As the Supreme Court releases its final judgments of the current term today, there is a tendency to instantly react to each case. This leads to focusing on today rather than trying to see longer trends, deeper meanings, and more complex interactions between individual cases and larger societal changes.
I dimly remember President Johnson's creation (along with a national agreement) of affirmative action, for instance, back in 1964 through the Civil Rights Act. I did not remember clearly that the whole idea of going beyond mere statistics and test scores to add more diversity to college enrollments only truly affected about 100 colleges. The vast majority of universities welcome students who qualify, often defining "qualify" much more broadly than a Harvard or University of North Carolina.
There are great arguments to be made both for and against admissions policies such as "every student from x state will be admitted to the school if they rank in the top half of their class." There are even more intriguing arguments around whether to use "class" or socio-economic group as a major factor in adding more diversity to a campus.
After all, it is not logical to suggest that a wealthy Black student who scores high on tests and show great academic promise needs a bit more a "thumb on the scale," so to speak. But it is also not appealing to imagine a student body that consists only of the top one percent of all applicants (however that it determined). Colleges make all sorts of exceptions to "the rules," particularly when it comes to athletics or music performance or even computer programming. Demonstrating raw talent often pushes a few students past others who boast of equally impressive SAT scores or high school grades.
And it's important to realize that there are a lot more students with "raw talent" than can fit on our "elite" campuses. We love to have winners and losers.
Not everyone gets into Harvard. And it turns out that the old cliche: "You can achieve anything you can dream" is a myth. Really? I dreamed I played catcher for the Cubs for several years of my life, but no matter how much I dreamed and hoped, I just didn't have the elite skills. Thanks, mom and dad.
In many ways, the Supremes eliminating affirmative action based on race was just an argument among the rich and well-educated, signifying almost nothing for most Americans. Most Americans don't even attend college and most college students attend schools that admit most applicants.
The fact that nearly all the Supremes attended Ivy League schools is a comment on how we run our government and how we defer to "paper" credentials in so many cases.
But unlike the appalling Roe decision last year, which flew in the face of the vast majority of Americans' views, yesterday's affirmative action demolition actually sides with the 70 percent of Americans (even a majority of Black voters) who are not strong backers of racial quotas.
Americans prefer to believe in one of our national myths: that merit should always win the day. That no one should be given added advantages and that we all can succeed if we just try hard. Many Black Americans reject being branded as "victims" who need special treatment, and that is understandable.
Once we reach a goal or experience a success, it's very human to look back and see how we, of course, deserved our success. How hard work and talent paid off... no favoritism involved. It's much harder to see how generations of advantages (or lack of them) might produce specific outcomes.
In fact, the real issue in education is that so much power is concentrated in the hands of so few "elite" schools... and they remain elite mostly because they claim that status and society doesn't challenge the idea. But a Supreme Court and a large number of the nation's other leaders being a product of those elite campuses just perpetuates the challenge.
Only a "lucky" few will reap the benefits. There won't be a Supreme Court case that reduces America's own class system that grows from just a few universities.
Is it any wonder that lots of Americans mostly just hate colleges and college students and professors and all those self-proclaimed elites? And there's a lot more hate in the country that needs fixing... somehow.
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