Leftists on Twitter are increasingly strident over SCOTUS' 6-3 "conservative" majority (Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett vs, Sotomayor, Kagan, and KBJ), They denounce the majority as ideological, hostile to precedent and/or corrupt (e.g., Thomas' politically connected Trumpkin wife Ginni, Alito's undeclared vacations with a billionaire with business before the Court).
The principal problem is that social liberals seem to confuse means with ends or goals. During my salad days, I identified with intuitively worthy goals. Who, for instance, would disagree with equal pay for women? It wasn't until later I started to develop a growing skepticism over the general government's nature and extent of intervention. Even then I saw evidence of failing public education, a floundering war on poverty, the makings of a permanent government-dependent underclass. I hadn't considered the opportunity costs, the unexpected/unintended consequences of government action, e.g., on philanthropic efforts.
Let's start with BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL. v. NEBRASKA ET AL The issue is not whether student loan forgiveness is a good/fait public policy. (Now personally I have a principled objection: I do not see education as an enumerated federal responsibility on principles of federalism. Second, the federal government has a de facto monopoly and sitting on a $1.8T mountain of debt, at the expense of the American taxpayer. Roughly 70% of graduating students carry up to $30K on average in loans. Forgiveness adds massive national debt, is morally hazardous, and sets a bad precedent.) As for me, I had to take out a $1600 loan during undergraduate school (higher in today's dollars) My folks had 6 younger children and it was a one-income household on the modest income of a career NCO; they really did not contribute to my bills. I had scholarships, modest savings, etc., but for the most part I worked through school half-time. I paid off that loan in full, even during periods of unemployment. I went to lower-cost Texas state universities for my 3 graduate degrees and my employers didn't subsidize my expenses when I started on my UH MBA part-time. I really don't want to be forced to pay off the loans by others, especially those whose education (e.g., physicians) leads to expected high lifetime earnings
Biden had made a political promise to college loan debtors to forgive up to $20K each. Consider the average price of a new car is $47K, far more than the average college loan aggregate; nobody is calling for the bailouts of car loan debtors, [I'm about to start the fifth year of payments on mine.] I certainly didn't get a Presidential pause while unemployed during the pandemic.
The problem isn't so much Biden's corrupt political bribes for voter support, but how Biden was planning to cover the $400B or more cost of loan forgiveness. Biden didn't have the money or Congress' power of the purse. Even former Speaker Pelosi admitted he needed Congressional approval:
Biden's Education Department relied on a provision of the "HEROES Act," a 2003 law passed during the Iraq War. In the event of a national emergency, it allows the government to freeze, temporarily, the student loans of soldiers and their families. The law explicitly allows DoE to waive or modify student loan regulations, but only so as to ensure that service members and their families would not suffer financially because of a deployment.
Biden even vetoed a Congressional attempt to stop his cancellation pre-SCOTUS.
So, any attempt to argue the court's decision us political is patently absurd. The above-cited bill Biden vetoed went through a Dem-controlled Senate.
Next, let's look at Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. First of all, let's describe affirmative action:
Affirmative action in the United States consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to historically excluded groups, specifically racial minorities or women. The programs tended to focus on access to education and employment. The impetus toward affirmative action was redressing the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination Further impetus is a desire to ensure public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
Affirmative action included the use of racial quotas until the Supreme Court ruled that quotas were unconstitutional. Affirmative action currently tends to emphasize not specific quotas but rather "targeted goals" to address past discrimination in a particular institution or in broader society through "good-faith efforts ... to identify, select, and train potentially qualified minorities and women.
I'm going to discuss a couple of relevant anecdotal examples familiar readers may recall from earlier posts. On the way to perfect GPAs in my intellectually demanding majors of math and philosophy at OLL, my career goal transitioned from becoming a high school teacher to a professor (and the chances of becoming a philosophy professor were negligible, like faculty attrition at universities). One of the religious sisters/nuns running the university worked to negotiate a near full stipend math doctoral program slot at a Louisiana state university (Lafayette?). I think to this day the recruiter must still be wondering what happened, and certainly I still wonder about the road not taken. But I was worried about my faculty hiring prospects, thinking I needed to go to a name university like my faculty advisor's PhD from the University of Texas.
Now, for unknowing readers, OLL in located in a heavily Latino section of San Antonio, and a large plurality of fellow students were Latino. My best friend was Ramon C, a Latino education major. UT was making a recruiting visit to campus. I realized my relatively rare Franco-American blue eyes wouldn't impress them much. but I heavily begged Ramon to accompany me for moral support. I don't think when I entered the room a single recruiter looked my way, but every recruiter immediately pounced on Ramon the second he entered the room. He instantly regretted accompanying me, repeatedly told them he wasn't interested and begged them to talk to me who wanted to go to their school. It didn't work, of course, but bless his heart,
The second story involves my second year as a junior MIS professor at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Faculty typically get evaluated on 3 things: teaching, research and service. One way of doing service is serving on committees. My next-door neighbor was a well-known female academic turned down her assignment to the MBA Admissions committee. I agreed to replace her. Basically, UWM had 2 principal criteria for automatic admission: high enough GMAT scores and upper-division GPA. We would decide certain oddball cases where, say, they had mixed results. One example I remember to this day is this dude with a PhD from the University of British Columbia, He had the lowest GMAT scores I've ever seen. It was obvious to us he was unhappy with having to take the GMAT and blew it off on purpose. We weren't thrilled with his attitude but approved of his admission.
So, there was the male chair, 2 junior female profs, a couple of other male profs, and me. We usually voted alike, although I was more likely than the others to dissent on occasion (against admission) But in what would turn out to be my last committee meeting, we had a fairly unusual case where the applicant well below the cutoff of either criterion. We as a group had routinely rejected candidates with better scores. For some reason the chair and the 2 tight-lipped women were pushing acceptance of this applicant, and we were deadlocked 3-3. Finally, and I realized it would sound weird as a TV or movie plot but it was real life: the chair told the 3 of us we had to let the applicant through. The applicant was a woman of color, and the dean had already awarded her a scholarship, and it would embarrass him if she wasn't accepted to the program. This went nowhere because to the 3 of us, it wasn't fair to the applicants we rejected with better criteria scores. The chair then unexpectedly brought me into the conversation, somewhat paraphrased: "Resistance is futile. This is Ron's last meeting. Next month he'll be replaced by someone who will rubberstamp the dean's preferences." I then responded in a way that got everyone upset with me: I voted present (a protest vote), so the applicant got accepted but without the moral authority of a majority vote.
Now diversity is a criterion many in academia raise for various reasons, including geographical diversity, e.g., students from almost every state and/or multiple foreign countries
I'm hardly against diversity; I grew up in an integrated military and I've worked with or for, taught or attended school with a diverse group of people, different races, ethnicities, religions, etc. It wasn't centrally planned. For example, I met a Bangladesh immigrant as a FORTRAN programmer contractor at NASA; he told me in a family where everyone else had an MD or a PhD, he had stopped with a mere MS and was considered the black sheep of the family. It was just the first example of meeting people from Asian cultures with a near-obsession with educational accomplishment and excellence. I've also dated a diverse set of women (including Brazilians)
A couple of related points: while the use of standardized test scores and GPA have limited relevance (and grade standards and course rigor can vary among high schools), they provide more objective comparative analysis among applicants. Second, racial preferences and other violations of equal protections do not make beneficiaries more competitive at elite schools. During my 8 years of university teaching (and I did not teach at elite colleges) I found a challenging mix of students, a significant percentage who weren't capable of college-level work, some who couldn't write out essay answers. Others had believed their inflated grade records from high school but couldn't handle college level work. I remember one UWM student literally in tears; he had seen computer science students in my class do my programming exercises in 30 minutes and he wasn't done after 12 hours. When I taught database at UTEP, I was going over routine review material on linked lists, and almost no one was following discussion, despite the course having a data structures prerequisite. So, I ended up having to teach a remedial mini-course. My late best friend Bruce Breeding, a former UH doctoral student officemate and Rice graduate (Rice is like in the Ivy League of the South), used to work his heart out for his students. He ended up taking a position with Murray State in Kentucky. I had never heard Bruce complain about anything. But one time he reached out to express frustration to me and he wasn't specific, but he seemed to feel thar his incoming students (perhaps a number from impoverished areas like Appalachian?) weren't prepared to succeed in his classes, and he couldn't fix the problem. Now I can't speak to how beneficiaries of affirmative action admissions to elite colleges compete against many of the brightest students from elite college prep programs, but I'm sure some classmates resent what they perceive as double standards in admission.
In large part, black students, especially from failing urban schools with little access and/or resources to more effective charter or private schools, may be at a disadvantage, not through any fault of their own. While a ban on de facto affirmative action quotas may limit opportunities at elite colleges, and one cannot underestimate the effect on the nature and extent of opportunities and networking through academic success at an elite institution, one should not underestimate the opportunities from more open respected colleges. For example, Berkeley is a widely respected university in the UC system (in fact, one of my nieces is pursuing her doctorate there), there are a number of excellent sister campuses in the system. A recent Census survey showed over a quarter of black adults (vs 36%) hold a college degree.
States that have banned affirmative action include:
- Arizona
- California
- Florida
- Idaho
- Michigan
- Nebraska
- New Hampshire
- Oklahoma
- Washington
As SFFA noted in its Harvard petition, “an Asian American in the fourth-lowest decile [SAT] has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%); but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%).”
I don't want to go into the weeds of the dispute here; note that Harvard no longer relies on the SAT, Harvard already accepts a disproportionately high percentage of Asian Americans and has trended higher acceptances over the past decade, there are other, more significant factors.
Just my take here: a lot of said other factors are more subjective, and I'm concerned about disparity of scoring (say, against Asian American students) across ethnic groups, which may mask more subtle racial preference/reverse discrimination biases. And it's disconcerting that Harvard is abandoning one of the few objective comparative criteria (the SAT)
But racial preferences are morally and constitutionally indefensible, no matter how past Justices have rationalized them. Equal protection means exactly that. No ban, no thumb on the scale. How you can rationalize the son of a back businessman who goes to an elite private school getting bonus points over an Asian immigrant from a family of modest means?
Finally, we have 303 CREATIVE LLC ET AL. v. ELENIS ET AL. This is somewhat similar to the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case. Both cases involved a heavy-handed anti-discrimination Colorado law which includes LGBTQ+ as a protected class, The earlier case involved the sanctioning of a Christian baker who had refused (before Obergefell) to custom bake a gay wedding cake, which conflicted with his religious/moral beliefs. Note that he did not refuse to sell regular goods to the couple. Note the issue is not just free exercise of religion but freedom of expression. (My own Mom started cake decorating while I was in high school, and it's an art.) Freedom of expression includes freedom from expression, including government-compelled speech. Note that the Civil Rights Commission rejected both First Amendment exceptions, arguing the baker had to accept gay wedding cake orders and issued related sanctions
I think an alternate case focused matters on religious expression when a Christian customer tried to order a wedding displaying Leviticus 18:22 (“Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable"). The commission ruled that the 3 bakeries were right in rejecting a "hateful" Biblical verse message.
Jack Phillips (the baker) appealed through the Colorado courts (as McClanahan would prefer) and when that failed appealed to the Supreme Court which reversed the Civil Rights Commission for violating the principle of religious neutrality under Free Exercise.
In the recent case, a Chrisian web designer, Lori Smith, sued the state's anti-discrimination law, claiming it would violate her freedom of expression in designing websites consistent with her faith and values. SCOTUS agreed. On Twitter there's been a bitter debate whether Smith was a victim like Phillips, but the fact is compelled speech has a chilling effect on the supply of goods and services. Christian bakers and web designers do not have a monopoly on relevant goods and services. Voluntary exchanges and associations are key markers of a free society.
