Affirmative Action Is Wrong. There’s a Better Way to Make Campuses Diverse.

I am the daughter and granddaughter of Indian immigrants. In 1967, my father and grandmother came to the United States from Jhansi, a city in the north of India, to reunite with my grandfather who had arrived three years prior. This was around the time the Civil Rights Act was passed; my grandfather attended graduate school for psychology at DePaul University on a scholarship, with less than $100 in his pocket. In 1995, my mother came to this country, having just married my dad in an arranged marriage. Up to that point, she had never stepped foot on a plane, let alone left India; all she ever knew was in Kanpur.

The story of how my family arrived and found its way in America is a unique one that exemplifies diversity. But based on revelations from Students for Fair Admissions’ challenge to Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions policies, cases that have oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Monday, it seems neither of these schools would agree with me.

They, along with many other elite universities in the U.S., seem to have decided that because Asian American enrollment at their schools exceeds the Asian American share of the population, stories like mine don’t count as “diverse.” Instead, the stories of “underrepresented” racial minorities tend to count more as the diversity in which universities have a compelling interest, the rationale for racial preferences today.

Racial preferences in college admissions are wrong, and not just because they make it more difficult for certain racial groups over others to gain admission. Race-conscious admissions programs are wrong also because they promote the view that certain types of diversity matter more than others, that certain stories are more worth telling than others.

This is obviously misguided. On a university campus, true diversity should encompass all aspects of a student’s personhood that could contribute to the educational environment, like whether the student is a spelling bee champion, grew up in a single-parent household, or worked in a New York pizza parlor. Indeed, this is what Justice Lewis Powell had in mind when he established the diversity rationale behind race-conscious admissions in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Fortunately, the court is expected to overturn racial preferences. In the absence of court-protected and delineated definitions of diversity, will Harvard and U.N.C. remain diverse? How can we go about furthering a more multifaceted diversity on America’s college campuses? The answer is a simple one: race-neutral alternatives.

The court has previously recognized that race-neutral alternatives have the potential of promoting diversity in higher education. Indeed, in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, the court noted that a university could only use race-conscious admissions to promote student body diversity after it had proved that race-neutral alternatives don’t work. If a university ignored this step, then it’d be in violation of federal law and the Constitution.

The court then reiterated this point in 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the last time it considered a challenge to a university’s affirmative action program. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion upholding the use of racial preferences, stressed that federal law and the equal protection clause “impose ‘on the university the ultimate burden of demonstrating’ that ‘race-neutral alternatives’ that are both ‘available’ and ‘workable’ ‘do not suffice.’”

On top of defining diversity in a way that fails to fully appreciate Asian American stories, Harvard and U.N.C. have never seriously tried to meet this burden.

Consider Harvard first. America’s oldest and most storied private university argues that it has given serious consideration to race-neutral alternatives for promoting diversity, including Students for Fair Admissions’ suggestion that it eliminate preferences for legacies and the children of donors, faculty members and staff members and increase its preferences for low-income applicants. Harvard, however, has suggested that these ideas are not workable because they would lead to a decline in African American enrollment.

The District Court, however, acknowledged that despite forming committees intended to study race-neutral alternatives beginning in 2014, Harvard did not actually do so until 2017, three years after Students for Fair Admissions filed its complaint. What’s more, Students for Fair Admissions has demonstrated that under its proposed race-neutral alternative, white enrollment would decrease, while combined African American and Hispanic admissions would rise slightly, Asian American admissions would increase, and socioeconomic diversity would skyrocket. Yet even if this proposed race-neutral alternative did not achieve current levels of racial diversity on Harvard’s campus, that would not render it unworkable. Per the court’s holdings in Grutter and Fisher, race-neutral alternatives need to work only “about as well.”

U.N.C. is in no better position. Similarly to Harvard, it has said that it cannot replace its race-conscious admissions program with a race-neutral one. Doing so, it claims, might impede future efforts to achieve more racial diversity.

But it is not clear why that would happen at U.N.C. As Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in his dissent on the Fisher case, at the University of Texas at Austin, a higher proportion of Black, Hispanic and Asian American students were admitted under race-neutral means in 2004 than race-conscious ones in 1996.

And Richard Sander, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor, has shown that adopting race-neutral admissions policies may lead to improved outcomes for racial minorities. He’s noted, for instance, that after replacing race-conscious admissions with race-neutral ones in the University of California system, the number of Black and Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees rose significantly. (The University of California system’s leadership, however, has filed an amicus brief in the cases against Harvard and U.N.C. saying that race-neutral policies have been “inadequate to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.” It acknowledges that the U.C. system as a whole is very diverse but says that diversity on individual campuses is lacking.)

Justice Powell was right in that diversity writ large could enhance higher education. A student from a small town in Idaho, one who was a pianist, another who grew up in poverty and a fourth whose family immigrated to America from South Asia could each bring a unique perspective to campus and help further learning both in and out of the classroom. Unfortunately, racial preferences have made higher education admissions such that these examples of diversity are not necessarily considered by universities to be the kinds of diversity they seek out. Race-neutral alternatives are the remedy.

Renu Mukherjee is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

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