The Trump administration is rolling back Obama-era efforts to force aggressive race-based preferences at colleges and universities, and elevating Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court could well lock in those changes.
As with DACA and limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, the Obama policy reflected an aggressive application of a legal principle established by a 1984 Supreme Court decision involving Chevron. It states that when a law is unclear or vague, the court should defer to a reasonable interpretation by the federal agency.
Often abused by administrations to circumvent Congress, Judge Kavanaugh wrote in the Harvard Law Review that “Chevron is nothing more than a judicially orchestrated shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch.”
With Kavanaugh on the High Court, future Democratic administrations will be less able to reverse Bush-era guidance to universities — now reinstated by the Trump Education Department — aimed at enforcing more race-neutral practices.
Schools don’t need explicit quotas to impose them. Harvard ranks applicants by four criteria — academic, extracurricular, athletic and personal. Applying the latter three requires a lot of training to ensure admissions officials apply consistent values and metrics, and Asian students are generally assigned the lowest scores on the last category, which assess whether applicants have a “positive personality.”
The Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard. A statistical analysis it commissioned finds an Asian student with a 25% likelihood of admission would see his chances increase to 36% if he were white and 75% or 95% if he were Hispanic or African American.
Harvard appears vulnerable because it will not release to the public the training materials it uses to ensure admissions officers and alumni, who often evaluate applicants, apply the standards as its board of overseers, administration and faculty consider appropriate.
At Harvard, it is highly unlikely that many freshmen are admitted who cannot compete in the classroom — it gets many more applicants with perfect SAT scores or GPAs than it has seats to offer — but its racially and culturally slanted practices are mirrored by admission departments formally and informally across the country.
When students are admitted for race or other reasons (for example developmental seats offered children of wealthy and prominent parents and alumni) with substantially lower academic credentials than the average for a class, the likelihood that he will leave without a diploma and with significant debt goes up dramatically. And faculties are pressured to lower content and grading standards to trim casualty lists.
University campuses have become decidedly hostile to conservative values—notions such as becoming an adult consists of marriage and starting a family, individual accountability and economic and social status are more important than race. Instead, a culture that systematically vilifies the contributions of European heritage to American civilization and that discriminates against white males is the order of the day.
In this environment, speech is tightly policed, faculty cannot require students to defend unpopular positions on social issues—or justify widely held, politically correct attitudes—and students are encouraged to substitute sloganeering for critical thinking. Disruptive, intolerant behavior—outright tyranny—is tolerated and indeed encouraged.
Look at the vilification of Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania law school for exploring the impacts of affirmative action on student performance and the consequences of minority cultures for success in our economy and broader society.
No surprise, tests conducted near the beginning and end of university careers indicate many universities—some prestigious and others not—add little to students’ ability to address a body of information and reach well-reasoned conclusions. And employers find many graduates unprepared for entry-level professional or managerial work.
It would be interesting to see how Harvard ranks two students with identical records but one whose primary extracurricular activities are of a female volunteering for liberal causes through Pantsuit Nation and another volunteering at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum—or a male who devoted himself to a Junior Achievement project to launch a software app.
Harvard argues its admission processes are akin to a trade secret—perhaps the secret it wants from public view is the institutionalization of its racial, political and gender prejudices. And it would have a tougher time justifying those to the Supreme Court if Kavanaugh is confirmed.
