Ed Blum Was Never Going to Be Satisfied With Making Harvard a Little Whiter
Colleges and universities trying to find new ways to build diverse classes are going to get pulled right back into court by the same activists who killed affirmative action.
The entering college class of 2028 is the first class of students who applied to school after the Supreme Court’s rulings in Students For Fair Admissions, a pair of cases that effectively outlawed affirmative action in higher education. (Yes, the decisions came down more than a year ago, in June 2023, but the admissions cycle for the class of 2027 had of course ended by then, thus preventing John Roberts from giving mediocre legacy applicants a marginal boost in their quest to matriculate at the university of their wealthy parents’ choice.)
Over the last few weeks, a handful of schools have released class profiles that provide the first look at the real-world impact of Students For Fair Admissions. You can see them all at Inside Higher Ed, but the short version is that underrepresented minority enrollment generally fell, and sometimes significantly. At MIT, for example, 31 percent of the class of 2027 is Black, Hispanic, or Indigenous; this year, the number is 17 percent. The drop-off is even steeper at Amherst College, which went from 24 percent to just 11 percent.
Not every school experienced this effect. Yale, Duke, and the University of Virginia, for example, each saw their combined share of underrepresented minority students increase by a point, which Inside Higher Ed attributes to schools launching new recruitment initiatives that aim to assemble student bodies in ways that do not offend Clarence Thomas’s sensibilities. Duke, for example, began offering full-tuition grants to students from North and South Carolina whose families make less than $150,000 per year. UVA expanded its existing free-tuition guarantee to in-state students whose families make less than $100,000 per year.
It is unambiguously good that Students For Fair Admissions was not immediately as disastrous as it could have been, and schools will almost certainly get better at operating in this post-affirmative action world in the years to come. But if the conservative activists who spent five decades crusading against the very idea of racial equity have demonstrated anything, it is that they were never going to be satisfied with making Harvard a little bit whiter than it already was. At Balls & Strikes, we’ve covered the efforts of the people behind Students For Fair Admissions to eliminate the scourge of minorities participating in other aspects of American society, too: suing to kill programs that offer museum internships to Latino students, and VC funding to Black women founders, and law firm summer jobs to students of color. Translated from legalese, a recent challenge to academic hiring at Northwestern’s law school boils down to “Look, Your Honor, there are Black people on this faculty! Aren’t you going to do something about it??”
So, good on these schools for finding ways to mitigate the impact of Students For Fair Admissions, and to keep their student bodies (somewhat) diverse. But it’s a safe bet that Ed Blum and company are already cooking up lawsuits to challenge these programs, too, and a matter of time before they end up right back in court, once again before a conservative-captured federal judiciary where they’re likelier than not to meet a friendly audience. As I wrote earlier this year, the conservative legal movement is never really done attacking multiracial democracy. It is just waiting to figure out which aspect of multiracial democracy to attack next.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Twitter at @ballsstrikes, or get in touch by emailing contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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