By Michael P. Riccards

As expected, the reactionary Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Robert has gutted affirmative action in college admissions. Despite the moderate sound of the decision, the verdict will have an enormous impact on race relations in general and the use of education as a tool of social integration. 

As a historian and a former college president, I am perturbed that the highly educated Ivy League court seems to be deprived of a sense of what has happened in this nation before yesterday. And as an administrator, I must decry the handcuffs the court will put on guys like me trying to make universities more open and flexible to different ethnic groups.  

I am aware that in the past the use of quotas worked against Jews, especially at Harvard, Columbia and Cornell, in their attempts to use arguments of merit as they sought to gain the American dream for them in the 1930s. Any quotas seem to be against our notion of fairness and parity. But one must admit that the situation with Black Americans is very different. This was a people who were enslaved for 200 years, who gave 180,000 Black soldiers to the Union war effort, who then after constitutional amendments that guarantee equality suffered the humiliations of Reconstruction politics lasting until the protests of the 1960s. The court until the Brown decision not only allowed such discrimination, but in Plessy v. Ferguson approved of separate but equal schools. Now the Supreme Court has suddenly discovered the problems of disparate treatment.

I know that there is disconcerting talk of reparations as another sign of ridiculous liberal guilt, but in fact, for many Americans, the true reparations came in the form of open admissions. The end of meritocracy and the beginnings of open admissions in CUNY for example benefitted at first Irish and Italian kids. Only now has it been extended to Blacks and Hispanics. 

When I was provost at Hunter, the development office would send me to Florida to talk to Jewish matrons about the need for private money for their alma mater, and I would remind them that the new ethnic groups coming into CUNY were using the same arguments that Jewish students used a generation ago. The ladies understood that and were very generous. I have heard my fellow Italian Americans complain that nobody helped them, but yet in three generations, Italian Americans are the second wealthiest, most educated, and most assimilated of white ethnic groups.  

Because of the incredible racial hostility that continued especially against the Blacks as a group, we must frankly give some credence to critical race theory that we have as a country allowed systematic racial discrimination. Let us be honest — racial discrimination is built into the past and current practices of the GI Bill of Rights, the New Deal minimum wages, the Social Security standards, the mortgage industry, sports, politics, and religion. The question is not why we have affirmative action in education, but why don’t we have it in the other institutions of American society?

So, we have eliminated affirmative action in education, Now tell me what are we going to use for admissions: we have already discredited the SAT and ACT because they are class-based. I worked for the College Board, and we all knew that was true and spent a lot of time trying to get around the facts and consequences. We cannot use the class rankings since the schools are so different that that standard means nothing in admissions. We can use essays that someone else will write. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be people. Soon Artificial Intelligence will write like David Brooks or George Will, or God forbid, William Shakespeare. We could use a lottery, or reaffirm the importance of legacy admissions, which only increases the unfairness of it all,  

Michael P. Riccards, a former college president. is the author of 30 books, including a two-volume history of the presidency, The Ferocious Engine of Democracy, and the recently published Woodrow Wilson as Commander-in-Chief. Riccards wrote this article for the Jandoli Institute.

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Michael Riccards