People embrace each other as demonstrators for and against the U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down race-conscious student admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina confront each other, in Washington, U.S., on June 29.EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/Reuters
In the 1920s, McGill University adopted a race-based affirmative-action program. The administration aimed to fix what it identified as a growing imbalance in the student body. The problem: Applicants from one racial group (the early 20th century had different ideas of “race” than we do today) were being admitted in a proportion below their share of the population, while students from another group were being admitted at a rate above their population.
The gap existed, and appeared to be widening, because the university was basing admissions decisions on grades from standardized high-school leaving exams. Students from the increasingly overrepresented group tended to have higher scores than students from the underrepresented group.
So McGill quietly took steps to achieve what it believed to be a more desirable racial makeup. That included imposing a need for higher high-school grades on applicants from the overrepresented race.
The racial group this affirmative-action program was designed to help were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The group the program targeted were Jews.
Modern American affirmative action in higher education, born of the civil rights era, and now declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, is of course very different from what McGill and other leading Canadian and American universities did all those years ago.
Affirmative action at U.S. universities started as a response to three centuries of legal, widespread, state-imposed discrimination against Black Americans. That history is impossible to deny or ignore.
But the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court argued that giving someone something, even partly based on race, means denying it to someone else, partly for reasons of race. It’s why the techniques of negative discrimination of the past, such as the old McGill admissions system, are not entirely unrelated to the positive discrimination of the present – particularly if you happen to be one of the applicants being positively discriminated against.
Race-based affirmative action in American higher education has changed and expanded since the 1960s. Programs to up Black enrolment became broader diversity programs, aimed at making the student body look more like the country, in a country that – just like Canada – has become increasingly multiracial through immigration.
But that changing American population introduced new wrinkles. The key plaintiffs in the cases the U.S. Supreme Court decided on Thursday were not white; they were Asian-American. Like Jews at McGill in the 1920s, they are a large and growing share of the top applicants at top U.S. schools.
The data presented to the court showed that, when a leading university such as Harvard starts adjusting admissions scores or taking other factors into account to achieve its preferred racially balanced outcome, the group whose admission chances are most negatively affected is Asian-Americans. That’s because they are the group that, at least today, is most outperforming academically.
David Shribman: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action produces more questions than answers
The U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong last year when it overturned its own 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, ending constitutional protection for the right to abortion. But in its decision on the use of race in college admissions, I think the six conservative judges got something right.
Several states, including uber-liberal California, already do not allow race-based affirmative action in public education. Polls suggest that most Americans are uncomfortable with race-based preferences. And if we’re all going to get along in a multiracial society with no racial majority – that’s where Canada and the U.S. both are headed, fast – I believe that in the long run we have to strive to get beyond race rather than obsessing over it.
Canadian higher education isn’t the same as American higher education, and in many respects that’s a good thing. Top U.S. universities engage in legacy admissions – preferential admission for the children of alumni and donors – which is basically affirmative action for kids who skew white and wealthy. Many U.S. schools also offer preferential admission to thousands of student athletes in obscure, non-revenue sports from golf to sailing – another affirmative-action program for low-scoring kids from the upper-middle class.
Canadian universities don’t do much of any of that. Neither should American universities.
But universities in Canada and the U.S. should have affirmative-action programs for low-income students, regardless of race. That’s what universities focus on in states where race-based affirmative action was long ago banned. They don’t take an immutable factor such as race into account, but they do consider changeable circumstances including poverty and disadvantage.
Does poverty sometimes correlate with race? Yes. But what has a 100-per-cent correlation with poverty? Being poor. Giving preferential admission to the children of Serena Williams or Will Smith, ahead of a poor white or Asian kid with the same or better grades, isn’t logical or fair.