In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court rules that race is no longer a factor in college admissions decisions. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito join Professor Jason Riley to discuss the ruling and what it means for the future of race-based college admissions.
00:08:52.700And he found that black males that were freshmen at Duke about 76% of them expressed an interest in majoring in economics or one of the STEM fields, which was far higher than among white males, but only about 35%, less than half actually ended up obtaining a degree in those fields.
00:09:11.820Well, well, the fall off rate among whites was only about five percentage points.
00:09:15.900And he said the entire difference here was the entrance scores of the black students.
00:09:21.140Duke admitted some black kids who met the credentials of the average kid at the school.
00:09:44.200Uh, this was another study done, uh, a little further back of, of black students at MIT who were, um, you know, on, they had scored in, in, uh, the, the, the 90th percentile of, uh, of, of all black kids, of all kids in the country, uh, white or black on the math section of, of the SAT.
00:10:04.300So these are some very smart black kids, but among their peers at MIT, they were in the 10th percentile in terms of their test scores.
00:10:13.560So kids who would have been hitting it out of the park at a less selective university, um, uh, would have been on a Dean's list at a less selective university.
00:10:42.920The chief justice said, uh, many universities have concluded wrongly that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.
00:10:54.980Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
00:10:59.220Uh, he, now he goes on to say at the end, something interesting and somewhat controversial.
00:11:04.020He says, um, universities can still consider applicants discussion of their personal race based experiences as part of essays that we all have to submit when we apply to college.
00:11:15.720Here's what he wrote, quote, not just heat, the majority, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.
00:11:30.080But despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.
00:11:39.560And the question is, I get what he's saying.
00:11:41.760You know, it's the same way I could write an, even if I didn't check on a box that I was a woman applying to Harvard, I could write a big essay about how I was part of the Me Too movement.
00:11:51.680And, uh, you know, I came forward and I stood up for other women, hint, hint, hint.
00:11:56.980That's what he's saying you're allowed to do.
00:11:58.720And, and the question is really, does this give the permission slip for the regime to just continue?
00:12:06.540Well, he, he very explicitly says that it does not.
00:12:09.400And I think he's trying to preempt that, that, that he's, he's concerned that schools might try and use proxies for race to get, uh, the result that they want.
00:12:19.520And I don't, I don't doubt that they will.
00:12:21.380I mean, um, I, I don't, I don't expect the other side to just back down and say, oh, we lost the court.
00:12:27.100We tried, uh, we're just going to move on.
00:12:29.540I think, I think they're going to really challenge this ruling and it's going to take repeated lawsuits to, to test the resolve of the Supreme Court justices in this ruling.
00:12:38.380Um, you know, Thomas, Thomas talks about how, and in his, uh, concurring opinion about how it took more than a half century, uh, after the, the Plessy v. Ferguson, uh, decision to correct it.
00:12:50.280And Brown v. Board of Education, that took, you know, more than 50 years.
00:12:53.520He said separate, but separate, but equal is okay.
00:12:57.100Yeah. And so, and now we've taken 46 years to correct the Bakke decision that you mentioned, which was handed down in 1978.
00:13:04.620But I suspect that, um, what you're going to see from the left is a lot like what you saw after the Brown v. Board of Education from Southern segregationists who said, frankly, we don't give a damn what the Supreme Court decided.
00:13:29.320It took the sending of federal troops down in some cases to have the Supreme Court decision enforced.
00:13:35.620And I don't expect the other side to give up.
00:13:38.480I think they're going to fight this just as hard.
00:13:40.460And I know they hate the analogy of being likened to those Southern segregationists, but that's exactly what they're, what, what the role they're applying here.
00:13:49.900Well, I want to talk to you more about California and what happened there, because I know you've pointed out in the past, Americans approve of, they will approve of a decision.
00:13:59.240Like this, because they disapprove of affirmative action across racial groups.
00:14:03.320And that's one of the reasons why when it's put to the voters, even in a state as liberal as California, they voted to strike down affirmative action in the college level long before today.
00:14:13.180So we do have some evidence of how this is likely to go.
00:14:15.240But so let's just put a pin in that right now, because I do want to talk a little bit about Justice Jackson, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas's response.
00:14:23.540These are two African-American jurists having a battle over whether race is an appropriate consideration at the college level.
00:14:32.200And it's kind of interesting to watch them go back and forth.
00:14:34.140She, in her dissent, says the following, I write separately to expound upon the universal benefits of considering race in this context in response to a suggestion that it's unfair for a college's admission process to consider race as one factor in a holistic review of its applicants.
00:14:52.700Again, back to sort of the lie that it's just one of many.
00:15:03.320Our country has never been colorblind.
00:15:05.300Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized in a college, if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants, fails to acknowledge the well-documented intergenerational transmission of inequality that still plagues our citizenry.
00:15:25.680It is that inequality that admissions programs, such as UNC's, help to address to the benefit of us all.
00:15:32.800She's back to the, it's the past history of discrimination that makes this discrimination necessary.
00:16:02.780So these policies are not having the effect that she is alleging that they are having.
00:16:08.440And then there's a larger point here to be made, which is that people like Justice Jackson are suggesting that affirmative action somehow created the Black middle class, that Blacks can't go to college or become professionals without affirmative action policies.
00:16:28.000In fact, the Black middle class was growing at a much faster rate in the decades before affirmative action than it was in the decades after these policies began in earnest in the 1970s.
00:16:39.940The idea that, you know, Blacks were already going to Harvard, were already teaching at Harvard before affirmative action, the era of affirmative action.
00:16:48.980So just the idea that Blacks, where does she think people like Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall came from?
00:16:56.380There was no affirmative action back then.
00:16:59.080So this idea that Blacks cannot enter the middle class, that this is going to decimate the ranks of Black professionals, the ranks of Black college students, is just, I think, belied by history.
00:17:11.980And I also mentioned, I mentioned the STEM fields earlier, and for Black students, you know, who does the best job of graduating Blacks in the STEM fields, are the HBCUs, the historically Black colleges, which don't use affirmative action.
00:18:12.940You tell me, Jason, my instinct in just having read your books is, sure, maybe the admissions declined at the top, top, like Berkeley in the UC system, but they likely went up at the other universities and the graduation rates then improved.
00:18:30.500Not only, yeah, they not only, and they did mostly rebound, even at the elite schools, they mostly rebounded.
00:18:36.500I don't know if they reached the exact parity to what they were before, but they largely did rebound after initial dip.
00:18:42.220Again, a dip you would expect if you're going to start matching kids properly with the schools, they're most likely to excel while attending.
00:18:50.020I mean, what is the goal here to have the most diverse freshman class and then and then have a more racially monotonous graduating class?
00:19:01.100I mean, what is the goal here is to produce college graduates, not just to produce a freshman class that looks like America.
00:19:09.760The goal is to produce college graduates.
00:19:12.360They kept going back to the reason a student body benefits from a diverse, you know, racial diversity is, among other things, it's hobnobbing with power.
00:19:23.520If you have more Black students at Harvard, they have better connections.
00:19:26.560You know, the same reason why people who went to Harvard want little junior to go to Harvard is those connections last for life.
00:19:32.740If it's a better springboard into a, you know, more fruitful and productive and lucrative profession.
00:19:39.860And if you stop Blacks from going to the Harvards and so on, they're not never going to make those connections.
00:19:45.220Well, again, we want them to graduate, though.
00:19:47.660I mean, we want at the end of the day, we want a college graduate to go out into the world who knows something and can apply what they've learned in college to their profession.
00:20:07.720And even at the University of California, even though there was that drop off at Berkeley and UCLA initially, overall in the entire University of California system, Black enrollment went up and Black graduation rates went up.
00:20:22.040And so I think that is the better outcome.
00:20:25.300And it's not a sort of Yale or jail world, Megan.
00:20:28.280You can you can graduate from a good state school and go on and have a very productive life.
00:20:34.140I agree that some of these elite schools are going to have networking opportunities.
00:20:38.280That that that's always been the case.
00:20:40.460But you need to graduate and you need to be confident in what you do.
00:20:43.920And affirmative action is setting up kids to fail.
00:20:49.040We've talked about this before and I've talked about it with Heather McDonald, who, by the way, is coming up next on how I was bright enough.
00:20:55.300But if somebody had put me into Harvard where I didn't belong and my grades would never have got me in, it would have been an utterly frustrating failure for me there.
00:21:05.760Whereas at Syracuse, where I matched, I did well enough to get myself into law school and through hard work and all the rest of it.
00:21:15.280And that's true of everybody, which is why, Jason, I've got to ask you about.
00:21:18.780Yeah, go ahead, because I want to ask you about Michelle Obama.
00:21:20.660I was just going to say, and I'm glad you made the point that you did, because this is not a racial issue per se.
00:21:27.720Anytime you admit a student to a school who doesn't meet the credentials of the average student at that school, whether they're they're an athlete, whether they're a child of alumni, they're going to struggle.
00:21:39.140They're going to congregate in the bottom of the class. That's that's that's just the nature of how that happens.
00:21:45.280If you admit a kid to a school that can't handle the work, they're going to struggle.
00:21:48.800So we talk about affirmative action and its negative and negativity in terms of race often, but it's not limited to to to the racial context.
00:21:57.240Not at all. OK, so listen to what Michelle Obama said in response to this opinion today.
00:22:02.740She tweeted a lengthy statement that reads in part, of course, students on my campus.
00:22:08.200And I don't know what she means by my campus. I think she went to Princeton. Right.
00:22:12.220So maybe she means Princeton and countless others across the country were and continue to be granted special consideration for admissions.
00:22:19.520Some have parents who graduated from the same school. Others have families who can afford coaches to help them run faster and hit a bit hit a ball harder.
00:22:26.480Others go to high schools with lavish resources for tutors and extensive standardized test prep that help them score higher on college entrance exams.
00:22:33.860We don't usually question if those students belong. So often we just accept that money, power and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level.
00:22:48.480So already I'm going to get to already. You know what, Michelle? Same, same. And I'm white. I didn't have any of those advantages.
00:22:55.700I showed up the day the SAT. I was like, it's the SAT today. Oh, shit. OK. My friend loaned me a pencil. I never took a review class.
00:23:02.920We didn't have the money for anything. It's not just a black thing, but she and other progressives, Jason, are going to completely tie the racial inequity and its ongoing nature to this decision.
00:23:14.020And the irony here, Megan, is that they oppose policies that that in theory would obviate the need for affirmative action and college admissions.
00:23:25.740This is a K through 12 education issue. Yes.
00:23:28.760You cannot sit down at age 17, given the inequality that exists in our K through 12 education system,
00:23:35.580and expect every 17 year old in this country to be on an equal playing field when it comes to taking that test.
00:23:40.840And this is regardless of the income. It's just we have very poor quality K through 12 education.
00:23:47.060And and at the K through 12 level, I think, is where our focus should be on things like school choice, on letting parents decide which schools are best for their kids.
00:23:57.060We know that there are models out there that can produce black kids and white kids, poor kids and rich kids who will do well in that SAT test.
00:24:04.180We have a problem doing is scaling up those models to meet demand.
00:24:08.320And the Michelle Obama's of the world are opposed to many of these school choice measures, vouchers and so forth that would give parents the ability to send their kids to the schools where they would be able to excel and be ready when they sit down and take that test.
00:24:23.540But the idea that you're going to have you have black kids graduating from high school reading at an eighth grade level, the idea that you're going to make that up with a few remedial classes freshman year at Duke is ridiculous.
00:24:35.760You're not. So we really need to be focused on the K through 12 education system.
00:24:39.920And hopefully there will be a little more of that given this decision.
00:24:44.680Right. But we can't get any of that addressed because the Democrats are beholden to the unions, which are strongly opposed to charter schools and vouchers and all of school choice.
00:24:53.940And so she's got only herself to blame for the problem in this education system where you've got, I know, charter schools right now with black kids, mostly black and Hispanic kids who are crushing their white counterparts coming out of public schools that are well funded and so on.
00:25:09.640But they people like Michelle Obama and her husband shut those down.
00:25:14.240They don't want more black kids to go to those institutions because the teachers unions don't like them.
00:25:19.380There's another thing now because there's been a push recently to get rid of the SAT, to get rid of GPAs, to sort of just any standardized criteria that would let these schools assess somebody's ability to perform at the school is getting erased because they believe it's going to lead to fewer minorities entering the school.
00:25:37.580I heard you not long ago talking with I think it was somebody I can't remember.
00:25:42.380Maybe she's from The Wall Street Journal, but you were talking about a study that showed the number of words like that that a young child who is from an affluent family, doctors or lawyers here by a certain point versus right down the line.
00:25:58.220And how your point was that student coming out at 17 or 18 to apply for college is not going to do well just because they get rid of GPAs and standardized testing.
00:26:09.620Could you make could you tell us about that study?
00:26:13.560It's been cited by a number of people.
00:26:15.220I think Robert Putnam is who I was referring to, the Harvard political scientists, but basically it was a study of words that kids hear per hour at home based on their class background.
00:26:28.920So a child of parents of professionals, doctors, lawyers might hear something like 2400 words per hour at home.
00:26:37.140An auto mechanics kid might hear about 1200 and a child of someone on welfare might hear about 600 words per hour at home on average.
00:26:45.860And it might not seem like a huge difference, but what it means that over a period of time, a three year old child of professionals will have heard more words than a 10 year old child of a family on welfare.
00:26:57.340And so you think about how early these learning discrepancies begin and the idea that we are blaming a test that kids take at age 17 for being racist is ridiculous.
00:27:12.880This is something we need to that test is happening way too far downstream.
00:27:18.220We need to we need to go to the source of the problem.
00:27:22.040And that's occurring in the K through 12 system.
00:27:24.860And so that's what the what the study was was was was really getting.
00:27:29.380So in other words, you're you're you're getting rid of the thing that exposes the problem, not the thing that's causing the problem.
00:27:36.400And then you're letting kids into the system who will fail because the problem is still there, even if you choose to ignore the diagnostic.
00:27:44.560Right. All the test is doing is identifying the problem.
00:27:48.700And if you want to help someone, Megan, you need to know where they are, not where you hope they are or want to pretend they are, but where they actually are, because they can only get where they need to go from where they are.
00:28:00.080And that test is telling you where they are.
00:29:19.760Well, as I said earlier, I think there's going to be a lot of resistance on the left.
00:29:23.540I think they're going to try and find end runs, proxies for race to continue getting the diversity that they want on campus.
00:29:29.540So I think more follow up lawsuits will need to be filed to keep the schools honest here.
00:29:34.880In terms of public opinion, though, and you cited some of this earlier, I think that this is probably going to be a pretty popular opinion with the general public, if not with the with the media elites.
00:29:46.200I mean, surveys have shown that a majority of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics all oppose using race in college admissions.
00:29:54.520And we had that ballot initiative out in California in 2020, in which there was an attempt to reinsert race based admissions in the University of California system.
00:30:07.940And it was led by Asian parents who said, we are not going back to that old system because it disproportionately harms our kids.
00:30:15.000So I think the general public is going to side with with this with this opinion.
00:30:19.580But you'll have your media elites out there, including your black elites like Michelle Obama, claiming to speak for for the masses, but not really, really just speaking for themselves.
00:30:28.820Absolutely. Jason Riley, love listening to you. Thank you so much for being here.
00:30:35.780When we come back, another favorite of my own and of our shows, Heather McDonald is here with thoughts.
00:30:42.380You could not ask for better guests. I mean, honestly, I love bringing you these brilliant minds on a big day like today.
00:30:48.900Thank you for listening. During the now, Heather McDonald, Heather is a contributing editor at City Journal and author of the book When Race Trump's Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty and Threatens Lives.
00:31:06.040I love this book. Heather, so happy to have you here.
00:31:09.240Thank you for joining us. Your reaction to the breaking news that Supreme Court has finally struck down the use of race in the admissions process.
00:31:17.100Well, I was actually sort of disappointed in the Roberts decision because it did not throw out the entire incoherent, conceptually muddled, incredibly frustrating equal protection jurisprudence until I read Justice Sotomayor's dissent, which was so over the top that it made me realize that Roberts actually was quite clever.
00:31:40.260When Sotomayor claims that the opinion entrenches racial inequality in education, which is a complete lie, I'm grateful for what Roberts did.
00:31:53.380The idea that this harms Black students is preposterous, Megan.
00:31:59.160We're going to have as many Black students go to college as before.
00:32:03.100The doors are wide open to Black students.
00:32:07.480It simply means that they will not be as easily catapulted into schools for which they are academically not competitively qualified as before this decision.
00:32:23.600It is not as resounding a refutation of the courts of preposterous rulings as I would have liked.
00:32:32.160It does not overrule the previous precedent, which allowed racial preferences grutter.
00:32:38.560But it is it cleverly finesses it to make things harder for colleges to exercise racial preferences.
00:32:46.940This is directly opposed to the messaging you're hearing right now on places like MSNBC, where a legal analyst named Catherine Christian had the following question.
00:32:55.440Now that schools no longer have to consider race, you know, I fear what will happen and what will there be many lawyers who look like Charles and I in the future or doctors or accountants.
00:33:12.040It is a problem and it's not preferential treatment.
00:33:20.940Well, but but but it's as a as a just a logical or functional matter.
00:33:28.380Black students are going to be admitted to hundreds of schools, but they'll be admitted on the same basis as every one of their peers.
00:33:39.540So if you're qualified to go to Amherst as a black student, you'll go to Amherst, but you won't be catapulted into Harvard, but you will have Amherst available to you.
00:33:50.620If you're qualified to go to a state school that is perfectly valid as an educational opportunity, you will go to that state school.
00:34:02.260Every college in the country still is desperate to get as many black students as possible.
00:34:07.700There is no exclusion of black students in any college today.
00:34:13.000What there has been is a set of incredibly massive racial preferences, which said that black students with academic scores that would have been automatically disqualifying for a certain set of schools.
00:34:28.640If presented by whites and Asians, nevertheless, get admitted to those schools, that's not fair.
00:34:35.600And it's also not good for those beneficiaries.
00:34:38.540Instead, those same black students will be admitted to the schools for which they're competitively qualified.
00:34:44.960Mm hmm. The the left, the dissents in this case seem to think that race is the only thing stopping people of color from getting the same admission rates at a place like Harvard.
00:34:55.800It is their race. Like if either it's run by a bunch of racists and because of this racist country, they've been kept down and so on.
00:35:02.160But Justice Thomas responds to some of that, in particular, responding to Justice Jackson and he says Justice Jackson would replace the founders vision with an organizing principle based on race.
00:35:15.300In fact, in her view, almost all of life's outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.
00:35:21.560This is this is so she writes because of statistical disparities among different racial groups.
00:35:27.060Even if some whites have a lower household net worth than some blacks, what matters to Justice Jackson is that the average white household has more wealth than the average black household.
00:35:37.580He goes on. This lore is not and has never been true.
00:35:41.140Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color.
00:35:46.340Then is now. Not all disparities are based on race.
00:35:49.280Not all people are racist and not all differences between individuals are ascribable to race going on.
00:35:54.900Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth and well-being to label all blacks as victims.
00:36:04.820Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.
00:36:08.100I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds and goes on to say the following.
00:36:39.280It is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.
00:36:51.840And yet and yet here's the reaction to Justice Thomas by the NCAA president, Derek Johnson.
00:37:00.160The worst thing about affirmative action is that it created a Clarence Thomas who benefited for the from the program and now is in a position where he's going to deny many young African-American talented individuals an opportunity.
00:37:21.540And whether or not Thomas did benefit from affirmative action, that should not prevent him from looking at it rationally and seeing whether this is a way to help blacks.
00:37:34.000There's black students pretty much know that they don't have to meet the same standards, that standards will be lowered for them throughout their careers.
00:37:41.980They should be told to meet the standards.
00:37:46.100At this point, there was no mention really in the any of the opinions about the racial skills gap, the academic skills gaps.
00:37:53.780But that's what's preventing Harvard from being able to create 10 percent black student body without vast racial preferences.
00:38:04.820If Harvard admitted students based on academic skills alone, there would be less than one percent black students at Harvard.
00:38:15.160That's because the skills gap is so great.
00:38:17.560Now, those students that wouldn't be admitted to Harvard with racial preferences will instead go to perfectly good schools like Amherst.
00:38:26.600Again, this this whole structure is based on such extraordinary academic snobbery and elitism.
00:38:33.060I'm amazed that so-called second tier colleges put up with it because Harvard is basically saying unless black students come here, their their fate in life is sealed.
00:38:44.800You know, they have no possibility of succeeding.
00:38:47.360UC Berkeley said that when the voters in California voted to ban racial preferences, the chancellor said, well, where will we get the leaders of tomorrow if they can't go to Berkeley?
00:38:57.400Well, they will go to the University of California at Riverside or Santa Cruz or Irvine, and they will get perfectly good educations.
00:39:14.860What needs to happen if Harvard wants to get its 10 percent black student bodies absent racial preferences, and I can guarantee you it is going to continue using racial preferences.
00:39:26.000Lawrence Bacow announced today that it is already looking for ways to take advantage of the Roberts huge loophole, which he gave, which said, well, of course, you can consider race as part of somebody's life story.
00:39:43.440So I don't think all that much is actually going to change as a result of this.
00:39:46.560But if Harvard really wanted to say we'll be colorblind, but we still want 10 percent black student body, what it should have said is let's work on closing the academic skills gap.
00:39:58.760Let's change the academic culture within too many inner city black families that spurns academic achievement rather than studies relentlessly in order to academically succeed.
00:40:11.600They won't do that. And they don't care about diversity. I mean, Justice Thomas said when they heard this case, I don't know what diversity means.
00:40:17.720What what does that mean? And talked about how, you know, look, is it is a college campus like Harvard truly diverse when they have what, four percent conservative professors?
00:40:27.600Professors, if that never mind the student body where they're openly discriminated against when they join the college Republican club at all these schools, which just has maybe a dozen members when secretly there's scores of others who are just closeted and had to lie through their high school years and on their college admissions essays just to get in.
00:40:44.640Is that diverse? And the other thing is that these universities, Heather, who want to tout themselves and cloak themselves in glory about how open minded they are and how they really want to help these minorities have a better life.
00:40:55.340You know, you know, the reality is the half of these admissions are made based on legacy status and whether you're going to help Harvard win the big football game or lacrosse game or what have you.
00:41:07.020These are not noble people making these decisions at all. They want blacks who are going to make them look good.
00:41:13.780They're not actually admitting them because they have some higher purpose.
00:41:16.900Well, there was a period very early on when Harvard admitted lower income blacks and they did so poorly that it junked that right now Harvard has huge preferences of higher income over lower income blacks.
00:41:29.280So it's not interested in, you know, what might be an actual predictor of life experience, which is socioeconomic background.
00:41:38.460But, yeah, I mean, the whole I would go to pure academic skills admissions.
00:41:45.100I would throw out any whole anything holistic.
00:41:47.760I would go purely on a numbers based system precisely in order to put out of a job these outrageously narcissistic screening admissions officers that give themselves such airs.
00:42:00.640The University of North Carolina admissions officers, we got data on them talking about their little brown people and how, well, this little brown person can't qualify for this scholarship because her grades aren't good enough, but we'll get her in in another way.
00:42:15.060And Harvard admissions officers asks 16 year olds, you know, what have you done in life that shows courage and what sort of character do you have?
00:42:25.620Oh, come on. What sort of character do these admissions officers have?
00:42:29.560They fancy that they're creating this little utopian perfect community with this, that and that.
00:42:37.860It's just preposterous. They have such power over these students' lives.
00:42:42.920Basically, many students today spend the first 18 years of their lives trying to craft some ridiculous resume that will make them stand out to the Ivy Leagues.
00:42:52.960Get over it. Let's just study, learn things, not engage in preposterous.
00:42:59.560Learn, you know, internship programs doing homes for habitat or homeless advocacy.
00:43:05.460Learn, learn history, read literature, be the best possible student you can and go to schools for which you are academically qualified.
00:43:12.760That is the solution to America's failing education.
00:43:19.280I mean, we're going further and further behind.
00:43:21.820Our academic skills are pathetic compared with other countries.
00:43:26.020And when we should not be lowering our skills further by the charade of diversity and penalizing academic success.
00:43:34.240Well, this is part of the problem. So we don't have fourth graders or eighth graders who can read or do math.
00:43:41.500And yet we're trying to make social justice warriors out of them.
00:43:44.960So these kids get up. They do badly on the SAT.
00:43:47.980They get poor GPAs and then they get admitted to Ivy League schools.
00:43:52.720But then now at the university level, it looks bad for these Ivy League colleges to keep having all these black students or Hispanic students fail out.
00:44:03.640So unless they lower the standards of their institution, they're going to be embarrassed.
00:44:08.960So they have to lower the standards of their institution.
00:44:11.480And then those people graduate and probably get the same preferences in their medical school application or their law school application.
00:44:17.780And then we have to compete. Those are the very people we need to compete on behalf of our country in science and technology and innovation.
00:44:25.060Whereas other countries, like you just mentioned, like South Korea, like the Japanese and so on, aren't worrying about any of this and are on a much different path.
00:44:33.120Well, racism is irrelevant to a medical lab trying to solve cancer or Alzheimer's disease as it is to getting into a college.
00:44:41.240And yes, Megan, you're absolutely right. The preferences never end.
00:44:44.620You know, we point to to Sotomayor and say, well, you see, preferences worked.
00:44:49.240Well, no, they didn't necessarily because who says she wasn't the beneficiary of preferences throughout her post law school career?
00:45:00.700So we are now engineering, deliberately engineering mediocrity, if not outright negligence and malfeasance.
00:45:07.880We are putting our scientific competitive edge at risk by racial preferences throughout our society and especially in the STEM fields.
00:45:18.620And so really, I would have liked to have seen a more resounding refutation of the idea of using race at all in this majority opinion.
00:45:27.880But it's better than nothing. But it did not discuss, as I say, the vast academic skills gap, which is why we don't have, you know, why Harvard can't get all the black students that want the demand outstrips the supply.
00:45:44.080That's what's really happening. As you point out, these Harvard admissions officers are actually not sitting there saying like they were with the Jews.
00:45:49.500Let's find a way to keep out the blacks. That's not what they want at all. But the demand outstrips the supply right now.
00:45:55.520And the question is, how do we increase the supply of academically gifted, talented, prepared African-American applicants and Hispanic applicants?
00:46:04.300And they the Democrats won't take an honest look at that, Heather.
00:46:07.980No. And and you know what needs to happen again?
00:46:11.560Above all, it has to be an internal culture change.
00:46:14.200No, we all pretend the discourse around racial preferences and admissions is extraordinary.
00:46:19.960They will never mention the academic skills gap.
00:46:22.340There's just some kind of mysterious fact that Harvard can't get all of its its black students that it wants.
00:46:29.000But what we don't know why is that it is discriminating.
00:46:32.000Of course, Harvard would rather claim that it is somehow discriminating than to look at that skills gap honestly.
00:46:39.120But all that's going to happen is is the Harvard core of black students shifts once baby step level down and and vice versa, all the way down the line.
00:46:48.840There's just this ratchet that's been going on.
00:46:51.540So let's hope that the next step, because it's going to get harder now to monitor preferences.
00:46:58.540But the next step the court will take would be to say completely no more race.
00:47:06.440Admit on the basis of neutral, objective facts, not on the basis of the trivialities of race.
00:47:15.660We should have also had, I think, a more resounding refutation of the idea that to be black represents some kind of specific life experience.
00:47:25.280You know, and you also get the inevitable contradiction, Megan, where the whole diversity rationale is, well, because because you're black, you, by definition, have some different set of life experiences than some your fellow Brearley student, white Brearley student.
00:47:43.880Manhattan. So but then what happens is so then in in in constitutional history class.
00:47:50.380Oh, excuse me. They don't teach that any longer.
00:47:52.120But in your in your race studies class, everybody looks to the black students to tell us what it means to be black or what's your experience of civil rights.
00:48:01.060And the black students get all mad. Well, why are you stereotyping me because I'm black?
00:48:05.200Because that's what the diversity rationale says you're here for.
00:48:08.120So, you know, they wanted both ways to be be let in on the basis of race.
00:48:13.260And then if anybody actually says, OK, we'll give us the black perspective.
00:48:17.480Oh, that's a microaggression. Listen, the whole diversity apparatus is based on racial preferences.
00:48:25.540The reason we have these DEI bureaucrats is because allegedly it's so awful to be black on a college campus today.
00:48:31.700Because, as you say, Megan, blacks experience extreme academic difficulty because they're in an academic environment for which they're not competitively qualified.
00:48:41.660Again, they should be at a different college. I'm not saying they don't go to college.
00:48:44.980They go to a college for which they're prepared.
00:48:47.980And so the DEI bureaucracy comes and says the reason you're experiencing trouble in your first year chemistry class is because you're in a racist environment.
00:48:56.900So it's ridiculous. Meanwhile, Heather, I know you pointed out in your books.
00:49:00.980Meanwhile, a lot of these students are two standard deviations below the average SAT score and other scores of their competitors.
00:49:08.500We're not setting these folks up for success under the current regime.
00:49:12.200Heather McDonald, thank you so much. Love hearing from you.
00:49:15.480When we come back, we turn the page with Carrie and Brit, who've got a lot of thoughts,
00:49:20.080including on that lunacy happening in California with that legislation trying to criminalize parents who don't affirm.