The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Affirmative Action's Demise and Higher Education
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds unpacks the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings against the Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s race-based admission programs. Reynolds contends that the Court’s rulings not only end affirmative action but also signals the end of academic deference.
So the Supreme Court has ruled against Harvard and UNC, and in the process fatally wounded the “diversity” and “affirmative action” practices of most every higher education institution in America.
There’s a lot to say about that, but I want to mark one important point: This ruling represents a drastic retreat in the social position of higher education. Though the ruling itself is not so much the cause as a symptom.
Reynolds notes that in the not too distant past the Court was willing to effectively trust higher education’s argument that its race-based admissions process to promote “diversity” was essential to advancing educational good. However, he notes that the Court’s deference to academia’s “diversity” claim was not an expression of the Court’s opinion.
But the Supreme Court did not itself find that diversity was a compelling interest. Rather, it deferred to universities’ claims that diversity was a compelling interest. A court defers to someone else when it says that it may have a different opinion on the matter itself but it will allow the opinion of the person or entity in question to control because of their expertise. So, for example, under the now moribund doctrine of Chevrondeference, the Court would defer to an agency’s interpretation of the statute it administers, even if the Court would have interpreted the statute differently.
Thus, for example, in Grutter v. Bollinger the Court said: “The Law School has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body. The Law School’s educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer.” (Italics mine). So diversity is a compelling interest only because the university says it is.
Now, however, things have obviously changed, as the Court is no longer willing to abide by the “trust us” argument given by academia.
But who trusts higher education anymore? At the turn of the millennium, when Grutter was decided, American higher ed was at its zenith. Since then a series of scandals – just today a famous “ethicist” at Harvard was charged with fraudulent ethics research – has undermined its reputation for probity (and the Hollywood admissions scandal of a few years back certainly undermined the perceived integrity of its admissions process), even as everything else about universities came to seem less serious. With 57 genders, coloring books and crying rooms for election results, endless crusades against “whiteness” and “heterosexism,” and the like, the notion of deferring to the educational seriousness and expertise of those in charge of the asylums of higher ed seemed much less appealing. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. But higher education has supplied the ridiculousness itself.