Thursday, the US Supreme Court landed a body blow to racial discrimination in college admissions. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that it violates the US Constitution to use racial discrimination in admissions, no matter how noble-sounding the vicious and racist goal may be. (BREAKING: Supreme Court Rejects Race-Based College Admissions).
The initial response from Harvard University indicates that the empires, careers, and jobs created by Frankenstein’s monster, that is, the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity industry that runs most university campuses today, will not “go gentle into that good night.”
This calls to mind the apocryphal story of President Andrew Jackson’s response to a decision by Justice John C. Marshall’s declaring, “Mr. Marshall has made his decision, no let him enforce it.”
Indeed, Sean Davis, on Twitter, laid out a very clear path for what comes next.
What comes next? Not merit-based university admissions. Instead, we’ll see the opposite.
Bolshevik madrassas masquerading as universities will eliminate admissions criteria that highlight differences in intelligence and ability — GPA, test scores, and academic achievements will no longer be evaluated.
Universities will claim a new, holistic approach to applicant evaluation so they can discriminate based on identity, but without obvious academic comparisons that make it easy to prove they’re discriminating against qualified candidates because of their race. Eliminate objective academic criteria like grades and test scores, and you eliminate the easiest way to discern whether someone who is otherwise qualified is being discriminated against because of his or her race or identity.
The goal of the modern university is not education of the nation’s best and brightest. The goal is indoctrination and credentialing. The corrupt university cartel is not going to suddenly do a 180 on its obvious goals because of a pesky court decisions telling it to stop being racist. They’re going to be even more race- and identity-obsessed going forward, but now they’ll start trying to hide it better.
Unfortunately, like Chief Justice Robert’s bizarre and ill-advised decision that racial discrimination was completely fine at the nation’s military academies (see The Supreme Court’s Decision to Continue Racial Discrimination at Military Academies Betrays the Nation and the Military), he left the door open here:
At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.
…
A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.
In fact, the wide Latina interprets that as a workaround for universities to consider race in admissions:
In a single paragraph at the end of its lengthy opinion,the Court suggests that “nothing” in today’s opinion prohibits universities from considering a student’s essay that explains “how race affected [that student’s] life.” Ante, at 39. This supposed recognition that universities can, in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.
That was slapped down rather hard:
But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”
There is no doubt that the left looks at this decision not as an answer to a legal problem but as a challenge to overcome.
Unless we can be balkanized into racial, ethnic, and economic ghettoes with festering grievances against one another, the left’s grand experiment in destroying American Exceptionalism can’t succeed. Large and politically powerful academic institutions, like Harvard, have invested too much time, money, and credibility in reshaping America to just go away. As Sean Davis says, they understand that what is at stake is not the scientific and economic, and academic progress that will be lost by a merit-based admissions system. The prize is the credentialling of young commissars to spread Marxism to whatever business or government agency hires them. They understand the prize is having inside agents to pull along other young, similarly credentialed commissars to higher levels of influence.
The Roberts Court did a brave thing in this decision. Between this and Dobbs, I doubt there are a lot of invitations to the best DC cocktail parties heading toward the Chief Justice right now. But a new theater of war has opened, and we’ll see how the Court responds to the next round of challenges.