The End of Affirmative Action. For Real This Time.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian American plaintiffs, a historically underprivileged minority group and not the usual aggrieved white applicant. This is a detail that has also complicated, and maybe even confused, the picture.

If this conservative Court strikes down affirmative action, which many legal experts expect, the decisions will likely have profound and immediate consequences for many institutions. When Michigan voters banned affirmative action by ballot measure in 2006, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan dropped to 4 percent, in a state that is 13 percent Black. The effects ripple out. Elite institutions produce politicians and doctors and future leaders of all kinds. But as Adam Harris, a longtime education writer for the Atlantic and this week’s Radio Atlantic guest, points out, we’ve lost sight of universities as serving this broader good. Instead, we tend to see them narrowly, as vehicles for individual advancement.

These cases have been kicking around for nearly a decade, and I have followed them loosely. But until this conversation with Harris, I did not realize how hazy I was on some very important questions: how universities have been using affirmative action all these years, and how much groups such as SFFA had co-opted the conversation.

Harris is bracing for next week’s decisions but would not be surprised if the Court eliminates affirmative action. What he clarifies for me in this episode is that affirmative action has been heading in this direction for many decades. Almost as soon as affirmative action became an important tool in the 1960s to redress past racial injustice, it was met with a backlash. The backlash chipped away at the tool until it was just a tiny scalpel. And these latest decisions are potentially the backlash’s final triumph.

“When I think of higher education, it’s a great democratizing way to expand civic good. But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: A lot of attacks on higher-education admissions, particularly at these highly selective institutions, gain traction. And that’s because they’re such black boxes. You think about what these institutions sort of bestowed on students in terms of the prestige that they have on the back end, and the fact that, on the front end, you have this sort of black box in terms of how people get into them.

They’re seats that people want to get to because they know the potential benefits.