It is altogether fair to look upon a fresh foray by President Trump’s Justice Department, under Attorney General-for-now Jeff Sessions, with more than a little skepticism.
Sessions, no friend of voting rights protections, criminal justice reform or other matters of importance to black Americans, now focuses legal fire on affirmative action programs built to give historically disadvantaged African Americans and Latinos a hand up in college admissions.
But even progressives who believe deeply in the value of diversity should be prepared to admit that, as important as the overall objective of affirmative-action programs remains, they often function, as designed, as blunt instruments with pernicious unintended consequences.
At immediate issue is the federal willingness to take sides in a complaint filed against Harvard University in 2014 by plaintiffs that include an Asian-American applicant rejected despite perfect test scores and wide-ranging extracurriculars — alleging that the university employs illegal quotas that give systematic advantage to black and Latino applicants and disadvantage Asians.
This, goes the claim, is discrimination akin to capping the number of Jewish students in the 1930s and 40s.
Harvard replies that qualified Asians are not being shut out, but that race is one factor among many used — consistent with the law and the Constitution — to ensure that its student population remains diverse.
For two years, the Obama administration stood on the sidelines; the Trump administration looks poised to jump in, on the Asian students’ side.
The students make a compelling case for reform, boiling down to a provable pattern that Asian Americans face consistently higher bars to Harvard admission attributable to their race — in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
More broadly, research by Princeton scholars finds that African-American students get an admissions boost worth 310 SAT points compared with whites. Hispanics get a 130-point preference.
These are granted regardless of economic disadvantage; as President Obama pointed out, his privileged daughters will be the beneficiaries of admissions preferences.
Meanwhile, Asian students face strong headwinds, even if they happen to come from poor or working-class backgrounds.
But rather than scrapping preferences altogether, or pitting blacks and Latinos against Asians in a zero-sum fight, the far better way forward is for colleges — with guidance from the feds — to begin recrafting affirmative action programs to be responsive not to a student’s skin color, but to his or her disadvantage.
A team led by an economist at Stanford (harder to get into than Harvard) found that top universities admit more students from the top 1% of U.S. households than from the bottom 50%. Shameful. Recalibrate admissions to cure that disease — doing away with legacy preferences, and putting a thumb on the scale for youngsters from lower-income families — and racial diversity will naturally follow.
None of this is to suggest that the educational playing field is anywhere near racially level, or that the moment for remedying past discrimination has passed. The burdens of history are real. And millions of black and Latino children, chronically failed by separate and unequal public schools, are disadvantaged by the time they apply to college.
For society to throw up its hands and demand all 17-year-olds be subjected to a rigid meritocracy would be to abdicate our common responsibility to strive toward genuinely equal opportunity.
But the answer is not to cling to rigid and simplistic race-based preferences; it is to embrace a fairer, more inclusive understanding of equity.
