Universities in the US, by law, will no longer be allowed to discriminate to allow access to college education based on skin colour. As Justice Clarence Thomas writes in his concurring opinion:

‘Many Universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the colour of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.’

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision striking down the discriminatory admissions practices of America’s leading Universities is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s still-reverberating 2016 election win. Trump’s subsequently-fulfilled promise to put genuine constitutional conservatives on the court has won another symbolic victory, after the court’s historic overturning of Roe v Wade last year.

Unlike Roe, however, it remains to be seen whether or not this decision will substantially alter either admissions practices, the culture of American higher education, or the dynamics of racial politics more broadly. Whilst it is true that on face value this is an important victory for common sense and a fair society, there are three reasons why Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College may prove to be a less consequential decision than we first expect it to be.

The first reason why the ruling won’t effect change is because elite Universities are wholly bastions of the political left, and the political left today operates in deliberate defiance of Court authority. In April, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded the Biden administration ignore a Federal Court’s ruling halting the approval of abortion pill mifepristone.

AOC’s protestations are not on the fringe of contemporary American leftist thought. They are mainstream. Responding to the Supreme Court ruling, President Joe Biden said of the conservative-dominated bench, ‘This is not a normal court.’ Make no mistake, Biden intends to delegitimise the court as a means to achieving the ends demanded by his now-radical leftist base.

The Universities themselves are of course, even more radical. In August last year, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, law lecturers at Harvard and Yale respectively, penned a guest essay in the New York Times entitled The Constitution Is Broken and Should not Be Reclaimed. Amidst a slew of radical proposals, they argue that modern America demands ‘a new way of fighting within American democracy’ and that this ‘must start with a more open politics of altering our fundamental law’.

Again, these are not the benign speculations of errant philosopher-kings. They represent the default settings of the University in-crowd, the kinds of academics, students, and administrators who make up the diaspora of modern elite education. They detest the Constitution and see both it and any court that faithfully upholds it as an obstacle to Liberalism’s inevitable progress. When Harvard-educated lawyer Elie Mystal said recently on The View that the Constitution was ‘kind of trash’, he was espousing the view that most of his ilk hold toward that document.

It is improbable that the Universities will respond to the ruling by obeying that which they detest. Instead, expect a campaign, both public and private, of subversion and deception. They are well-resourced to do this: Total endowment funds in the American University sector top $700 Billion – higher than the GDPs of Switzerland, Sweden, or Saudi Arabia.

We should expect well-financed elite Universities to deploy all manner of techniques to get around the court’s decision. Whilst the ruling will no doubt effect University policy change, it will not change the ‘subjective’ inclinations of staff in admitting students based on what they deem to be the ‘right fit’ for their institutions. Yes, they now stand at greater risk of legal ramifications for preferencing incompetent students over the best and brightest, however there will always be room for subjective decision-making in college admissions. In this way, the court’s ruling will be more difficult to police than that which overturned Roe: It is a cut and dry thing to prevent abortions after a legislated hard-limited date. Not so to adjudicate on breaches of admissions policies which must necessarily leave room for human judgment in the dispatch of duty.

The second reason the ruling may prove futile is that the focus on admissions obscures the real locus of decay in American Higher Education. Admissions departments are hugely problematic in and of themselves, and the court’s ruling will undoubtedly do much to reign them in. However, they are not the main game in disestablishing Wokeism within the University sector.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments are now self-sustaining organisms within major Universities. Whilst so-called ‘DEI’ is omnipresent across the University, it has become for most colleges, a mega-department all of its own. It is siloed, and perpetuates its own ideology both within and without its walls. I have written previously on how the DEI cancer has overrun higher education. This week’s ruling rightly attacks a huge part of the DEI agenda, by striking at a core component of Wokism’s cultural program: the delegitimisation of meritocracy as an organizing principle within Western society.

In my March column, I likened DEI Bureaucracies to a Hydra – the many-headed serpent slain by Hercules who would respawn with two heads for every one cut off. I fear that the SCOTUS decision on affirmative action may prove that analogy truer than ever. Admissions are but one head of the DEI Hydra, and by cutting it off, we may yet see the respawning of a more vicious monster.

If the initial reaction is anything to go by, the DEI Bureaucracy is poised to strike back with a vengeance. The SCOTUS decision will not substantially affect the operation of these now-gigantic departments. Essentially, while admissions departments will take a haircut, the ruling will not reach into the cultural heart of education’s woke monster, that being the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments themselves. As Chris Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute said in response to the ruling, ‘It’s time to go further: abolish DEI bureaucracies, prohibit race-based hiring, eliminate the “disparate impact” doctrine, and restore the principle of colorblind equality in all of our institutions.’

The final reason this week’s ruling lands dead on arrival is its timing. Not by the hour, week, month, or year, but rather, the decade, or perhaps even the century.

Most universities are already past the point of institutional failure, and reverting to a more sane admissions policy will not save them. True, University-driven gains in the hard sciences have done much to aid our material prosperity. But these gains have been more than offset by the destruction of ideologies propagated by an aloof, nihilistic class of academics and administrators. As a result, elite universities have long ago betrayed their communities. They have abjectly failed at their historic mission in producing the virtuous leaders our world desperately needs. Oxbridge graduates have destroyed Whitehall. Ivy Leaguers have done the same to the White House. Government bureaucracies across the Anglosphere are stuffed full of technocratic elites who are indeed richly clever, but alas, suffer from an abject poverty of governing virtue.

As Sohrab Ahmari, founding editor of Compact magazine this week argued, Universities’ preoccupation with perpetuating the dominance of this elite has had disastrous consequences for both higher education, and society at large. Ahmari notes that as early as 1930, Harvard President James Conant was actively promoting the mission of his once-humble seminary as being ‘to ensure the circulation of elites’. Whilst it is true that Harvard increased meritocratic admissions around the same time, the college’s practical historical effect upon society has been to increasingly stratify, not to unify.

This mode of operation observed at the top of education’s hierarchy is merely repeated (with very few exceptions) down through the tiers of all ‘lesser’ institutions. The aim of the modern university has thus been tragically reduced to its most superficial reckoning – that of knowledge as a product traded and sold, not, as Aristotle might say, as a virtue habituated into a student’s soul.

This points us to the real reform needed to save the University from itself. Not to admissions, but to its very orientation in the world, its relationship to the community, and the manner in which it nurtures the souls of its students.

The death of affirmative action is a win to celebrate long into the night. Lest it be a Pyrrhic victory, proponents of sanity in education best swiftly re-arm for the still-raging war at hand. The real work, I think, is yet to commence.

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Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC.

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