The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023 while MIT's Black enrollment dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent in a single cycle, and the country still cannot agree on whether the correction was working or had become the problem.
Harvard litigated Bakke, Grutter, and Students for Fair Admissions all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost 6-3 on June 29, 2023.
Harvard litigated Bakke, Grutter, and Students for Fair Admissions all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost 6-3 on June 29, 2023. In the trial record was a fact the university never explained: Asian American applicants had received systematically lower "personal ratings" — measuring likability, courage, kindness — assigned by officers who mostly never met them. The system designed to correct one exclusion had been running a second one under the same roof for decades.
Between 1619 and 1964, American law sorted people by race into different schools, neighborhoods, and wealth trajectories. Affirmative action was the first systematic attempt to reverse that sorting. By 2023, Harvard's entering class was roughly 14 percent Black, up from 4 to 6 percent forty years earlier. Then Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the programs "lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives" and Justice Sotomayor responded that the majority had "cemented a superficial rule of colorblindness in an endemically segregated society." The same Fourteenth Amendment — equal protection — produced two irreconcilable readings.
MIT went from 15 percent Black enrollment to 5 percent in one cycle. A sees the reversion to the structural default — the one centuries of exclusion built. An who watched their child score 99th percentile and get waitlisted has a different relationship with the word "holistic." A is rebuilding diversity through zip-code weighting and transfer pathways that exploit the very segregation everyone decries. And the keep asking the question nobody wants to answer: what was the exit condition? What metric would have told us the correction had worked? Nobody wrote it down.
Corporate DEI programs ubiquitous in 2021 have been dismantled across the Fortune 500 by 2026. The Black-white wealth gap remains roughly ten to one. Whether the correction ended too early or ran too long depends on which side of the original injury you stand on — and whether the people absorbing the cost of either answer were consulted before the sorting mechanism decided for them.
Harvard fought for affirmative action for fifty years — then its own trial data showed Asian American applicants had been penalized the whole time. Every correction promises to be temporary. The conditions that justify it carry no expiration date.
Where do you stand?
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