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If Harvard tomorrow decides to condition entry on basketball skills, they can. Their mistake in this case was failing to apply their own purported standards equally to different groups, in the sense that they discriminated against Asians who in every sense passed the university’s threshold for acceptance and so could only have been nakedly discriminated against because of their race. If Harvard abolishes objective admissions criteria entirely and admits purely based on ‘personality fit’ and ‘unique perspectives’, they can admit people in whatever proportions they wish and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The only reason a group could complain is if they were highly underrepresented (eg. Asians are 5% of the population, but made up only 1% of admissions). But Asians have always been and still will be overrepresented at elite colleges, so this approach won’t work.
So, for example, in 2022 the proportion of black freshmen at Harvard was about 16%. Say that next year, Harvard moves to purely subjective criteria for admissions and this rises to 20%, while the percentage of Asians rises by 1% and the percentage of whites falls by 5%. What can anti affirmative-action campaigners do? Absolutely nothing, because Harvard can simply claim the criteria have changed and they now prioritize recruiting people based upon their ‘personal resilience’ or something as evaluated by AdCom.
The best historical parallel is the post civil war amendments, 13-15. Virtually everything 14 and 15 were designed to accomplish should have been accomplished by 13.
Read historically 13, 14 and 15 read as:
Free the slaves.
No, like, really, free them, they're people now, citizens and everything.
No, fucking really, you have to let them vote too.
Then the Democrats made alliance between inner city Irish immigrants and Southern lost causers, the government lost interest in enforcement, and until the 50s the whole thing sat in abeyance.
It will take several more major court decisions, and a government interested in enforcement, before this decision will actually mean AA permanently ends. But it's an important first step.
We won't have the second, and we probably won't have the first -- next time there's a decision the court will have changed and it will go the other way. As usual the decision is "heads the left wins forever, tails the left holds the line now and wins forever later".
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