RadixJournal - November 02, 2022


Affirmative Action and the Genesis of the Elite


Episode Stats


Length

29 minutes

Words per minute

122.41534

Word count

3,639

Sentence count

216

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of Bollinger v. Bollinger, a case that challenges the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Will the court uphold a landmark precedent allowing colleges to use race as a factor in admissions decisions?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I was actually going to talk about affirmative action.
00:00:04.460 I didn't listen to the entire five hours of oral arguments, I'll admit, but I listened
00:00:09.200 to at least two, maybe even three hours of it yesterday as I was just taking care of
00:00:16.340 some things in the morning and at the gym.
00:00:18.880 And it was fairly interesting.
00:00:22.520 It got a bit repetitive and you could more or less see how this is going to shake out.
00:00:29.120 But I think if I were a betting man, I and I am, I would definitely put money on this
00:00:39.560 case succeeding.
00:00:42.300 And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that and then I'm going to make a deeper point
00:00:49.680 about the function of the university and the creation of an elite class after that.
00:00:59.120 But I first would like to set it up just a bit.
00:01:04.240 So I've seen some headlines of this that have indicated this sentiment, which is basically
00:01:12.180 like the Supreme Court is about to overturn a landmark decades old precedent.
00:01:21.060 But this time, the public is fully behind it.
00:01:25.480 In fact, this is going to be really popular.
00:01:28.920 And getting rid of affirmative action is actually even more popular than I imagined. 0.53
00:01:36.560 So there was a recent Pew Research study from spring of this year.
00:01:44.820 And I was pretty much amazed by it.
00:01:50.640 So 75% of the public were willing to tell a pollster that they did not feel that race
00:01:58.140 or ethnicity should be a factor at all in college admissions.
00:02:02.640 And 20% of the public said that it should be a minor factor.
00:02:09.340 So and then 7% said that it should be a major factor.
00:02:12.860 So that is a pretty overwhelming case of public opinion being against something.
00:02:19.380 This basically means that every conservative is against affirmative action.
00:02:24.220 And in fact, most liberals are.
00:02:27.740 I even think the minor factor question is almost kind of a euphemism.
00:02:33.840 Like you don't really like it, but might it be a tipping point between two candidates?
00:02:42.000 So among white people, opposition to affirmative action is even higher.
00:02:46.420 But opposition to affirmative action is actually pretty high among even African-Americans.
00:02:51.700 And it's certainly high among Asians as well, although less than whites, interestingly.
00:02:56.620 So but overall, this just seems pretty radically unpopular, actually.
00:03:03.460 And I think it might even be one of those issues that does create not just polarization,
00:03:12.580 but that notion that there's something rotten in Denmark.
00:03:17.820 You know, it's like the elite class are just not listening to the public.
00:03:23.340 They might even be evil, maybe even Satan worshipers.
00:03:27.100 I'm kind of exaggerating there, but you get my point.
00:03:29.660 It's just this like extreme disconnect between the public and elite institutions.
00:03:36.580 The other interesting thing about this case is that the Supreme Court really set up a overturning of its decision.
00:03:51.040 So in 2003, there was a case against Michigan Law School that was a Title VI claim.
00:04:01.100 So it's basically an identical claim to what is happening now.
00:04:06.080 And it was called Grutter versus Bollinger.
00:04:08.840 And the decision was written by Sandra Day O'Connor.
00:04:14.020 And just these last words of the decision, the court takes the law school at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race neutral admissions formula
00:04:27.440 and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable.
00:04:33.020 The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved of today.
00:04:40.940 So the court really set up this case.
00:04:45.860 This was by no means a definitive decision.
00:04:48.680 And even that decision was also a bit wishy-washy.
00:04:54.360 This is one of the, I guess, two major ones, Baki, which involved the University of California Law School,
00:05:01.660 and then Grutter, which involved Michigan Law School.
00:05:04.920 These were basically kind of pushing these schools against outright quotas and towards using race as a kind of one among many criteria for allowing a student to gain admission.
00:05:24.360 It's actually fairly interesting.
00:05:26.400 There was a good book written about 15 or 20 years ago called The Affirmative Action Hoax by, I believe his name is Joseph Farrow, but it's still around.
00:05:38.820 You can find it.
00:05:39.520 It's a good book.
00:05:40.380 He actually made one pretty compelling argument that outright quotas are actually just better because the process is so mysterious.
00:05:52.700 And it, in some ways, this, like the Supreme Court urging institutions to engage in this, you know, touchy-feely, wishy-washy version of affirmative action is actually kind of worse.
00:06:09.180 And that you should just have an outright quota.
00:06:12.300 First off, it's simpler.
00:06:13.820 You can reduce the admissions officers and bureaucracy.
00:06:18.040 But also, it's just kind of a plain and honest admission of what is going on.
00:06:27.800 And what is going on is that elite schools are more or less attempting to capture the national population demographics.
00:06:36.900 Why don't we just admit to it in a way and not engage in these kinds of things?
00:06:43.240 One of the big questions here is the notion of compelling interest.
00:06:51.240 And I think this gets to my larger point about the, what is a compelling interest?
00:07:01.040 Like, what is the university all about?
00:07:03.060 What is it trying to do?
00:07:04.480 And, you know, what is the meaning of the, say, 1,500 youngsters who matriculate to Harvard every year?
00:07:17.600 So, in the oral arguments, Clarence Thomas said, you know, I've heard the word diversity, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
00:07:27.920 Well, we kind of do know what the university is talking about.
00:07:32.860 They are trying to achieve racial and, to a lesser degree, but to a significant degree, religious diversity.
00:07:43.780 And they also, I mean, with North Carolina, it was interesting because they actually said some things remarkable, which was that, I believe it was a high number.
00:07:52.440 It's like four in 10 students are actually from rural North Carolina, and they actually are trying to achieve rural urban diversity as well, and so on.
00:08:03.000 So, I think they are trying to do that.
00:08:07.260 But it's really, you know, where the rubber hits the road and what really gets people up in arms is this notion that there are two candidates that are more or less identical.
00:08:19.000 And the African-American just gets the brass ring. 1.00
00:08:26.600 There's also some things I remember this past summer.
00:08:29.560 There was a case of this young girl who is African-American.
00:08:35.320 And, you know, I'm sure she's smart and so on, but she was literally accepted to every big name school you can imagine.
00:08:45.640 She got into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, wherever she applied, she was allowed in.
00:08:56.640 And I think this also gets to a kind of bigger problem, which is that there are, you know, intelligent, attractive, well-rounded African-American students.
00:09:11.820 And these big colleges are just kind of getting the first bite out of the apple.
00:09:18.120 And you're bringing these students that aren't really more excellent than others, and they get into all of the schools while these other students are really struggling just to get into one because things have become so hyper-competitive.
00:09:34.580 But you're basically just rewarding, say, a wealthy African-American family that already has, you know, a good culture and something.
00:09:47.540 You're not really helping out African-Americans. 0.99
00:09:50.840 There are plenty of Black people in poverty, et cetera, who aren't benefiting from the fact that this one girl went to Yale and will now, you know, one day serve on the board of GE and the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something.
00:10:10.040 This is not really helping African-Americans at all.
00:10:14.240 And I was kind of thinking about this a little bit.
00:10:21.200 So what is the university and what is a compelling interest?
00:10:28.840 Now, obviously, academia has its origins in the monasteries and the church.
00:10:36.580 You can even see this in the architecture of many of these institutions, Harvard in particular.
00:10:46.820 Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia is a little bit remarkable in that it was a colonial architecture kind of looking towards Plato's Lyceum and the Greeks, the Romans, more than it was looking towards the medieval monastery.
00:11:07.900 There is a very medieval chapel on campus just right outside the lawn.
00:11:16.060 It's kind of the exception that proves the rule in this case.
00:11:21.380 It looks very much out of place with the larger architecture.
00:11:24.620 So what are these schools become?
00:11:30.060 You know, I think to a large degree, they have become adult daycare centers or country clubs.
00:11:37.800 And even for me, I'm not terribly old, but the degree to which these universities have become, you know, luxury gymnasiums is pretty remarkable.
00:11:56.620 I mean, even in my case, your living environment dorm was fairly spartan.
00:12:04.020 There wasn't a climbing wall in every student center.
00:12:11.360 I remember the meals at the University of Virginia were cafeteria style, pretty basic.
00:12:18.040 We had a gym, of course.
00:12:19.880 We were getting to where we are now.
00:12:21.640 But, you know, it's obviously clear that a lot of the, you know, say top 100 schools and even on down from there, they have become club med. 0.80
00:12:32.300 And that is a bit ridiculous. 0.76
00:12:35.920 It's especially ridiculous when you kind of compare it to what was going on before. 0.84
00:12:40.360 So I think there is this kind of weird compelling, you know, when you say, is it legal for us to do this in behalf of a compelling interest?
00:12:49.520 You're begging the question of what that compelling interest really is and what you're trying to achieve.
00:12:56.880 And again, before I talk about class, let me just go in a little digression on sports.
00:13:03.640 The first Heisman Trophy winner actually attended the University of Chicago.
00:13:12.920 I'm forgetting his name.
00:13:14.440 It was something like Ray B. Wenger.
00:13:16.780 He had some kind of funny name.
00:13:18.280 And he was a Heisman Trophy winner in the 1940s.
00:13:22.700 So he was a great football player and he attended the University of Chicago.
00:13:27.080 It's a trivia question at this point.
00:13:29.460 The University of Chicago does not have any football program, anything like, you know, the University of Alabama or Notre Dame or something.
00:13:40.100 And consciously so.
00:13:41.460 They took themselves out of the college sports game and they have a team that is, I forgot what it is, Division II or whatever.
00:13:55.360 They might have a few scholarship athletes.
00:13:57.160 They're not trying to win.
00:13:59.100 They see football as a kind of add-on to the school or maybe even an experience that you might have.
00:14:06.240 But, you know, when I was in high school and I played football, no one, oh, actually one or, I think one might have actually played college football at a somewhat high level.
00:14:17.180 But it wasn't about that.
00:14:19.120 It was about the experience.
00:14:20.300 I remember my father who attended Lawrenceville in New Jersey, he said that they had a, and I don't know if they still have this tradition, but there's a house football program where everyone plays.
00:14:33.980 And so the quality of the football on the field is extremely low.
00:14:39.500 You have, you know, 90-pound weaklings playing right tackle or whatever.
00:14:45.040 It's all about the experience.
00:14:47.120 So in that case, they were trying to use sports and athletics as they should be as a way of building character and building community and bonding among the students.
00:15:01.020 They never imagined, and the University of Chicago consciously did this, they never imagined that the school had a compelling interest to effectively have a professional football team on the field.
00:15:14.980 I wouldn't be surprised if the University of Alabama could defeat an NFL team.
00:15:21.920 Maybe that's reaching a bit, but it's not reaching too much.
00:15:24.760 It is effectively a professional program.
00:15:29.800 The coach gets paid millions.
00:15:33.120 Now the students are allowed to kind of get paid in some form by sponsorship or something.
00:15:40.140 The whole thing is a billion-dollar industry, and it becomes this kind of grotesque parody of student-athletes.
00:15:51.020 And this notion of a compelling interest is just radically different.
00:15:56.080 We now have a compelling interest to present an effectively professional team every Saturday afternoon.
00:16:05.600 For what?
00:16:06.480 For the students' enjoyment?
00:16:07.940 For the reputation of the school?
00:16:11.760 Et cetera.
00:16:12.640 It's just bizarre.
00:16:16.180 And the fact that the university, like, when you say, like, can you legally do this for a compelling interest?
00:16:22.480 You're just begging the question of what the university is really all about.
00:16:28.080 And what is it about?
00:16:31.640 Is it, I mean, I think you could probably fairly argue that the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, which has evolved in this suit, that they have a kind of democratic or egalitarian motive, you could say.
00:16:49.800 That, yes, it's secondary education, it's not for everyone, but it's a government program, and it is there to help out the people.
00:17:06.080 They can go learn a practical trade, like agriculture, a business.
00:17:11.120 They can, at the very least, kind of expand themselves in a way that they otherwise couldn't.
00:17:17.760 This should be subsidized through the taxpayers, et cetera, in order to have this institution that, again, has democratic and egalitarian motives.
00:17:30.660 You could definitely say that.
00:17:31.760 There's also, and you could, in the oral arguments, you could hear them hint at another motive for the universities.
00:17:44.520 And they said things like, well, the university, and I think they use this exact word, or exact term, it's the training ground for leadership in our society.
00:17:56.000 So they didn't use the word elite, they used leadership.
00:17:58.200 So basically, if you're going to become a Supreme Court justice, if you're going to become a corporate CEO, if you're going to become a journalist, if you're going to, you know, so on and so forth, you went to college, at the very least.
00:18:16.440 And so they kind of got at this fact that the university system is about constructing elites.
00:18:23.620 And they even got at this with one of the arguments that was made by the plaintiffs, and that was echoed by Gorsuch and Thomas, among others, which is that, you know, Harvard has this history of racial exclusion in admissions.
00:18:48.640 And that isn't this new diversity regime, isn't this, despite its intentions, reproducing this racial antagonism that we saw throughout its history.
00:19:04.780 And it is very clear that admissions at Harvard were discriminating against Jewish students.
00:19:16.080 And there was actually a funny moment when Amy Covey Barrett said, and I don't want to speak any longer on Harvard's history of anti-Semitism.
00:19:25.460 It was just kind of funny to hear out loud when we think about these places today, which, of course, the bastion of political correctness.
00:19:35.740 But Jews were discriminated against.
00:19:39.100 They weren't discriminated against in the way that African-Americans were.
00:19:43.220 They were discriminated against due to the fact that they would be overrepresented by a large margin if you simply took, say, basic test taking or your high school record into account.
00:19:59.460 And that Harvard didn't quite want this.
00:20:02.460 It didn't want a class that would have been, say, 20 percent Jewish.
00:20:06.840 And thus, it created some admission standards that, very much like today, used euphemistic categories in order to prevent Jews from getting into Harvard, at least in disproportionate numbers.
00:20:23.440 So it would actually give favor regionally.
00:20:26.380 So if you were very smart from Montana, you had a little bit of a leg up against the very smart kid from Exeter Academy, which is a famous Harvard theater.
00:20:38.980 They kind of wanted to broaden themselves.
00:20:41.100 And you can kind of see the fact that that would be exclusionary to Jews if you're going out to the broader country.
00:20:49.640 As just an anecdote, it's interesting that Richard Nixon, who had a Quaker background from Whittier, or he went to Whittier College.
00:20:59.080 He actually was accepted at Harvard and couldn't afford the train travel across the country that that would entail.
00:21:07.720 Pretty interesting.
00:21:08.620 So basically, at least when we're talking about the top level of academia, we're talking about the selection of an elite.
00:21:28.160 That's what's going on.
00:21:29.700 Previously, in the history of academics, these monasteries were, you know, purely religious, and they might have been, to some degree, a way of keeping these people outside of the community in the monastery, so they wouldn't do too much harm due to their kind of fanaticism and asceticism, etc.
00:21:53.740 But in that case with Jews, and in the case today, it is about selecting a new elite, or maintaining an elite, and maybe evolving an elite. 0.98
00:22:10.680 And that is what every Harvard class is about.
00:22:15.620 So I hope affirmative action is overturned. 0.98
00:22:19.440 I absolutely do.
00:22:20.460 And I also chafe at the just patent unfairness of it all.
00:22:28.960 And it could affect my, it will, well, it could, I should say now, I do think it will be overturned.
00:22:35.180 It could affect my own children.
00:22:36.540 So I have a dog in this fight as well.
00:22:39.880 But I think just thinking of it purely in terms of unfairness is kind of missing the point, at the very least, when it involves Harvard, and I think to a very large degree, when it involves a good public school like the University of North Carolina.
00:23:00.500 So there are 1,500 to 2,000 slots at Harvard College every year.
00:23:10.400 Now, they actually put out a tweet today, and this didn't surprise me at all.
00:23:16.620 This was, I have heard all of this, even when I was applying to colleges in the 90s.
00:23:21.800 I don't, anything's changed.
00:23:23.940 So this is, was tweeted out by Harvard University.
00:23:26.580 2,000 available slots at Harvard College.
00:23:28.800 8,000 U.S. applicants with perfect GPA.
00:23:32.340 Therefore, they could fill a class four times over with the amount of 4.0 GPA high school students.
00:23:42.320 And 4,000 are ranked first in their class.
00:23:46.460 18,000, that is incredible, scored 700 plus on SAT reading, writing.
00:23:51.920 20,000 scored 700 plus on SAT math.
00:23:54.920 Now, we're kind of back to the old scores.
00:23:56.960 If you get above a 700 on reading or mathematics, that means you're exceptionally bright.
00:24:02.380 Now, obviously, people get higher than that, but that's a baseline of you can basically do anything you want.
00:24:10.200 So they're using this as an argument of we actually want a different student body, and we want one that might be kind of well-rounded, however you want to describe that.
00:24:21.480 But let's kind of take this even further.
00:24:24.420 I mean, there are 1,500 to 2,000 slots at all of these big-time universities, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, et cetera.
00:24:39.540 Now, do you get the kind of arbitrary quality to all of these classes?
00:24:47.320 They could almost allow people in at random and probably have an equally strong class as the one they arrive at by actually reading their 1,000-word essays.
00:25:01.460 You know, if you're applying to Harvard, you already kind of think highly of yourself, so it probably means that there's something going on there.
00:25:13.140 And you can kind of take this further.
00:25:15.520 Like, let's say, like, let's say the University of North Carolina or even a kind of, you know, a bit lesser university like the University of Montana.
00:25:28.560 Could you find 2,000 Harvard-worthy students from UNC or University of Montana?
00:25:39.660 I bet you actually could, and I bet the classes would be pretty similar.
00:25:49.140 Now, maybe it would be taking from the top 20% or something, but you get my point.
00:25:57.240 There is just a kind of randomness and arbitrary quality to the selection of these classes.
00:26:07.540 And so maybe it's not exactly the case at UNC or the University of Montana where they have a different compelling interest.
00:26:17.380 But certainly at Harvard, their compelling interest is to construct an elite.
00:26:25.780 Two things I think are important here.
00:26:28.940 First off, this elite has, in a way, already been constructed.
00:26:37.400 So if you look at, say, the Princeton, the 2022 Princeton class, a strong majority, and I think it's actually about 60%, are people of color.
00:26:50.840 That is, they are Asian, African-American, Hispanic, or multiracial.
00:26:58.440 So at Princeton, for these young people who, through great grades, some special talent, or just downright luck, they got into this class.
00:27:12.080 And again, I would stress that luck plays a huge factor here.
00:27:17.040 They are already, like we already have an elite group of people who are going to matriculate to other institutions after this,
00:27:28.280 who are already kind of well beyond like 2050 America or something.
00:27:35.400 In fact, whites are a large but clear minority in these classes.
00:27:45.560 And you can see this in your local news.
00:27:50.820 You can see this in your national news.
00:27:54.680 You can see this less so on the boards of corporations, but you can certainly see this in hiring practices at top levels of boards, not boards, but leadership, et cetera.
00:28:09.800 You obviously see it in Hollywood in terms of casting to a large degree.
00:28:16.020 So the real compelling interest of these top schools is generating, maintaining, and evolving an elite group.
00:28:29.060 And they are largely successful at that.
00:28:32.000 And the other thing that I would say is that this kind of new post-white American elite class has already been constructed. 0.79
00:28:43.040 Like we're already seeing this now.
00:28:47.220 So even though I am enthusiastic about affirmative action ending, and I do think it will affect things, maybe even in unintended ways,
00:28:57.780 doing a completely race-blind admissions might, you might have UCLA as a 75% East Asian university.
00:29:08.440 So there are going to be some remarkable things, and not necessarily things that are pro-white or so on.
00:29:16.860 But I do think that it should end.
00:29:18.780 I'm very happy about it.
00:29:20.900 But I kind of also want to keep my eye on like, what is the actual purpose of these elite institutions?
00:29:30.480 What are they doing?
00:29:31.380 And what have they, in some ways, like already succeeded at?
00:29:35.280 And something that they can continue to succeed at, even when affirmative action is over and done with.