I started this newsletter with sports. And while I could start off saying I know nothing about the enterprise, that wouldn’t be completely honest. I do know something about fencing. I’m certainly not a varsity épée fencer, but if there was a sport I could have invested in during high school, fencing would be it. I say that because I don’t want to totally come off as an anti-sport nut, but because there is an appreciable tension when parents commit their children to “the Hunger Games for the ruling class” when nothing about those ‘Games’ directly tie into academics. So many tied their success to what the physical Ivy League doesn’t see as important enough to risk the lives of athletes, compared to the Big 12 or the ACC. The Atlantic feature for the November 2020 Issue is a great exploration of that tension.
To be clear, the only reason I know the basics of fencing is because I went to a school that had that sport, and many of the other country-club sports that are now facing cuts across elite schools. As Ruth Barrett describes the US squash pipeline, the individual lessons necessary to be competitive are $400 for weekly 45-minute lessons that might become twice or thrice weekly lessons. It’s expensive to commit against that kind of money. That’s why sports like squash, golf, and fencing are white, suburban sports, at least for the sake of US admission. And while many would argue over athletics in general provide character-building and leadership opportunities that are important, the market that elite schools have made in this specific wealthy-sports category is terrible, emotionally, in encouraging parents to run against very fixed constraints
Fixing the Constraints
Speaking of constraints, Trump’s Department of Justice may or may not be a thing in several weeks, but that’s not stopping them from charging racial discrimination against the Ivy League in admissions and in general. Last week, this attack continued at Yale, in the form of a lawsuit.
Trump would have to be reelected for Yale to face serious consequences from this specific lawsuit, unlike the Harvard suit alleging the same case that is more likely to be noticed by the Supreme Court. (The DOJ’s is, at least, a good summary.) People against affirmative action argue that colleges and universities do not use race in narrowly-tailored criteria permitted as recently as the Fisher cases against the University of Texas. One can, and probably should, read the tealeaves and assume that the political goal of the lawsuit is aligned with Justice Thomas’ concurrence: racial sensitivity is actually racism. I can’t tell you whether the Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett on board would rediscover an ambivalence towards precedent, but the two most famous originalists on the court, Thomas and Scalia, aren’t exactly fans, and Barrett is a self-professed originalist. While the Chief Justice has, on occasion, played moderate to the consternation of conservatives, his personal and legal belief that “racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing” imposter syndrome might means he might rule against affirmative action on similar grounds. Kavanaugh worked for the Bush administration when it was prosecuting the Bollinger cases, and he discussed many of the race-neutral options originalists think universities have. And Gorsuch, strict textualist as he is, might read Title VII to explicit deny any discrimination on race.
I recognize that I’m engaging in speculation in order to get to a 5-4 ruling in — let’s just say it, get to a 5-4 ruling in either U.S. v. Yale or Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. These aren’t theocraticals right now. The DOJ takes the textualist stance in paragraph four, and something tells me if this court won’t deliver a conservative, sorry, textualist and originalist ruling on either of these cases, conservatives won’t go home saying they lost fair and square. Because everyone is competing against fixed constraints and, instead of accepting economics or requesting elite schools make education more accessible, people do this.