“Ray Marshall, the former Secretary of Labor, explained this totally predictable result by pointing out that those who are the least disadvantaged will be best positioned to take advantage of efforts.
One thing that will be “interesting” is whether courts will treat sex differently going forward since it wasn’t an issue in the cases.”
Also - while race based interventions require a strict scrutiny level of review- sex based interventions have required a lower “intermediate” level of review by the courts. They could view the two differently.
There’s nothing in Affirmative Action that says you have to put quotas on Asians. It’s done for the same reasons Lowell advocated to keep Jews out in 1926:
At one point, Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would “ruin the college” by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel’s book. Harvard would be ruined “not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body,” Lowell wrote in the letter.
In other words, Asian quotas are there to protect White, more specifically powerful, affluent White students from competition by Asian students culturally wired to highly value higher education like their Jewish forebears a century ago, not African-American or Latinos. The people who run the Ivies are perfectly happy to throw poor rural Whites under the bus, on the other hand.
Your argument is that there is no smoking gun. Considering the despicable history of the change of admissions process from a purely academic one to a “holistic” one in 1926 with the clear intention of using it to keep Jews out, while obfuscating the true motivation for the change of policy, and the clear statistical evidence that Asians have a much higher bar to clear, you are being deliberately obtuse.
Any company with those numbers would be found guilty of racial discrimination by the EEOC, just because Harvard is a hedge fund with a sideline in education as a tax dodge does not exempt it from scrutiny. The highest court in the land has found against the justices’ own alma maters, the burden of proof is on your end, not mine.
No-one here is denying that the Ivies tried to exclude Asian applicants, sometimes using the exact same mechanisms and higher bars as they once did against Jewish ones. The point people are making is that there is no evidence that the Ivies were trying to hit a specific quota percentage with Asian students in the 21st century as they were with Jewish students in the 20th century.
Saying “The Ivies wanted fewer Asian students” instead of “The Ivies wanted to limit Asian enrollment to [say, based on rough reflection of the total population] 7% of the student body” would understandably seem to be a distinction without difference, but it’s a necessary one in the context of this discussion. Right-wing and racist opponents of affirmative action have cynically been using one injustice (exclusion of Asian students) to support another injustice (ending affirmative action) based on the disingenous claim that the Ivies have specific percentage targets for admission and exclusion for different races and ethnicities.
So yes, Harvard and the other Ivies that have engaged in racial discrimination against one group and should face consequences – but not at the added expense of destroying a programme meant to combat racial discrimination of other groups.
“Data for that time period — which begins with the admissions cycle for applicants to Harvard’s Class of 2000 and ends with the cycle for the Class of 2017 — show that Asian-American candidates on average saw an admission rate of 8.1 percent. “
Compared to this year:
“Harvard admitted the highest ever proportion of Asian American applicants at 29.9 percent”
Both from the Harvard Crimson. Evidence of a top side quota seems lacking. Evidence that affirmative action for this group has been working seems evident.
The court doesn’t decide what is good and bad; that is the legislative branch’s job. It decides what is legal and what isn’t. The court can only rule on the issue brought before it. The case did not mention legacy or donor admissions. I suggest you direct your blame at Congress for not making legacy and donor admissions illegal.
Most of the members of this court very much do decide what is good and bad, on the basis of christofascist, elite-serving ideology, and often, of cynical, grubby self-interest.
Blinkered idealism straight out of a middle school textbook won’t serve the rest of at all well.
