Higher education and the American dream

At the end of its term, the Supreme Court declared race-based college admissions unconstitutional in a case brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. What was it all about? Take Harrison Chen, a party to the lawsuit against Harvard. Mr. Chen graduated first in his high school class and earned a near-perfect SAT score. He applied to Harvard, but Harvard wanted none of that. If in the zero-sum world of admissions, Harvard didn’t want someone with a sterling academic performance like Mr. Chen, whom did it want?

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said, “‘Race is a determinative tip for’ a significant percentage ‘of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants.’” Small wonder we saw signs protesting Harvard that said, “I am Asian–American/ I have a dream too.”

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch pointed out in their concurring opinions that Harvard has done this kind of thing before against another group of people—Jewish applicants. Whereas Harvard had a de facto Jewish quota in the 1920s and 1930s to “help maintain admissions opportunities for Gentiles and perpetuate the purity of the Brahmin race—New England’s white, Protestant upper crust,” Justice Thomas wrote, now Harvard is doing it with other disfavored groups, Asians and whites. Although, alas, Jewish brothers and sisters: You’re back in there again being disfavored in admissions, except now—the irony!—being lumped in with “white” ethnic groups. The Jews may be God’s chosen people, but, Harvard says, not ours.

Of course, the case isn’t about just Asians or Jews, for it’s about all of us Americans. The more we hear that we are nothing but our skin color, the more balkanized, brittle, and hollow we become. In holding race-based admissions unlawful under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has done us a great service. It is a welcome relief to the mad anti-racism nightmare gripping America, a healthy corrective to its reductionistic and anti-agency view.

For how much melanin we have does not dictate our outlook, potential, accomplishments, or virtue. Justice Thomas would be a good one to heed, having grown up dirt-poor in the Jim Crow South. “Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color,” he wrote in his concurrence. Individuals have agency: They’re not consigned to a given trajectory vis-à-vis their skin color. They are rather “the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them.” The justice continued: “And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.”

But already, many elite schools seem to plan to weasel out of the law by doing away with standardized test scores so that their race-based picking of winners and losers won’t be so blatant. This has been some time in the making, but Justice Sotomayor in her dissent actually provided the nudge. She suggested that students could (should?) spell out their race in personal essays. To which the majority preemptively swats: “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” and the student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

Still, popular discussion has gone swiftly to—you guessed it—essays and assigning adversity scores to applicants. Might schools use these as a proxy for race, precisely what is now disallowed? It wouldn’t be novel, having been done for many years by schools where affirmative action is ostensibly banned, like the University of California.

Elite colleges take many of our country’s best and brightest, turn them woke, and set them captive to the big cities, tearing up social fabric and depleting the capital of their left-behind local communities along the way.

So it would be welcome if our best and brightest, especially children of faithful families, seek to go instead to faithful colleges or—teaching the nearly forgotten craft specializations—faithful trade schools. Elite colleges cast a strong spell on the country, dictating what the American dream should look like—at least to the elites. But if, following the twists and turns of the aftermath of this case, more Americans’ dream looks less like prestige and more like truth, goodness, and beauty, good days await.