A bit of sociology shows just how unusual it is to have admission committees to colleges and universities try to balance off the various kinds of applications for admission so as to accomplish just the right mix they want for the freshman class. There are legacies so as to keep the alumni happy; there are the children of rich donors so as to get money for buildings and programs; there are athletes to fill stadia or appeal to new applicants or to win trophies in crew and tennis; there are meritorious scholars because, after all, learning about the arts and sciences is supposedly the aim of colleges and universities; there are musicians because everybody admires musicians; and there are even recruits to fill up the bottom third of the class so that the rest of the graduates don’t feel so bad. That, at least, it was that way through the Forties, a balancing act to make sure to get sufficient numbers of the required prerequisites.
That is very different from the people of various types that assemble at the Thanksgiving table. There are nephews and nieces and grandparents and close friends and not so close ones such as boyfriends and girlfriends of family members and even an acquaintance or two invited over so as not to be lonely on a holiday. But they are not selected to make up a balance, just for their individual characteristics, even though the matriarch of the family reminds Aunt Syd and Uncle Harry not to be quarrelsome about politics.
And, in fact, most organizations do not try to achieve a balance through their selection process even if they do check up so as not to avoid selecting people of certain categories like race and gender. And sometimes not even that. The United States Senate is not designed to represent the various kinds of people in the American population. Its numbers are selected to represent a geographical and politically designated area, the state, and the mix that results is not monitored by a body, even if an observer can note that at the moment there are only three African American Senators while African Americans comprise twelve or thirteen percent of the population and that there are two Senators to represent forty million Californians while there are also to Senators to represent the less than a million people in Wyoming. No super-organization to consider which considerations are to be represented. That is up to the voters or a constitutional amendment. Meanwhile, the number of women in the Senate has creeped up to about twenty percent when the female population of the nation is about fifty percent. It is quite unusual for Joe Biden to proclaim that his cabinet and executive agencies will be as diverse as the American population, and so the selection process for the executive branch does act like a college admissions officer.
In the Forties, the College Board introduced a set of standardized tests so as to manage the great increase in applicants for college. This was to replace the smaller pools of merit appointments which relied on private school advisors who could give a good read on students and relay them to college admissions officers because the advisers own reputations were on the line. A larger pool of applicants required the SAT’s because GPA’s are unreliable in that the quality of unheard of schools may have different standards and because recommendations are also unreliable. The introduction of objective testing was directed at the portion of students who were applying as merit based ones. It was clear that a swimming star could have considerably lower SAT scores and be admitted. The diversity of the student body was maintained even if a higher percentage of them went purely to merit applicants.
Less than a generation later, in the late Sixties, a different problem emerged. Colleges and universities wanted to include its Black students as part of the diversity mix, though that term became a euphemism for bringing on board Black students not qualified to do the work a college required. An early experiment at affirmative action at one of the Seven Sister schools found that the admittees could not manage any of their coursework even if the standard course load was reduced. And, soon enough, Harvard found that too many of its merit based Asian students were too much like grinds rather than the well rounded people they preferred, and so found the applicants unacceptable, just as much earlier on there were quotas on Jews because they were also regarded as grinds. How to square diversity with merit remains a challenge even if a Conservative Supreme Court found two days ago that discrimination against Asians was unconstitutional because protected categories of race, religion and national origin could not be subjected to discrimination but that affirmative action to swimmers is allowed. Also, I don’t understand how all female colleges are still allowed in that these schools are engaged in a gender preference. Maybe it is that the underdog, women’s colleges, should be protected and so should Black over Asian applicants. Consistency is the hobgoblin of weak minds and that is especially the case in Supreme Court decisions.
As a matter of fact, the Roberts written ruling that ended affirmative action was clear and to the point, in clear distinction to many Supreme Court decisions that over the past fifty years seemed to me arbitrary, just a way to follow what the majority it wanted to find, although the 6-3 vote shows that the Justices follow their own political predilections rather than the persuasiveness of the reasoning. Roberts stuck to the reasoning that, ever since Plessy v. Ferguson was overthrown, the Supreme Court has held that separate but equal is necessarily unequal. Following Justice Powell on the matter that colleges might allow for exceptions because of academic free speech and diversity in the older sense, but only if they were not negative or disadvantageous, Roberts cited Asian Americans as disadvantaged and that the category of Asians was overly vague in that there were both South and East Asians. He also said applicants could still be judged by their characters and circumstances, which gives college admissions committees plenty of room for rejiggering so as to get what they want, just not alone by their race.
Conservatives say discrimination is clearly unconstitutional in that merit alone should count and how long reparations should last remains unclear. But look beyond that at the bigger structural issue concerning what colleges are all about. These days they are treated as training schools for jobs and so access to such places is largely a matter of merit so that students get to rise up on the greasy pole. But a different view is that students are in college to be in an enclave to try out possibilities including interacting with people who regard another group as being obnoxious. Should such a peculiar institution as higher education be exempt from anti-discrimination laws? Religions, after all, are allowed to require Sunday school teachers to be members of their corps of believers but not allowed to discriminate against janitors. Roberts thinks colleges are not different but I would like to see that directly discussed by the Liberal Justices.
Actually, the response to the Roberts decision has been remarkably restrained, Op ed pieces in the Times and in cablecasters have not found fault in its reasoning but have instead cited past injustices of discrimination. The Times Editorial Board said that there are programs going back to the Freedmen's Bureau which provided assists to ex-slaves, but that is the same as colleges reaching out today to low income and black high schools to prep them for college admission competition and no one objects to that, just in weighting the final scores of the competition. One Times op ed writer and one Times front page newspaper column, both in this case being the same thing, say that applicants will game the application system, which will now give more room to personal essays as a basis for admissions. Applicants will decide how to play up or down their various ethnic heritages. So be it. What that means is that the peculiar institution of college admissions will have survived its ordeal of merit which restricted their own discretion and go back to allow colleges to decide whatever Freshman classes they please.