The hidden figure behind the affirmative action ruling

Ron Unz

The opinion in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College has been issued and everyone says “Affirmative Action” is over. What does that mean? The dissents and much of the commentary on the left suggest that the case was about protecting white privilege at the expense of legitimate admissions policies favoring “Black” and “Hispanic” applicants.

The majority held that the two admissions policies at issue, Harvard’s and UNC’s, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Since both of those policies were constructed to comply with SCOTUS’ incoherent Grutter precedent, one would expect the SFFA opinion to also overturn Grutter, which held that strict scrutiny permitted racial discrimination to further “diversity” and deferred to educational institutions in their methods for achieving this. However, the majority doesn’t explicitly say that Grutter is overturned (Clarence Thomas and the dissenters believe it has been, but as Sonia Sotomayor points out, the majority didn’t engage with the issue of stare decisis).

Whatever the holding proves to be (trust the plan), most agree that the Court decided that the “holistic” admissions policies of Harvard and UNC, specifically their use of positive “tips” in favor of certain races, along with their Grutter-derived purpose of promoting “diversity”, violated the Equal Protection Clause. This means that you can in theory still discriminate on the basis of race, provided that you can pass muster under the Court’s strict but incoherent scrutiny standard for reviewing government actions and laws that discriminate on the basis of race.

On the right, there has been much agonizing over the fact that this decision constitutes mere window dressing that will permit ongoing informal racial discrimination using proxies for race. I celebrate the outcome for civil-religious reasons and think this criticism misses the significance of the ruling, though the criticism remains generally valid for all non-objective individual assessment criteria in the west, not the least of which are Ivy admissions criteria. If I have time (I have to finish the Durham and Group Narcissism series), I’ll make another post on this topic.

For now I want to focus upon a significant and overlooked aspect of the case: Ron Unz.

Ron Unz, Harvard, and Intellectual Achievement

The majority opinion in SFFA is interesting for many reasons but one overlooked reason is that the majority didn’t address the lower court’s trial finding that there was no discrimination against Asian applicants. This is interesting because the origin of the case can partially be attributed to a 2012 landmark article by Ron Unz in The American Conservative called “The Myth of American Meritocracy.”

Ron Unz’s 2012 article was a mainstream smash hit that was boosted in the New York Times and received praise from many esteemed public commentators from across the political spectrum. The praise it received focused upon Unz’s conclusion that Ivy admissions policies disparately impacted Asian Americans the most, resulting in their underrepresentation in the Ivies relative to objective measures of intellectual achievement, like prestigious intellectual awards and scholarships, as well as test scores.

Unz’s article and the publicity it received may have catalyzed the formation of the plaintiff in the current case, the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a nonprofit created by “Edward Blum, a white, 66-year-old legal strategist.” (Source) That the subject-matter of the case was discrimination against Asian Americans reinforces the conclusion that Unz was a significant influence.

Notably, the SFFA argued not just that the admissions policies at issue violated the Constitution, but also that they discriminated against Asian Americans, specifically because the “personal” ratings systems in the policies favored whites over Asians. (Sotomayor’s dissent, pp 198 of the pdf) (see this NYT article for a summary of SFFA’s claims)

Yes, the trial which produced the ostensibly “racist” and “pro-white” majority opinion was actually based upon the claim that the admissions policies unfairly discriminated against Asians in favor of whites. The trial court ultimately determined that this wasn’t the case and the majority declined to address the trial court’s ruling, opting instead to throw out the policies themselves as unconstitutional. (Upper-level courts are generally averse to looking at abuse of discretion by trial courts, but it’s possible there’s another reason the majority remained silent on the trial ruling.)

Now why would the SFFA allege pro-white discrimination in its case? Likely because of Unz’s article.

Buried within “The Myth of American Meritocracy” was the controversial claim that admissions bias favoring Jewish applicants discriminated against Asian and non-Jewish white applicants who were otherwise more qualified than Jewish applicants.

Unz would go on to publish variations on this article that received zero public attention, likely because of his emphasis upon this aspect of his analysis, and undoubtedly because he chose to embed random declarations of Holocaust denial in the articles. (In a later article on ethnic ordeals and dissident ideology, I might take up in more detail Unz’s reasoning for raising the Holocaust, but I’ll limit my scope here.)

The aggressively ethnic and ideological character of Unz’s analysis suggests to me that his overall analysis of admissions should be trusted (I’m not an expert, nor do I have time to go through the data myself). Unz himself is the descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, a self-made billionaire, libertarian, and firm believer in individual merit.

As Unz repeatedly observes throughout his articles on this subject (another just went up on his site as I was writing this!), beginning in 1920, Ivy WASPs eschewed objective testing-based admissions criteria in favor of more “holistic” criteria to justify a Jew quota below what pure objective merit would’ve authorized. Does this sound familiar?

Fast forward to 2012 and Unz’s surname analysis of intellectual achievement and Jewish admissions rates caused him to conclude that Jews had begun favoring ethnocentric admissions policies to the detriment of merit. Notably, Unz discovered that Jewish intellectual achievement had precipitously declined since at least the 1980s while Jewish Ivy admissions rates remained stable. As just one example, the following image from Unz’s original article illustrates the decline:

(Image source is Unz’s article, linked above. If he requests to have it deleted, just read the article.)

Notwithstanding this decline in achievement, Unz demonstrated that Jews remained overrepresented in the Ivies:

Unz spelled out the disparate impact this policy had in 2012:

These charts demonstrated the hidden reality that white Gentiles were heavily under-represented at elite colleges not merely with regard to their fraction of highest-performing students but even relative to their share of the college-age population. Academic administrators might publicly fret that blacks or Hispanics were not enrolled proportional to their national numbers, but the under-enrollment of non-Jewish whites was actually far more severe. To a considerable extent, the student bodies of our top colleges constitute the next generation of our national elites in embryonic form, and during recent decades white Gentiles had been increasingly excluded from that important pool. [source]

Unz noted that the precipitous decline in Jewish achievement mirrored in many ways the precipitous decline in WASP achievement documented by Nathaniel Weyl:

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.[63] [source]

Evidently cognitively elite ethnic groups rise and fall with rapidity (notwithstanding ethno-narcissistic claims to the contrary) and Unz was concerned that the same had occurred for Jews, who had once undoubtedly deserved overrepresentation in the Ivies but now appeared to be coasting like the WASPs of the 1920s. Further, because Unz is a firm believer in meritocracy, he would not want biased policies (and unqualified students) to tarnish the credibility and prestige of his beloved alma mater, Harvard.

Unz’s consternation seems to be caused by people not earning it at Harvard, and therefore not being intellectually productive at Harvard. He attributes the decline in Harvard’s standards partially to the same kinds of “holistic” admissions policies once used by WASPs to exclude intellectually elite Jews. For example, and possibly as a hint related to his Holocaust focus, Unz derisively remarks upon evidence that Jews had started using their “Holocaust grandma” and not their smarts to secure admission:

Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide strong evidence of hardships and victimhood. Given her extremely wealthy and privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem, explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust grandma.” [source]

What does this have to do with the SFFA claiming that holistic admissions criteria discriminated against Asians in favor of whites?

Unz notes that his explosive analysis likely caused a shift in Hillel survey data reporting, upon which the American establishment had relied for Jewish admission estimates for decades. Unz explains that Hillel began restricting its definition of “Jewish” to religious Jews (as we’ve seen here at the Touch Base, the group self-definition of the group narcissist always shifts, because the self-definition has no principled mooring beyond situational grandiosity):

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines. [source]

That this move was contrived to obscure evidence of pro-Jewish ethnic (not religious) bias in elite college admissions practices is underscored by a humorous anecdote Unz offers about Caltech

According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely [are] no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry. [ibid]

Yet this supposed complete collapse in Jewish enrollment in elite Universities did not garner the same political outcries as prior reductions in Jewish admissions rates (also based upon the old Hillel measure), further reinforcing Unz’s analysis:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system. [source]

Thus, as the result of a controversial but popular article, non-religious Jews had effectively become non-Jews for Hillel, which means most of them had likely become “white” under America’s convoluted racial classification system.

With the collapse of non-religious Jews into “whites”, SFFA could comfortably accuse the Ivies of discriminating against Asians in favor of “whites” (instead of Jews), notwithstanding the fact that non-Jewish whites were being discriminated against in admissions policies almost as much as Asians.

Returning to the case at hand, the conservative Justices repeatedly refer to the history of WASP admissions discrimination and fail to mention Unz’s analysis. Clarence Thomas, for example, goes so far as to suggest that the affirmative action policies at issue in the case discriminate against Jews:

“the current race-conscious admissions programs take no account of ancestry and, at least for Harvard, likely have the effect of discriminating against some of the very same ethnic groups against which Harvard previously discriminated (i.e., Jews and those who are not part of the white elite).” [page 79 in the PDF]

According to Unz, this is likely wrong. Based upon Unz’s analyses, Hillel’s pre-2012 measure of Jewish enrollment (based upon ethnic and not religious criteria) likely remains at around 25% even today:

The Iron Law of Arithmetic demands that percentages must sum to 100, so during this same period, Harvard’s white enrollment dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, steadily falling from 45.1% in 2012 to just 35.4% in 2021. And if, as seems likely, ethnically Jewish students are in the approximate range of 25%, the unavoidable conclusion is that although white Gentiles are nearly 60% of the American population and probably at least 60% of our highest-performing students, they are now approaching a single digit presence at our most elite college. [source]

In a case rife with discussions of “proxies” for race, it seems we are confronted with a case where “white” has become a proxy label for the real targets of Affirmative Action advocates: legacies, donors, and/or Jews. Flyover and melting pot American whites bear the brunt of this proxy war precisely because they lack group narcissistic policy representation and differentiation from these privileged groups.

And the problem here absolutely is group narcissism. As the dissenting opinions make clear, what’s important is not the coherency of the racial categories (they are completely incoherent), and not the amelioration of material inequality (they expressly denounce socioeconomic status as an acceptable race-neutral “tip” for holistic admissions), but rather the subjective perceptions of people who feel race/ethnicity is important to their identity.

If I have time, I’ll expand upon this in a subsequent article.