Comes now notice of a new survey by the Pew Research Center. It finds that most Americans–73%–say that colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions; that 7% say that race should be a major factor in college admissions; and that 19% say it should be a minor factor.
The survey does not explain what it means to “consider” race or ethnicity when deciding who gets in. But it would seem to mean using race in ways that favor the chances of getting in for “underrepresented minorities” when there are a limited number of seats in a class, as there is in elite schools. This racially preferential treatment is, I think, what draws objections in surveys using questions of similar wording as Pew’s.
The numbers from these surveys are obviously not ones that defenders of racial preferences can be happy with. Over the years polls have found majorities opposed to preferences, but this one, at 73 percent, is one of the highest yet. And in this survey this majority says colleges should not consider race or ethnicity in admissions.
Polling is not a high science, but note well that should not bears no exceptions. It is a statement of colorblind law, a reminder of Justice Harlan’s elegant dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson from a decision upholding a segregated railway law. The year was 1896 when Harlan wrote: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Still relevant, I’d say.
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The other day the New York Times published a story reporting that “2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations.” If they pursue those goals, the Democrats running for president will have, shall we say, an interesting primary. My summation of the Times story and the political tensions therein”:
–Some candidates have started endorsing specific goals and overtly race conscious legislation that even the most left-wing elected officials stayed away from in recent years.
–Senator Kamala Harris of California says government reparations for black Americans are needed to address the legacies of slavery and
discrimination. Senator Elizabeth Warren agrees. Other candidates could join them.
–Reparations would include policies that attempt to close the “wealth gap” between white and black families. They would cost several trillion dollars (though really, who knows?). Leading Democrats including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders have never supported reparations.
–The presidential candidacies of Harris and Warren and their support of reparations bespeak a shift in the importance of race and identity issues in the Democratic Party. “Many liberal voters of all races are now pushing elected officials to go further on policies of racial equality regardless of any political calculations,” says the Times.
–This development represents a win for party activists who have tried for decades to push reparations into the Democratic mainstream (though political wins can be temporary).
Republicans make a short appearance in this story, as we are told that they “have long attempted to paint Democrats who embrace policies that address racial inequalities as anti-white.”
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We’ll see about all of this as the Democratic field shapes up. Meanwhile, and not in the Times story, there is that admissions program at Harvard whose race-conscious aspects are discriminatory and inspired the lawsuit now in federal district court in Boston. There should be a decision soon.
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Last summer the Center for Equal Opportunity joined the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Reason Foundation in a friend-of-the-court brief in the Harvard case. The brief is not long and is excellent reading. Several aspects merit attention.
One is that it says Harvard cannot simply claim that “student body diversity,” including racial diversity, is essential to its pedagogical objectives and institutional mission, and think that is enough to justify racial preferences. Neither can the school assert an interest in the educational benefits of diversity “writ large,” and think that is enough. A school’s goals “cannot be elusory or amorphous but sufficiently measurable to permit judicial scrutiny of the policies used to reach them.”
Second, the brief emphasizes what a Harvard Law Review article points out, that the school has “never sought to define diversity with much precision.” The brief raises questions Harvard has apparently never asked itself, such as how much diversity is sufficient in order to justify racial preferences, and is racial diversity equally important in engineering as opposed to the liberal arts.
Third, the brief does not shy from addressing the costs of diversity-based preferences. They are personally unfair, and they reject better qualified applicants, on inexplicable and soft grounds. They also set less qualified admittees up for failure. For more on this, see Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor.
