By Any Means Necessary

60 years of uninterrupted racism by leftists requires a more forceful response.

This piece below was published yesterday at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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Mere law has never impeded the Left’s pursuit of its political objectives. The same pattern holds in our universities. Indeed, achieving political objectives now appears to be the primary aim of many American colleges, and willful defiance of the law has been de rigueur in admissions offices for 60 years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Proposition 209 in California, Proposal 2 in Michigan, and countless other explicit prohibitions on racial discrimination have done nothing to inhibit the Left’s racist utopian scheming.

Thus, it’s no surprise that admissions offices nationwide are ignoring the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which, once again, outlawed race-based discrimination in admissions.

Repeat Offenders

Fifteen months after the Supreme Court ruled in SFFA’s favor, the organization found itself sending letters to several elite universities. In these missives, SFFA alleged that Duke, Yale, and Princeton continue to violate the law, the Supreme Court notwithstanding. Take, for example, the organization’s letter to Duke:

Your college just reported its admissions data for the Class of 2028—the first class admitted after [the Supreme Court’s ruling]. Compared to the Class of 2027 (when you explicitly gave racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics), you now have fewer Asian Americans. Your Class of 2028 is 29% Asian American, a decrease of 6 percentage points.

Given the well-documented racial disparities in educational achievement and standardized test scores, such data are hard to explain. To be sure, as reported by the New York Post, some schools appear to have complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling. For example, at MIT the percentage of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander students in the Class of 2028 dropped to 16 percent, down from 25 percent the prior year. The percentage of Asian students rose from 40 percent to 47 percent. This is as expected, given the disproportionately superlative academic performance of Asian students. It is suspicious that the opposite happened at Duke, Yale, and Princeton.

Still, there are some possible explanations for the admissions figures that, if true, would be lawful. They include: (1) SFFA’s admissions data are wrong; (2) Asian students’ and black students’ standardized test scores are suddenly materially worse and better, respectively; (3) not enough high-scoring Asian students applied to the schools in question or, alternatively, accepted an offer of admission; (4) more Asian applicants refused to disclose their race; or (5) the universities have found some clever but lawful loophole in the high court’s opinion. Absent one of these explanations, it stands to reason that the admissions offices are ignoring the law, just as left-wing activists have done for 60 years.

We can safely eliminate the first explanation, as I am not aware of any claim that SFFA’s admissions data are wrong. Indeed, Duke’s website confirms SFFA’s 29-percent figure, while the New York Times acknowledges the six-point decrease in Asian student enrollment. Curiously, the Times also references a one-point increase in admitted black students, which suggests that racial discrimination in Duke’s admissions office is worse than alleged.

As for the second explanation, average SAT scores in 2023 for Asian and black students were 1219 and 908, respectively. These figures were down from 2022, when Asian students scored 10 points higher and black students scored 18 points higher (white students’ scores showed similar changes). In other words, black students have performed proportionally worse than Asians since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in SFFA. This cannot explain a decrease in Asian or an increase in black enrollment. Thus, we can eliminate the second explanation.

As for the third possibility, perhaps there is some unrelated reason that Asian students decided not to attend Duke, Yale, or Princeton. For example, the increase in Asian student enrollment at schools like MIT (which appears to have stopped discriminating post-SFFA) may explain part of the decrease at Duke. This implies that, prior to SFFA, many Asian students admitted to Duke were overqualified but chose to enroll anyway because better schools discriminated against them. Once that discrimination ended, these Asian students “shifted up.” The problem with this explanation is that Asian students enrolled at less prestigious schools than Duke also should have “shifted up,” thereby sustaining or increasing their enrollment percentages there. But that didn’t happen, so this explanation doesn’t work either.

Another possibility is that, post-SFFA, a substantial number of Asian students refused to report their race, thereby increasing the total number of enrolled students who didn’t report. At first blush, this seems plausible. It’s true that “11% of [students] enrolled in the Class of 2028 declined to share their race.” This was up from five percent the prior year. And this six-point increase corresponds exactly to the six-point decrease in enrolled Asian students. Still, it’s hard to believe that this increase in nondisclosure accounts for the change. After all, it would require that no other racial group changed its disclosure rate. It would also require that more Asian students chose not to disclose even though SFFA won at the Supreme Court in June 2023, not long before regular applications were due in January 2024. Put another way, there was no better time than January 2024 to identify as Asian on one’s college applications.

This brings us to the final explanation. In SFFA v. Harvard, Justice Roberts opined on the various ways universities may consider race:

[Universities may give a] benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, [but it] 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.

This language was unfortunate. Roberts’s exception consists of words so capacious they swallow the rule. Any university that wishes to continue discriminating on the basis of race will have little difficulty pretending that “courage and determination” or “heritage or culture” were deciding factors. Of course, Asian students also have “courage and determination” and “heritage or culture.” Indeed, as it relates to standardized test scores, it appears they have more than other students, which again implies that a fair admissions process would have increased their enrollment rates. Since the opposite happened at Duke, Yale, and Princeton, this last explanation also is implausible.

Plain Old Racism

In reality, everybody knows what’s going on here. The idea that university bureaucrats relied sincerely upon some loophole in the majority’s reasoning is belied by experience. For law-abiding people, court orders, legislative statutes, and public referenda are law. But to left-wing political operatives, they are mere words—parchment barriers that can be obeyed or ignored as circumstances warrant. And they can be ignored with minimal risk, since there are rarely consequences for left-wing ideologues who violate them.

In the educational context, consider California’s Proposition 209 and Michigan’s Proposal 2. The former amended California’s constitution by adding a new Section 31, which states in relevant part, “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, color, [or] ethnicity.” The latter did something similar in Michigan, amending the state constitution such that no “public college or university … shall … discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Both public referenda were supported by sizeable majorities: 55 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

These amendments, passed nearly 30 years ago in California and nearly 20 in Michigan, couldn’t be clearer. But that’s the point—they are already sufficiently clear. It’s not as though a clause was omitted or there was some confusion about their explicit or intended meaning. Everybody knows exactly what they say and do.

Yet, despite this clarity, in the decades since the people of California and Michigan amended their constitutions to prohibit racial discrimination, universities in those states doubled down on their affirmative-action admissions policies. And they did it with impunity.

In 2014, when a radical left-wing organization called By Any Means Necessary lost its challenge to Proposal 2 in the Supreme Court, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman announced defiantly, “Despite this decision from the Supreme Court, the University of Michigan remains deeply committed to using every legal tool at our disposal to bring together a diverse study body.” Meanwhile, the Wolverines’ admissions office did everything it could to continue discriminating on the basis of race.

In 2005, the year before Proposal 2, the median SAT score for black students admitted to the University of Michigan was 1160 “versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for white, and 1400 for Asians.” Eighteen years later, in 2023, it appears nothing has changed. From this chart, we can discern that the average SAT score for Michigan’s freshman class of 2023 was near 1470. We can also see that the class contained 432 black students. The problem is that not more than 2,259 black students in the entire country scored that high. Thus, either 20 percent of the highest-scoring black students in the United States enrolled at the University of Michigan in 2023, or the university continues to discriminate.

The same holds for California’s universities. For example, 524 and 662 black students were admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA in 2023, respectively. But those prestigious universities, like Michigan, had average SAT scores above 1400. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough black students scoring this high, unless more than 70 percent of the best black SAT test-takers in the land went to just these three schools last year.

The lesson here is that racial discrimination in university admissions is the sine qua non of left-wing political goals. It will not be impeded by mere laws or court orders. Without personal consequences for those who violate them, these laws and court orders will not deter left-wing political operatives from doing what they want. For them, the concept of lawlessness has no meaning except when tied to a consequence. Every admissions decision is a mere utilitarian calculation that considers only the likelihood of being caught and the penalty. This is not hyperbole: It’s why they call their organizations things like By Any Means Necessary. Any means include lawless means.

Just as university admissions offices in California and Michigan didn’t care about their state’s laws, Duke’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s left-wing admissions offices don’t care about the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA. That’s not going to change unless individuals in the admissions offices face personal consequences.

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