By Scott Etkin
In the days since the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in higher education, former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has been outspoken in his opposition to the ruling.
“It feels tragic,” he said on the NPR program ‘All Things Considered.’ “It feels like the country has been on a course of choosing between a continuation of the great era of civil rights and another view of ‘we’ve done this long enough and we need a whole new approach in this society.’ [Civil rights are] now the second choice.”
The day after the Supreme Court decision, June 30th, was Bollinger’s last day as Columbia’s president. After two decades in the role, he was succeeded by Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a British-American economist who is a former executive at the World Bank and the university’s first female President. So far, Bollinger has been more public than Shafik with commentary about the decision.
In The Economist, Bollinger wrote that universities should use the Supreme Court ruling as an opportunity to reconsider their admissions processes. In particular, he argues that universities should “focus even more attention on understanding who their applicants are, and the extent to which these prospective students can be good teachers to each other, so that universities can graduate people who will be engaged, sensitive citizens.”
While Columbia has issued a statement saying that it’s too early to tell what might change in its admission process as a result of the decision, they have firmly restated their commitment to “find a durable and meaningful path to preserve [diversity].”
Columbia has already started down a path toward a more holistic evaluation of candidates. Like many universities,it has dropped the requirement for undergraduates to submit standardized test scores (it’s now optional). Standardized tests are widely considered unfair because students from wealthier families have the resources for expensive test preparation. Bollinger wrote that “early data suggest that whether a student did or didn’t submit scores had little to no bearing on academic performance once they were in our classrooms.”
While Bollinger calls on universities to “adopt innovative methods to obtain more diverse pools of applicants,” one step towards a potentially more equitable admissions process that Columbia has not taken is removing “legacy” status (a parent who attended the university) from consideration. Many top universities — such as MIT, Johns Hopkins and UC Berkeley — no longer consider it while Harvard, Princeton and Stanford are among those that still do.
We’ll post an update if Shafik or Columbia announces any admissions process changes to promote diversity in response to the Supreme Court decision.
Tragic? Nonsense. Of course socio-economic situation has to be considered, but not the race only. Most Asian students who are doing well are not born with a sliver spoon either.
I’m not sure I understand; why should the son or daughter of a black surgeon in Bergen County have an application advantage over the son or daughter of a white tractor mechanic from Iowa?
Thank you Mr Bollinger for making that statement. Let’s hope your successor follows suit.
“Standardized tests are widely considered unfair because students from wealthier families have the resources for expensive test preparation.” Excellent, did he by chance comment on the legacy admissions at Columbia, where students from white wealthier families get in even WITHOUT academic considerations?
That is not how legacy admissions work. Of course, their academic criteria are considered, number one. They have to meet the standards of the college for admission. Why should a kid be exempt from going to the same college their parents did?
Will- you are missing the point. If SCOTUS says kids shouldn’t get a preference because of their race, why should kids get a preference for the luck of having parents who attended their school of choice? Everyone, says SCOTUS, should be judged on their own merits. But most of us know that in fact college admissions are a complex process that takes any number of factors into consideration as they try to build a diverse community that reflects the world we live in and will afford students the opportunity to learn from peers who don’t come from the same circumstances and possibly world-view as their own.
There is the little matter of the Constitution. It explicitly prohibits discriminating on the basis of race. It says nothing one way or the other about discriminating on the basis of where your parents went to college. It’s perfectly fine to oppose legacy admissions, but they don’t raise a Constitutional issue the way that racially-based admissions do.
The Equal Protection clause was adopted in 1866. Surely we can agree that notwithstanding its prohibition of discrimination based on race, discrimination has continued in many pernicious forms over the past 150 years, and the African American community continues to live with its consequences. In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled using racial quotas as impermissible, as that would be discriminatory, but race can be one of the many factors taken into account when considering a candidate, given (a) the moral exigency of trying to remedy hundreds of years of discrimination, and (b) the educational advantages of having diverse experiences and voices brought to the collective classroom. No two students are ever alike but for one factor, so it is just too simplistic to say that the only reason certain students get in is on the basis of their race.
I completely agree! At the same time, a president of a university pointing our unfairness of removing affirmative action should be the first running and saying, “wait! we know something else that’s unfair and we can fix it ourselves – legacy admissions!” The fact that “A 2005 analysis of 180,000 student records obtained from nineteen selective colleges and universities found that, within a set range of SAT scores, being a legacy raised an applicant’s chances of admission by 19.7 percentage points.” is a call to action not by Supreme Courth, but by those in charge of admissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
P.S. Will, nobody suggested that “a kid be exempt from going to the same college their parents did”. Legacy status should not be part of the consideration – that’s it… Easy to understand, easy to implement, and for all fairness-loving people easy to support. Let’s do it!
Lee Bollinger is wrong…the SCOTUS decision was the correct one. This court is undoing 40+ years of judicial activism that started with the Warren Court.
really? you want to get rid of Brown v. Board of Education, which was the landmark decision of the Warren court. You want to go back to “separate but equal”? Let’s roll back the 20th century!!!
Actually, I wish we could roll back parts of the 20th century.
WWI & WWII to start with. The wars in Vietnam. Iraq. Bosnia. Middle East. Assassinations of leaders. You OK with this Bruce?
B vs. B overturned Plessy, which itself violated the Constitution. The Constitution’s language is plain and clear – you cannot discriminate against people based on their race. Deal with it.
Lol – I think what you mean is “I didn’t like the old activists but I like these activists” since they are reversing well-settled precedent and in most cases popular decisions (you really think most Americans wanted to see Roe overturned? Ask your kids).
When Roe vs Wade was overturned I knew they would be coming for all of us.
The court is committed to ending systemic racism.
When I was in high school in the 1980s I bought a couple of SAT review books that cost about $10 each. I spent many months and many hours studying on my own and taking mock tests.
I did very well on the SATs and went to a very good (public) college.
So let’s dispel the myth that SATs discriminate against poor students because they can’t afford expensive tutors. Anyone with the discipline and will power can do well on the test regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Eliminating this test simply lowers standards and does nobody any favors.
Oh yes. I too used to subscribe to the “If I can do it anybody can” rules of the world. Of course, the fact that I had two married parents who raised me in a supportive white middle-class family had nothing to do with any of the successes in my life. It was all ME (tongue firmly in cheek).
It often comes down to the parenting they’ve experienced and their role models. There are numerous stories about the great success that minority students have achieved when put on the right path and disciplined to stay the course. It’s no secret that children who come from broken families have a much greater struggle.
Hear hear! I did the same a decade or so after you. Borrowed free SAT test prep books from my local library system and also spent hours and months studying them – renewing books and borrowing different ones, as needed. I did very well on my SAT & attended an Ivy. Same goes for my sibling.
Later in life I met a wonderful partner who likewise studied test prep books on own, and got into one of the best universities in the world.
There are more of us out there who did great on our SATs without tutors – the media & academia somehow forgot about us.
Eliminating the SAT eliminates one of the ways that students without connections or $ get to stand out in the applicant pool.
It feels like yet another strike against those with fewer socioeconomic means.
Most of the US does not want affirmative action. Peoples skin color should not be considered for college admissions or jobs. Admission should be purely merit based.
For all the commentariat handwringing about this decision, there is precisely zero consideration given to Asian Americans, who were the actual plaintiffs in this case! Asian Americans, not whites, are the group penalized by the zero-sum burden imposed by race-based admissions.
Interestingly, the only opinion that grappled with this issue as well as the odious history of discrimination suffered by Asian Americans throughout American history (e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment during WW2) was, by, gasp!, Clarence Thomas.
Progressives are playing a dangerous game if they take the Asian American community for granted.
At some point, we must recognize that social engineering and special programs only accomplish so much.
The target communities have to take command and compete.
Asian families often come here speaking no English and living in cramped homes – and yet their kids often excel in school.
My own family came with very little from Eastern Europe, spoke little English, and live in tenements. They worked extremely hard and made sure their progeny did as well.
If a demand for excellence doesn’t come from within a community, that community is doomed to be excluded.
Bollinger’s whole premise that test scores are irrelevant (and undoubtedly that tests are somehow racist!) is completely false, by the way. There is, unsurprisingly, a high correlation between test scores and GPA and college success: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-validity-study-overview-admissions-enrollment-leaders.pdf
This study is funded by College Board who administers the SAT and has a huge financial incentive to perpetuate this idea. Of course they want you to believe SAT is integral.
Please ask Bollinger his thoughts on legacy preference. Columbia loves their legacies and upwards of 70% of legacies are white. Isn’t this racial preferance?
Columbia has the lowest legacy admit rate in the Ivy league (Harvard the highest). The US is 71% white, so the legacy population mirrors the US population. No problem with that. The athletes are mostly black. Should they take more White and Asian athletes?
How could anyone think that admission policies based on race could be considered constitutional. Whatever happened to “…all men are created equal…without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.” The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, which is exactly what this decision reflected.
Just so we’re clear, you know that quote isn’t from the Constitution, right?
Yes, to be clear… it is from the Declaration of Independence. Thanks for that. I could have been more specific.
(Trying again, as the moderators ate the last attempt.)
Eh, not quite. “All men are created equal” is from the Declaration, but the “without regard” stuff is taken from elsewhere.
The Declaration doesn’t actually mention “race” or “color,” except insofar as it refers to Indigenous peoples with what we would now regard as a slur.
I used to work at Columbia and Bollinger’s “diversity” often consisted of a lot of upper-class students from third world countries who could pay full freight.