The recent Supreme Court decision that race-conscious college and university admissions policies are unconstitutional has overturned decades of precedent. This decision, often confused with the broader concept of affirmative action, will undoubtedly confuse and have a chilling effect on campuses. Colleges and universities, fearing further litigation, could limit their actions beyond the minimum legal limits of the decision, while proponents of the ruling plead ignorance of the results of their actions.
The Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are part of a larger movement to clamp down on all debates about racism across the country. These pieces exist in a patchwork that includes Florida’s Stop WOKE Actwhich seeks to curtail discussions of racism and sexism in public schools, Texas Senate Bill 17, which prohibits diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and others. As a Texas-based higher education policy professor who has previously worked in admissions, I’ve been very interested in following these maneuvers. Still, all college and university stakeholders should be concerned, as these developments could have drastic implications for the entire higher education system in the US.
These legislative and legal actions in higher education align with broader actions, such as the 2013 Supreme Court case that dismantled key parts of the Voting Rights Act, describing a country no longer needing intervention to establish white supremacy. to fight. Each assumes that there is no need for purposeful policies to correct historical wrongs or advocate for greater justice, because we have already achieved our goals.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These actions perpetuate white supremacy in the US, dismantle policy advances that help fight it, and obscure the racial realities of this country.
According to the majority opinion in the admissions case, Chief Justice John Roberts is calling for more “race-neutral” admissions practices, a strange descriptor for higher education policy in the US given that structural racism has been the overarching organizational framework of our country and higher education is still predominantly white. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, relying on the work of well-known social scientists such as that of Ira Katznelson When affirmative action was white and those of Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro Black wealth/white wealth, notes in her dissent That “[o]our country has never been colorblind.” Since its inception, the power of the state has been used to redistribute resources according to racial groups in itself created by the state. As just one example, Jackson cites the Homestead Act of 1862, which was created to provide “free” acreage in the country’s western territory and, in effect, stole Native land while it “extremely unlikelyfor black people to take advantage.
This perversion of racial neutrality is one of many used by Roberts in the court’s opinion and the concurring justices in theirs. It describes a US that does not exist and never existed.
The Court decided that institutions could not consider race generally, but could take into account the experience of each individual applicant with race. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, I noted that “[Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion] hammers home the individual’s experience of racism, but not the way we’ve created our society and systems that support racism. How can you acknowledge that individual people experience racism without acknowledging that our systems are built for this?”
But this contradiction is the point of the Court’s recent decision. While the SCOTUS decision explicitly states that institutions can use race when considering an individual’s experience and that the decision only pertains to admissions, we’ve seen (alleged) confusion and questions abound: Can colleges take race into account when awarding financial aid to students? Can they take it into account when hiring?
Likewise, even if there is one command that prevents the Stop WOKE Act from being implemented in Florida’s public colleges, the Florida College System Council of Presidents released a statement affirming that “our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practices, policies or academic requirements that … enforce the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning is analyzed and/or enhanced.” This decision flies in the face of decades of research outlining the harms of promoting and teaching racist practices, such as scientific racism.
Colleges are “conservative” with a small c. They move slowly and hate being the subject of a lawsuit, even in the absence of actors deliberately confusing. This is part of the reason I fear that institutions will overreact and limit their practices beyond what is explicitly required by law.
It has already happened. Liliana Garces of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues have found that the legal pressures facing education can push administrators to make less inclusive decisions fearing reprisals and lawsuits when confronted with hate speech. That’s why the Supreme Court’s actions are yet another square in the carpet that upholds white supremacy — making it so difficult for colleges to make legal and legislative decisions that administrators overreact.
There is already one along those lines new case is purported to target a magnetic high school from my home state, Virginia. The Fairfax County School Board was sued for “race-neutral” changes to the school’s admissions policy (for example, trading an exam for essays and giving a preferential weight to students living in poverty). Prosecutors argued that the changes placed an unnecessary burden on students of Asian descent because they added weight to so-called proxies for race. While the appeals court ruled in favor of the school, this case is widely expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court, where even “race-neutral” admissions practices aimed at diversifying the student body could be curtailed. This betrays the game: the goal is not now, and never has been, to focus exclusively on so-called race-neutral measures. It has been to dismantle all tools that can be used to promote racial justice in the US – to neutralize any discussion of racism, the wages of whiteness and their joint effect on society.
The form of race-conscious confessions used at Harvard and UNC was an imperfect tool for advancing racial justice. Even within that admissions regime, the reality was that we needed more reallocation of resources so that major public institutions, the ones that educate the majority of college students in the US, better able to provide good education. We still do.
We need a world where a single Northeast athletic league (often referred to as the Ivy League) is not the primary arbiter of future stability, either in perception or in fact. But if we focused only on the imperfections of one admissions tool, we would miss the way the recent Supreme Court decision, combined with other changes across the country, represents a clear assault on our ability to fight white supremacy. It took the US centuries of deliberate policy action to get to this point. It would be foolish to imagine that no large-scale, long-term interventions are needed to reverse that damage.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.