SCOTUS Ends Affirmative Action

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

80% :UPDATE: David French's column "Harvard Undermined Itself on Affirmative Action" is worth a read.
64% : Even though elite institutions haven't always lived up to the spirit of affirmative action -- giving a leg up to those who need it most -- the present system has managed to secure some racial diversity in higher education, including for working-class minority applicants.
62% : Matt Yglesias weighs in with "19 thoughts on affirmative action," some of which are from associates.
57% : The most interesting:Milan's take: Many defenders of affirmative action still, implicitly, view it as a reparations program, with the "diversity rationale" being a required legal fig leaf.
55% : I don't think I would have gotten into Haverford College as an undergraduate if it had not been for affirmative action, and the same is probably true of my Ph.D. program at New York University and the professorship I now hold at Bates College.
55% : [...]To the extent that you take seriously the educational benefits of diversity, ending affirmative action will redistribute diversity away from the most selective schools to a set of somewhat-less-selective schools which seems ... fine.
54% : NPR's Emma Bowman goes into greater detail on that history ("Here's what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges") but notes that the initial drop-off wasn't the end of the story:
53% : Because progressives are uncomfortable with straightforwardly defending affirmative action, they often pivot to whataboutism regarding admissions benefits that primarily benefit white students -- legacies, athletes, donors' kids, people from rural states.
52% : UC Berkley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky ("The Supreme Court's ultimate 'judicial activism': striking down affirmative action in college admissions") ignores the clear lineage of the Court's previous rulings, focusing only on the grudging allowance for diversity, before getting to this:The experience in California shows what could happen at universities all over this country.
52% : Yet I also believe that affirmative action -- though necessary -- has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture.
49% : "Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement, and said that affirmative action was crucial to countering persistent and systematic racial discrimination.
46% : I believe that affirmative action works, that it is necessary to redress the historical evils of chattel slavery and its myriad afterlives and, above all, that it is a crucial counterbalance against the prevailing system of de facto white affirmative action that rewards many academically mediocre (and wealthier) students for having legacy parents or for being good at rowing a boat.
44% : Here's a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions.") to share this perspective:Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action.
41% : As a matter of public policy, coming three years after massive protests across the country under the banner of Black Lives Matter, it's obvious that we have not reached O'Connor's hoped-for state.
40% : NYT ("Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action Programs at Harvard and U.N.C."):The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful and sharply curtailing a policy that had long been a pillar of higher education.
39% : But the UC system -- and state institutions in states like Michigan and Washington that also abolished affirmative action -- have found ways to achieve diversity through concerted efforts.
38% : In the world after affirmative action, however, our unhealthy system of racial gamification will intensify without any of the benefits of racial justice and real structural redress that affirmative action afforded.
25% : As a person who benefitted from affirmative action in college admissions, I'm struck that one of the key flaws of the program is that it would be considered an insult to say that I benefitted from affirmative action.

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