THE FALL OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education, by Justin Driver
Justin Driver’s compact and insightful new book, “The Fall of Affirmative Action,” appears at a time when the government’s approach to discrimination has shifted dramatically.
Back in 2020, Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, wrote to his community about the need to continue to root out the “systemic racism” that had plagued his and other institutions of higher learning for generations. Two weeks later, the Trump administration cynically launched an investigation, since the acknowledgment of racism’s persistence suggested that the school might be in violation of civil rights statutes.
At the time, Princeton, like almost every other university of note, publicly aimed to be more open to people from groups that had historically faced discrimination. This meant trying to have a more diverse student body and faculty — a campus that looked less like an exclusive country club and more like the country of which it was a part.
That was during the first Trump administration, and after some pushback, the federal government backed down. Now, emboldened by the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard outlawing race-based affirmative action, the government is aggressively punishing schools that practice what it calls “illegal D.E.I.,” with the result that many efforts by small colleges and large universities to create inclusive campuses are now prohibited.
In the Supreme Court case, prejudice against Asian Americans in college admissions played a central role in the plaintiffs’ winning argument: Affirmative action policies enabled reverse discrimination. Yet now the main racism of concern to the government appears to be “anti-white racism.”
In “The Fall of Affirmative Action,” Driver, a law professor at Yale University, charts the legal arguments used to criticize and defend affirmative action. He conducts a post-mortem of racial preferences, noting the gains achieved, especially in giving Black students more access to higher education as a conduit to the professions. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of Black lawyers increased more than sixfold, the number of Black doctors tripled and the Black professoriate more than doubled. Last fall, in the wake of the 2023 case, Black student enrollment plummeted at many schools.
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The post Affirmative Action Is Dead. What Should Universities Do Now? appeared first on New York Times.
