Honestly Podcast

A discussion with Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harry Litman and Sarah Isgur on the end of affirmative action and more. In the discussion, HLS professor Jeannie Suk Gerson points out how Roberts’ opinion uses the same rationale as affirmative action supporters. Roberts’ opinion, the “escape value,” says you can “take into account the perspective that someone brings in terms of how race affected their lives and shaped their views or shaped their future... I think that that is the way that often defenders of affirmative action explain why diversity is important.”

New York Times

Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer calls on elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale to put their money where their mouths are with affirmative action and create real, systemic change— “Instead of making the admissions process shallow, elite colleges should deepen the applicant pool. The simplest, most direct way to do that is for these schools to found and fund schools that educate disadvantaged students.”

New York Times

FAIR Advisor John McWhorter assesses the impact of affirmative action from firsthand experience. “As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account…. that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.” Assuming efforts are made “to assist the truly disadvantaged,” such as taking into account socioeconomics, McWhorter believes the SCOTUS decision was correct.

New Yorker

An excellent piece by Jay Caspian Kang who writes candidly about affirmative action—”The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend.” In reviewing the dissent by Jackson and Sotomayor, he argues, “These opinions betray the corruption of affirmative action’s original righteous, reparative promise, and the way in which a program that was designed for a racially binary America never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.”

Glenn Loury Substack

Guest essay writer Robert Cherry argues “just how mistaken the liberal position is and what we can gain by shifting away from it.” Among other factors, Cherry points to early years education as key. “Only by increasing family intervention programs that will improve the performance of young black children can we substantially close the race gap at the most selective colleges without sacrificing merit.”

Crimson

Harvard professor Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard co-president, identifies a diversity challenge: “How to provide a quality education [at Harvard] to students whose preparations differ greatly in quality…That is where the real work needs to be done.” FAIR Advisors Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury (AM 82) and Ian Rowe (MBA 93) identify this same issue, however Lewis looks to Harvard for the “real work” instead of what happens before college. Perhaps his most salient point - one that directly impacts free speech, viewpoint diversity, and intellectual curiosity—is about racial stereotyping.

Unherd

Ayaan Hirsi Ali separates black Americans into three groups, arguing that the third group, poor black Americans, are not only exploited by the second group (BLM-type activists and those supporting affirmative action), but that “affirmative action on its own could never solve the problems of black Americans born into terrible environments, because its operation came too late.”

City Journal

FAIR Advisor Ilya Shapiro along with Renu Mukherjee point out what many proponents of affirmative action choose to ignore—”a major cause of today’s educational achievement gap between ‘underrepresented minorities’ and whites and Asians: poor K-12 education.”

Coleman’s Corner (Coleman Hughes’ Substack)

An excellent piece by FAIR Advisor Coleman Hughes on affirmative action, spelling out “as clearly as possible, my reasons for believing that this decision is a net good for American society.” His 10 points end with a solution— “some of the most groundbreaking but neglected work” by Harvard’s very own Roland Fryer. “If one-tenth of the energy directed at preserving ‘Affirmative Action’ were directed at implementing the Fryer protocol…that would constitute, in my view, a serious intervention aimed at attacking the root causes of racial inequality.”

Harvard Leadership Statement

In a statement issued by Harvard’s leadership, including the deans of each school, Harvard affirms its commitment to “diversity and difference” and “a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”

Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Read the Opinion.

City Journal

Wai Wah Chin argues that universities still intend to practice preferential admissions by removing merit-based criteria and using proxies for race, including “socio” factors such as coming from a single parent home or having incarcerated family members. “Legal questions aside,” Chin argues, “the use of sham proxies for race should offend us. It should also alarm us: all these proxies entail the dumbing down of standards and the end of merit.”

Thurs 6/29 6p ET FAIR Roundtable following SCOTUS’ affirmative action ruling.

Affirmative Action at the Supreme Court: Post-Decision Analysis of SFFA v. Harvard/UNC

The Free Press

“The Supreme Court is expected to rule that colleges can no longer rig for racial diversity. Some say ‘that’s dangerous and cruel.’ Others say it’s about time.”

New Yorker

In this piece, Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen opines on the legality of “race-neutral” methods that are designed with the continuing goal of producing diverse student bodies.

The Glenn Show

In advance of the SCOTUS ruling, FAIR Advisors John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry discuss who needs affirmative action.

New Yorker

20 years ago, in a draft opinion, Justice O’Connor wrote that white applicants could not be favored over Asian Americans. Harvard’s Jeannie Suk Gersen asks why Justices O’Connor deleted those lines and why Justice Clarence Thomas adopted them in his own opinion.

FAIR Advisor John McWhorter, a supporter of socioeconomic considerations in college admissions, counters the argument of historian Richard Rothstein… I often can’t help detecting a quiet sense that black people just aren’t made for the school thing and that a moral society must grade all of us on a curve. I see this less as antiracism than condescension, a mild form of racial prejudice, which is neither a gift nor a compliment.”

Atlantic

A conversation about what the case means for the use of race in admissions, especially as a “social good”… “we’ve lost sight of universities as serving this broader good. Instead, we tend to see them narrowly, as vehicles for individual advancement.”