The Affirmative Action That Colleges Really Need
The dirty secret of higher education in the United States is that racial preferences for Black, Latino, and Native American college students provide cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy. The current framework of race-based preferences—which goes before the Supreme Court on Monday—is broadly unpopular, has been highly vulnerable to legal challenges under federal civil-rights laws, disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color, and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Major public and private universities cling to the status quo anyway, because doing so is easier financially than helping demonstrably disadvantaged students. These institutions act as if the predominant version of affirmative action is the only way to promote racial diversity, but that simply isn’t true. It’s just better for them.
Many of my friends—liberals like me—have been mystified, even horrified, that I helped the plaintiffs who are asking the Court to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. For three decades, I have worked with civil-rights groups and community leaders of color to , a , , and in college admissions. Yet by serving as an expert witness in litigation brought by Students for Fair Admissions, I allied myself with the conservative activist Edward Blum and a . In district-court proceedings, I testified that racial diversity is crucial on college campuses, but also that universities can achieve it by giving a much larger admissions boost to economically disadvantaged applicants than they presently do—and without resorting to racial preferences.
