Given a choice between ending racial preferences and death, they would take death.
I am talking, of course, about the administrations of elite universities who, in the grand tradition of massive resistance established by Governors Orval Faubus and George Wallace in the civil rights era, will pay any price and bear any burden in their fight against implementation of the Students for Fair Admissions decision, in which the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in 2023.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has launched a campaign to enforce this ruling, but it must recognize that its foes prioritize racial preferences over the very existence of their institutions.
Like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they may enter into negotiations and sign on to letter agreements, memoranda of understanding, and binding settlements. But they will defy them.
They will only devise new and more devious methods for arriving at their preferred racial outcomes.
If it really came to it, they would prefer massive legal judgments, a severing of federal funding, and the destruction of their universities over a true end to racial preferences.
Among the institutions that have been subject to the investigations are UC Berkeley, Duke and UCLA law schools, and UCLA and Yale medical schools. The letters containing the DOJ’s findings against these institutions are lacerating legal instruments that never would have been produced by an establishment Republican administration.
The DOJ and state attorneys general are the only realistic hope for implementation of Students for Fair Admissions.
Private civil actions by aggrieved candidates for admission are more easily procedurally stymied, do not carry the same threat of defunding, and can take a long time to reach resolution.
It took 25 years after the famous 1978 Bakke case to tee up racial preferences in admissions before the Supreme Court in the twin Bollinger cases in 2003. It then took another 20 years for Students for Fair Admissions to reach the Court.
In assessing the DOJ’s current efforts, it is necessary to view the history of racial preferences in admissions and the actions of elite universities in response to Students for Fair Admissions.
Two comprehensive lies historically underlay racial preferences: that they were mere “tie breakers” between essentially equal candidates; and that they were the product of “holistic” admissions in which non-academic factors played a large role.
Racial preferences were never tie breakers. They represented de facto separate admissions processes.
The truth was underscored in 1991 when a whistleblowing Georgetown law student who had access to the relevant numbers as an intern in the admissions office disclosed the staggering difference in median LSAT scores at that school for black and white students.
The scores for white students were typical of students at the most elite law schools, while black students had scores which, absent preferences, would typically admit a candidate only to a bottom-tier school that might be described as not so much ABA accredited as merely condoned.
In 1997, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, in their book “America in Black and White,” noted that the median SAT score for white students at Berkeley was over 1300, compared to 1000 for black matriculants.
In the 2003 Bollinger cases, one of the plaintiffs indisputably established that a student with her GPA/LSAT index had a 9 percent chance of admission at the University of Michigan, while a black student with that index had a 100 percent chance — in other words, guaranteed admission regardless of any other factor.
The race preference racketeers have also traditionally claimed their preferred results were the product of “holistic” admissions that considered non-academic factors.
Today, Ivy League schools typically no longer offer on-campus admissions interviews by staff. If an admissions committee cannot devote 20 minutes to a candidate for an interview, how does it purport to be able to assess the content of his or her character through a few minutes of reviewing groomed essays, contrived extracurricular activities, and pro forma recommendations from hack teachers who are strangers to the committee?
If “holistic” admissions could divine content of character, how did Cornell ever come up with the winners at the center of the current alleged gang rape controversy?
Admissions committees themselves are purely representative of liberal orthodoxy.
How many Trump voters, representing half the populace, or born-again Christians, marking about a quarter of the nation in polling, are on these committees?
Admissions committees, like hiring committees, choose candidates who reflect themselves. What they call “holistic” is actually more genetic, like replication of a blastocyst before cells become differentiated.
Obviously, black applicants as a group do not possess over others some great advantage in content of character not measurable in tests.
In fact, there are many black candidates, like candidates of other races, who qualify as bumps on a log. Taken across groups, non-academic factors would logically be a wash that would not alter the demographic results dictated by pure academics.
Always looking to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Chief Justice John Roberts, in Students for Fair Admissions, threw a bone to the “holistic” admissions prevaricators by stating that a black student might be able to impress a committee with an interesting essay on being black, just as a good essay on any subject might be a positive.
Predictably, elite institutions and admissions counselors responded by encouraging black applicants to devote their personal essays to being black.
Of course, being black is a subject that has been written about endlessly, and committees get thousands of essays devoted to it, so normally it should be a profoundly bad topic for a candidate seeking to stand out.
But since 2023, the admissions numbers reflect open defiance of Students for Fair Admissions.
Do you support the DOJ’s efforts to enforce the Supreme Court ruling against racial preferences in college admissions?
While Ivy League institutions have reluctantly required standardized test scores, a substantial portion of other elite institutions have eliminated the requirement as a means to obfuscate their continued use of racial preferences.
In Students for Fair Admissions, undisputed testimony derived from Harvard’s own internal study established that its entering undergraduate class would be less than 1 percent black if admissions were based on academic metrics alone.
Harvard has now disclosed that its post-Students for Fair Admissions entering class in 2025 was 11.5 percent black, which reflects that preferences are still being used to boost minority admissions wildly.
The findings encompassed in the DOJ’s letters to the institutions listed above also reflect massive resistance after Students for Fair Admissions. For example, incredibly, the DOJ found that at Duke Law School, the recent median LSAT score for admitted blacks was not just lower than the median for admitted whites and Asians, but was even lower than the median score for rejected whites and Asians!
The DOJ’s letters concluded by urging the subject schools to negotiate “voluntary resolution agreements.”
The agency must press, as the schools will stall, safe in the knowledge that an atomic clock cannot measure the infinitesimal increment of time it will take a potential Democrat administration to scuttle the cases against them upon the striking of noon on Jan. 20, 2029.
At that time, the schools will have the green light to adopt a drawl and intone “racial preferences now, racial preferences tammar-ah, racial preferences fo-evah,” punctuated by a suitably lusty rebel yell.
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