Why Did a Liberal Like Richard Kahlenberg Help Strike Down Affirmative Action?

[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, one of the things that we've been digging into on this podcast is how and why blue cities have changed. Back when we were in college in the 1980s, only about a third of adults in cities like Seattle, Boston, D.C. or San Francisco had college degrees.

[00:00:37] And today they're the majority. And in fact, in Seattle and D.C., it's roughly two thirds. 70 percent in Seattle. In Seattle from like 40 to 70. So part of what that means is that what happens on campus no longer stays on campus as much as it maybe once did. So it's not just that like colleges and universities are based in blue cities. It's also that changes on campus are sort of a leading indicator of what's going to happen in blue cities.

[00:01:05] At least that's one of our theses on this podcast, right? Absolutely. I mean, I think you and I have talked about this, but the speed at which ideas that develop on elite college campuses or, you know, or the basic kind of campus culture of those institutions, the speed at which they spread into the broader kind of progressive culture over the last 10 plus years is really astonishing.

[00:01:33] And I first remember this happening, David and I, we both went to Reed College, right? A small liberal arts college in Portland. And I remember 10 years ago in the big alumni Facebook group, these enormous like real wars developing between the alumni and the students of that era because these students were espousing these ideas that I would eventually come to understand as, you know, what we call woke one now.

[00:01:59] Right. But at the time, I was like, wow, where is this coming from? And man, this is never going to go anywhere. These kids are off in cloud Google. And within two years, I saw the same stuff at the Seattle City Council. Right. You know, in municipal politics in a big blue city in a very, very direct way. Exact same ideas in ways that wouldn't have happened. And I mean, of course, there was the divestment movement. There was campus activism in the 60s.

[00:02:25] There's a lot of influence that campuses had, but not that just like immediate, like seeping into the cultures in such a direct way where suddenly you're like at your NPR station going. Well, actually, I shouldn't say that because NPR stations would have always been that way. But anyway, you don't have to be you don't have to be James Garville to like wonder about sort of like faculty lounge politics and why the Democratic Party has become so fixated on, you know, ideas that come out of American, you know, elite campuses.

[00:02:53] It's a real trend story that we don't see covered as much as we should. But anyway, today's topic is higher education. Following the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court affirmative action decision at Harvard, Asian American enrollment is now way up and enrollment for black students is down. But our guest today says that this decline was avoidable. He thinks Harvard and other colleges could achieve more racial diversity by focusing on class.

[00:03:21] Richard Kallenberg directs housing policy and the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. Before that, he was a senior fellow at the Century Foundation for more than two decades. His most recent book is called Class Matters, the fight to get beyond race preferences, reduce inequality and build real diversity at America's colleges. And Richard Kallenberg served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in both affirmative action cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. Richard Kallenberg, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:03:50] Oh, great to be with you, David. Great to be with you, Sandeep. Yeah. Thank you for coming on with us. So before we get into what's happening now and a little bit about your own background, I wonder if we could start with your understanding of the origins of the idea of affirmative action, what it was originally intended to do. And my first thought, having studied U.S. history a lot, is Reconstruction, where after the Civil War, the U.S. government basically says formerly enslaved people need more than just freedom. They need assistance.

[00:04:19] They need education. They need medical care, help getting established financially, basically, all of these kinds of things, because we need to address the disadvantages that were created due to slavery. So what I'm wondering is, to what extent is affirmative action intellectually indebted to Reconstruction? To what extent does affirmative action kind of break with those ideas?

[00:04:41] I mean, what's your understanding of the link between those two moments, the 1860s, I guess, and the 1960s? Yeah. Well, that's a great question. I mean, both were moments of where we needed repair, that there had been in the case of right after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a need to address the fact that we committed this terrible sin against enslaved black people.

[00:05:10] And then in the 1960s, there was a recognition that decades of Jim Crow following those years of enslavement required some sort of response. It was not simply enough to pass civil rights laws, to pass the Voting Rights Act, to pass the Fair Housing Act. You needed to do something proactive to address and remedy that history.

[00:05:38] And there was a split in the civil rights community in the early 1960s over this question. Many thought that we should use racial preferences to provide a remedy or an answer to discrimination, past discrimination. And so Whitney Young, who was head of the Urban League, made that argument.

[00:06:03] He said we need a decade of discrimination in favor of black people, black youth, in order to try to make amends. Dr. King had a different approach. He said, yes, we need to repair for our history. We need to do something proactive. But he called for a bill of rights for the disadvantaged, that is, economically disadvantaged people of all races.

[00:06:31] And he had a couple of insights there. One was that precisely because of discrimination, black people were disproportionately poor and working class and would disproportionately benefit from an economic affirmative action program.

[00:06:49] Secondly, he recognized as a matter of politics that it was going to be really troubling to white working class people, whose economic position was not that different from black working class people, to say, well, this affirmative action can only benefit black people. That would cause a major backlash.

[00:07:15] And his third insight was that on the merits, the history of discrimination is not the only source of unfairness in society. There's also economics. And towards the end of his life, he especially emphasized the need for economic affirmative action rather than race-based affirmative action or preferences. Yeah, I thought that was fascinating. I was reading an op-ed you wrote right after the Supreme Court decision in 2023 in The New York Times.

[00:07:45] And you point to that quote from MLK where he says, quote, it is a simple matter of justice, right, that the forgotten white poor should be included in efforts to address historical injustices and inequality.

[00:08:07] And the other thing you point out in that op-ed is here in that moment in the early 60s, whether people are advocating for race-based affirmative action or MLK talking about some more class-based approach, they saw these interventions as temporary, right? And you point to illustrate that this was a temporary corrective, not a kind of permanent structural change in how we were going to address race in the public sphere. Do I have that right, Richard?

[00:08:37] Yeah, that's right. It was always meant to be temporary. And Whitney Young's idea was one decade. And then several decades later, we still had racial preferences in place at elite universities and other institutions. And the Supreme Court finally in 2023 said, OK, enough.

[00:08:59] You know, we have had several decades of racial preferences and now it's time to transition to something different. Well, so let me come in now. So with a question about you yourself and sort of why you've got into this space and what motivated you because you're now the author of, what, 20 books?

[00:09:18] And I would argue that you're not just the nation's kind of foremost advocate for class-based affirmative action, but you're perhaps the nation's leading opponent of race-based affirmative action, right? Or at least intellectually, you were an expert witness in the Supreme Court cases. So talk about that. Why did you take up this cause and what brought you to it? Yeah.

[00:09:46] Well, just to push back slightly, I think there are lots of people who are much more opposed to racial preferences than I am. I actually thought that, you know, as a last resort, sometimes it would make sense to use it. So there are many people who are more hardline than I am in terms of opposition. But I have advocated economic affirmative action for a long time, you know, in part because, you know, I thought King was right on that question.

[00:10:14] And in part because one of my other heroes, Bobby Kennedy, a senior, you have to say these days to clarify, the sender, Bobby Kennedy, was very prescient about this issue of race and class.

[00:10:30] And when he ran for president in 1968, he brought together a wonderful coalition of working class people of all races bound together in part by this idea that race matters in American society, but class matters more. And that was less true in 1968. It's much, much more true today.

[00:10:57] It used to be that the gap in test scores between black and white students was about twice as large as the gap in test scores between rich and poor students. That's flipped in the last 50, 60 years. And now the economic gap is much bigger than the racial gap, which is why, you know, someone like Barack Obama, when he ran for president, recognized my daughters are pretty privileged.

[00:11:25] Yes, they're black, but they come from a very privileged family and don't deserve a preference in admissions. So that's I wrote my thesis in college on on Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign and have been kind of motivated by that to to want to advocate this different approach. For a while, I tried working within the Democratic Party.

[00:11:51] You know, when when Obama said his kids didn't deserve a preference and working class people of all races do, I was very excited. And I went to the transition folks in the administration. So how can I help? I've been thinking about this issue for a long time. And they said, there is no way that we can do that. The civil rights groups would go crazy.

[00:12:13] And so that's ultimately why I got involved in the litigation is that to my mind, the only way you would ever get colleges to take seriously the need for economic diversity is if you took racial preferences away. Because they had used racial preferences basically to bring together rich kids of all colors, you know, which is better than an all white, all rich class. But but that was the easy way.

[00:12:40] That was the cheap way to get, you know, it was racial justice on the cheap. And by taking away the the ability to use race, now we are seeing many more universities bring in students who are first generation college who are eligible for Pell grants, who really are deserving of an extra boost in admissions. And so I think we're having the the theory has played out in action.

[00:13:09] That is, as long as racial preferences were available, universities wouldn't touch the economic question. And now they're beginning to as an indirect way of getting racial diversity. I wonder if we could spend a little bit more time going a little bit further on that encounter with the Obama administration, because it really is this remarkable moment where I remember this.

[00:13:31] You know, he comes out and says, look, my daughters, you know, one of whom ends up going to Harvard should probably be treated the same as anybody else because they're pretty advantaged. And moreover, he said he says, I think white kids who have grown up in poverty have been disadvantaged should be given affirmative action. He's basically getting really close to calling for what Richard Kallenberg is calling for him. So then you go to the Obama administration and say, hey, let's say we run with this and they shut you down.

[00:14:00] And you say it's it's basically the groups they're worried about what we now think of as the groups are going to, you know, not that he's in principle against it, but he but he's, you know, doesn't think that they can kind of go there. So I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that, because that's such a central problem, it seems to me still in some ways, even with the Supreme Court decision that people aren't willing to be sort of open to the possibility that class actually can unlock a lot of the same remedies that folks are looking for when they turn to affirmative action.

[00:14:30] Yeah, well, we've seen a sea change in the power of constituency groups within the Democratic Party. I remember listening to David Broder, who was a Washington Post columnist for many years. And when he retired, I think it was the late 90s or early 2000s. He was asked, what's the biggest change in Washington you've seen over the last 50 years?

[00:14:53] And it was the decline of labor unions and labor unions would traditionally have been the groups that would have advocated for economic affirmative action. The last thing you want is racial preferences because that divides working class people. And that's what, you know, basically employers always did. They tried to pit black and white people against each other to stop unionizing drives. So that was the natural constituency.

[00:15:21] But labor declined in strength. And then groups representing racial and ethnic minorities became more powerful as the demographics of the country changed. And so Obama was not in a position to make that change. And the end of that story is, you know, he can't do it on his own, but the courts are going to have to make him do it. And that, I think, is what's happening now.

[00:15:49] Now we see, you know, some openness now from civil rights groups to the economic approach because that's the only game in town legally. I mean, they can try to defy the Supreme Court, but that's ultimately a fruitless effort.

[00:16:06] Maybe we should get a little bit deeper on the question of what you're talking about when it comes to class-based preferences and looking at things like economic disadvantage and how well it actually works to achieve the kinds of things that folks that are advocates for affirmative action are interested in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:56] So you want to look at things that are all correlated with academic achievement to see who's beating the odds. So that would – one thing to look at is the parental education. Did the parents go to college or did they not complete college? The second is family income, which has a lot to do with opportunity in America. A third factor is family wealth.

[00:17:19] That is their accumulated assets minus their debts because that allows you to purchase homes and neighborhoods with good schools or send your kids to private schools. There are all sorts of ways in which wealth is correlated with opportunity in America. And there, there's a big gap between black and white people, even of the same income level. So that's an important thing to look at. Another is neighborhood.

[00:17:44] There's all sorts of research from Raj Chetty and others that finds that no matter what one's income is, if one lives in a high-poverty neighborhood, the chances of success for the child are lower. And so that would be another thing to look at, whether you come from a two-parent household or a single-parent household. Those are the types of factors that universities have knowledge of.

[00:18:11] They can ask students about all this information. And because students fill out financial aid forms, they have access to a wealth of economic data. And then as to your question, well, how well does it work to produce racial diversity indirectly? We've got a lot of research on that question. That's in the Harvard and the University of North Carolina cases.

[00:18:37] I worked with an economist at Duke University, Peter R. Ziddiakono, to look at past applicants to those two institutions over a several-year period. He said, well, if you stopped giving them racial preferences and instead considered these other economic factors, what would we see resulting?

[00:19:00] And you got almost as much, not precisely as much, but almost as much racial diversity as under a racial preference policy if you provided a meaningful boost to economically disadvantaged students and got rid of some of the unfair preferences for wealthy students. So that is preferences for the children of alumni, preferences for the children of faculty, those sorts of things.

[00:19:27] Sure. I mean, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the early 90s, I was pretty shocked that I think back then something almost 40 percent of the undergraduates at Princeton were either legacies or athletes.

[00:19:43] I think it's still about a third of, you know, but obviously that creates a huge preference for the, you know, the children of alumni at these elite schools. Obviously, they're much more likely to be white because of the, you know, past historical admissions practices of these universities, probably a lot more wealthy.

[00:20:05] And you look at things like early admission, early decision, those sorts of things, too, you say, play into on the other side kind of tilting the scales against creating diversity. Yes, absolutely.

[00:20:20] And so that's, you know, the idea is you want to remove barriers, unfair barriers to poor and working class students and also provide a leg up because, again, if a student did pretty well despite going to, you know, a pretty lousy high school and in a tough neighborhood, parents who didn't have access to college education,

[00:20:49] you know, that student probably has much more potential than someone who'd been given everything in life and scored something similar on terms of grades and SATs. And, Richard, you point to or I think I believe you pointed to the University of Texas model and the way they do it, where they basically say for UT Austin, right, the most selective, you know, college in the UT public system, one of the best public colleges in the country.

[00:21:17] They basically say, I think it's the top 5% or whatever it is, but of every high school graduating class is automatically, you know, guaranteed admission to UT Austin.

[00:21:31] So even if you go to a bad high school in a poor minority community and you don't have the same kind of education or SAT scores, right, that you would if you go to an upper middle class high school in, you know, Plano, Texas or wherever, you're still, if you're excelling in your high school, you're going to get the opportunity to go to UT Austin if you want. And so explain, yeah, why you like that kind of approach.

[00:21:57] Well, it's a form of economic affirmative action in essence. That is to say, you know, if they were considering SATs, which they don't, then it would be there would be students who had had lower SATs, but but came but did extremely well in their high school. So so have, you know, are clearly hardworking and talented students who just haven't been given the same opportunity. So I like that program a lot.

[00:22:26] I'll mention a couple of other things. One is that when when researchers looked at the students who got in through the what started as the top 10% plan now is now is something like the top 5% plan. The students did well academically at the UT at UT Austin. And so it's not as if you're admitting unqualified students who will flunk out.

[00:22:54] You also saw a large increase in economic diversity. So you had students from working class high schools who may have never sent anyone to UT Austin who suddenly had access. And the third piece of it that I found really politically exciting is that you had in support of this top 10% plan, in essence, the Bobby Kennedy coalition.

[00:23:21] You had working class white communities that love this plan because now their kids had access to UT Austin. Working class black and Hispanic communities, the same thing. And when it came to a vote as to whether to really cap this program and because UT Austin wanted to they wanted to go back to the old system of, you know, just admitting mostly rich kids of all colors.

[00:23:48] It was the coalition of working people across racial lines, across political party lines, who kind of who basically stood up for the program against the wealthy white suburbs that wanted more seats for themselves.

[00:24:06] So I thought it was a it showed the potential of a kind of a kind of a multi-racial working class coalition coming into into play long after Bobby Kennedy was gone. I know Wesleyan is an example of a school that's actually moved in the direction to at least get rid of legacy. And probably some of the alums are quite upset about that. I'm not sure.

[00:24:32] But but schools like Harvard haven't done it yet, even even though Harvard is by far the wealthiest, you know, university or college in the United States. And, you know, in part, a lot of these schools are worried. I don't think Harvard's worried, but a lot of the smaller liberal arts schools are worried about admissions kind of falling off the cliff.

[00:24:50] And so the idea of creating the kinds of changes that you want to make where you get rid of something like legacy, I'm sure they're worried that that's going to hurt them financially if they make that sort of decision, because people give to these schools thinking that it's going to give their kids some sort of advantage when they end up applying. Right. I mean, that's part of it.

[00:25:08] The other piece of it, though, somebody like Musa Al-Gharbi, you know, argues that folks who are highly educated professionals will support social justice causes as long as they don't affect their own pocketbooks. And that the kind of economic arrangements that legacy and privilege and class privilege kind of confers is exactly what people want.

[00:25:31] And that's why institutions like Harvard actually exist, is to continue that legacy, you know, of wealth and privilege in the United States. So I wonder if you could reflect on those things. Like, how likely is it that these universities want to make these kinds of changes, A, given that it goes against their own self-interest as institutions to try to survive and have those giant endowments?

[00:25:52] But also, B, like, you know, how willing are they to kind of recognize what's really going on here, that Harvard may not actually be giving you the best education in the United States, but it is giving you a number of things that are incredibly important if you want to be a member of the American elite. Yeah, just sociologically, David, you're saying that they exist functionally to be gatekeepers for, you know. The ruling class. Yeah, and membership in the elite, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, I'm a big fan of Al-Gharbi's.

[00:26:22] I think he's absolutely right about this point. I tried to get civil rights groups to oppose legacy preferences while affirmative action was still in place. And there was this unholy alliance between the groups and the universities which wanted legacy preferences.

[00:26:45] And so basically, the civil rights group said, well, we're not going to go after legacy preferences because the universities are for affirmative action. And so it was working – Al-Gharbi is right that the system of race-based preferences worked for economic elites because they weren't actually being asked to give up anything. They were able to continue to get their racial – their legacy preferences.

[00:27:09] And the racial preferences kind of made the system appear on the surface, to be fair, because there was kids of all different colors on campus. And in a sense, it propped up the unfair system of legacy preferences. I think all of that is now open to question. It's not just Wesleyan that's dropped legacy preferences. There's been about a 50% decline in the number of institutions that have been employing legacy preferences.

[00:27:37] You're absolutely right, David, that Harvard – actually, I think the entire Ivy League has kept – held on to legacy preferences, which has been disappointing to me. The question is whether that is sustainable as long as racial diversity numbers decline.

[00:28:01] That is to say, you know, for decades, Harvard has claimed diversity is the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like they said, this is the most important thing to us. And they've seen roughly a 50% decline in the share of black students since the Supreme Court decision. So there are things they can do, like getting rid of legacy preferences that would improve the situation. And how long they can hang on to these anachronistic preferences is – you know, we'll just have to see.

[00:28:31] I think the pressure will continue to build from civil rights groups and others to reform those policies. In terms of the financial viability of institutions, if it were really – the evidence on that is, first of all, mixed.

[00:28:53] A lot of the legacy preference model doesn't work as well as it used to because these places have gotten just so competitive. So even a lot of legacy students are getting rejected. And there was one study that looked at the pattern of giving among alumni. And it is true that there were – there are increases in giving when the kids are in high school because you want your kid – you basically want to help purchase your way in, bribe your way in, if you will.

[00:29:23] But if the student gets rejected, then the giving falls off a cliff. People are so angry that their kid didn't get in. So it's not clear that the model will work in the long term. If an institution was really desperate financially and said, listen, there's no – we cannot survive unless we give these legacy preferences.

[00:29:44] I think there's a much more efficient way to do this, which would be to just set aside a certain number of seats in the freshman class and say we're going to – you know, so long as students reach a minimal GPA and SAT score, we'll put this open to the highest bidder. So you just were transparent about it. Why limit it to alumni?

[00:30:11] Just anyone can purchase these 10 seats. What about other kinds of preferences like sports? My own kid is a student athlete. I'm against these kinds of preferences unless it comes to my own offspring. But honestly, like – My kid's a legacy at Reed, right? Sports is hugely – sports seems like it's hugely problematic. But on the other hand, for some kids, sports might be an anti-poverty program. So I wonder what you think about sports preferences in particular.

[00:30:41] Yeah. I would distinguish between the sports that people watch and the sports that people don't. That is to say there are a number of aristocratic sports – squash, fencing, crew – that don't really get large audiences among fellow students

[00:31:07] and tend to benefit wealthy white students. Don't add to school spirit all that much because they're not attracting crowds like the football team or the basketball team.

[00:31:25] So – and if you look at the sports that people do watch, as it happens, those are the ones that are likely to increase racial and economic diversity rather than to decrease it. So I would – I wouldn't have a blanket rule about athletic preferences.

[00:31:45] But rather, to my mind, it would divide between the aristocratic sports that people don't watch and the more popular sports that can lead to more camaraderie on campus and school spirit and also tend to bring in students of all different backgrounds.

[00:32:06] I want to get more into how elite universities – not maybe how they should be responding, but how they actually have responded to the 2023 Supreme Court decision in a minute. But before then, I want to bring it back to the politics of this, right? Because none of these policy decisions about admissions that Harvard or North Carolina or Texas or the small liberal arts colleges or what have you, the selective colleges are making, is happening in a vacuum, right?

[00:32:35] It's all happening in the midst of some pretty titanic political battles that we are having nationally, right? The students for fair admissions cases, I think, first get filed in 2014, right, in the – late in the Obama years. And then when they're way up to the Supreme Court, we get a decision in 2023. A lot going on in that period. Obama, Trump, Biden, you know, we're back to Trump.

[00:33:02] And you've seen this question about diversity in America, right? How do we promote the value of diversity become incredibly contested and polarized, right? And when I look at polling, I was just looking at the Pew polling from earlier this year. Very broadly, broad majorities of Americans support the idea of diversity as a kind of central value that they think brings benefit to society.

[00:33:30] Three-quarters of U.S. adults see racial and ethnic diversity as a good thing for the country. 62% say racial and ethnic diversity has a positive impact for the country's culture. That is polarized, that question. And then 64% say it's very or somewhat important for companies and organizations to promote racial and ethnic diversity. So broadly, those are big majorities.

[00:33:50] But yet the whole debate over DEI, right, diversity, equity, and inclusion has become incredibly intense and polarized. And we've seen kind of seesawing back and forth on this. The Biden administration went all in on DEI stuff. The Trump administration is making it a central focus of what they don't like about cultural institutions in blue America.

[00:34:12] So, Richard, how do you think this political context has played into the policy conversations as you have been making arguments as an expert witness in these cases and so on? Yeah. Yeah. Well, so there's been a divide for decades, really, between those who – a divide over ends versus means.

[00:34:39] It's not so much a divide between Democrats and Republicans. It's more ends versus means. So, in terms of the ends of diversity, broad majorities support the end goal of diversity and recognize it's a strength, as I do. Broad majorities hate the idea of racial preferences. They hate the idea of skin color counting and deciding who gets ahead.

[00:35:08] And some people look at those two findings and say, oh, people are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They want the diversity, but they don't want the racial preferences. And my response is, well, that's where the Economic Affirmative Action Program comes in, because you can get high levels of racial diversity without using racial preferences.

[00:35:28] So, when Trump gets up and speaks before the House of Representatives and the senators in the State of the Union and says, we want to end racial preferences and we support merit, all the Republicans stand up. The Democrats are kind of frowning and sitting on their hands. And that's a good moment for Trump, because people do believe in merit in this country and they don't like racial preferences.

[00:35:58] But now Trump is actually going after economic affirmative action, too, which makes it look like he's not just opposed to racial preferences. He's just opposed to diversity, no matter how you achieve it. And he'll be on the losing end of political opinion if he really pushes that angle. Just a quick follow-up, just factual point. In case our audience is not aware of this, but to your point that the idea of racial preferences are unpopular.

[00:36:27] When you look at – there have been, I don't know how many ballot measures now over the years to look at affirmative action, right? Racial-based affirmative action. And in almost every single case, they have failed at the ballot. I think there was one thing in Colorado that ended up passing by a very close margin. But in recent years, both California and Washington State, two of the bluest states in the country, have had affirmative action ballot measures on the ballot.

[00:36:57] Both of them failed. Washington was close. California was a blowout. And so to your point, Richard, there really is a resistance broadly in the public to the idea that this just somehow seems fundamentally unfair. This is not equal treatment under the law, right? We are doing racial differentiation in the public sphere about what – and that seems to go against some kind of fundamental liberal value that Americans broadly share.

[00:37:27] Right. Well, I mean, in that sense, the civil rights movement won. You know, if you'd asked in the 1940s and the 1950s, is racial discrimination wrong? Well, a lot of people – a lot of white people liked racial discrimination. That was the system in place. Now you have overwhelming majorities who are opposed to racial discrimination.

[00:37:51] And most people see racial preferences as a form of racial discrimination and therefore are opposed to it. Yeah. In California, you know, when Biden and Trump were running against each other in 2020, Biden won by an enormous margin. And nevertheless, the very same set of voters opposed racial preferences by 10 points.

[00:38:15] So it's – there's bipartisan opposition to racial preferences. Amazingly, the California legislators are trying to go back a third time and put it on the ballot in 2028, which I think is a huge mistake. But some people don't give up on these issues. I mean, I guess I can hear people saying, yeah, but the goal of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was super unpopular at the time.

[00:38:41] And we were right, those of us who stood with the civil rights movement, to support that. I think the difference is you're saying, hey, look, there's another remedy that might be – well, that is even more fair. So we don't have to abandon the concept of diversity. We just need to achieve it a different way in a way that's more palatable to more people.

[00:39:01] So what I'm wondering, though, we've talked about it, but when does the case for affirmative action shift from let's – this sort of reconstruction concept of we need to remedy the past to we need to create a more racially diverse university or workplace or society, basically, one that reflects America? Because I think those are goals that – certainly I supported that in my schools or my workplace.

[00:39:29] I think it's valuable, as you said, for these institutions to look more like America. But when does that shift kind of occur? And I'm just wondering, like, how much does that make the math – just make it seem easier to just go, let's just go straight to that then and not worry about all this economic stuff you're talking about. Let's just make it more diverse and not worry about the fact that we're recruiting from the middle and upper classes and sort of not achieving that larger concept of diversity? Yeah.

[00:39:58] Well, the pivot point was 1978, which is when the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case. A white plaintiff, Alan Bakke, sued UC Davis Medical School. And there were four justices who said racial preferences are a violation of the law. The conservatives just were opposed to it.

[00:40:21] There were four justices, including Thurgood Marshall, who said we need racial preferences as a remedy for past discrimination. There was kind of a moral imperative to address our history. Then the swing vote was Justice Lewis Powell, a conservative Republican, who said really the value here is not remedying past discrimination. It's just diversity.

[00:40:47] It's having people of different backgrounds contribute to a conversation that becomes more interesting because they bring different life experiences to the table. And so that was when diversity really took off for the proponents of affirmative action. One advantage of that was that then the kind of the ticking time bomb in theory no longer applies because you're not trying to do a time-limited remedy for past discrimination.

[00:41:16] You just want diversity. But the Supreme Court in 2023 rejected that rationale. And so that's no longer enough to justify racial preferences. So let us get into then sort of Supreme Court comes down with this decision in the Harvard and North Carolina cases in 2023. Colleges and universities. Well, let's start there, though.

[00:41:41] There are I want to broaden it out, too, to kind of more broadly into kind of the workplace world. There have been repercussions from that decision, too. But just in terms of how college and universities have responded to the 2023 decision. And we've talked a bit about how they maybe should respond. Right. Maybe the right the best way for them to respond. You've kind of laid some of that out. But how they've actually responded. What's your take on that, Richard?

[00:42:06] Did they, you know, did they are they adhering to the spirit and the intent of the decision or just the letter of it? Are they doing work around? You know, some conservatives try to argue that that they're skeptical, that these colleges are really complying. What's your take overall?

[00:42:26] Well, obviously, what we have seen is this news just came out, you know, the percentage of Asians at Harvard just, you know, in the entering class is way higher than it was a previous class. And then percentage of black entrance to Harvard has dropped a bit. So there have been some demographic repercussions. But explain your take on kind of how they've actually tried to implement or tried to avoid implementing, I guess. Yes.

[00:42:56] The decision. Yes. So I'd say a couple of things. One is that the catastrophe that many universities were forecasting did not occur. So a number of liberal arts colleges said that if you can't use racial preferences, we'll see the share of black students decline to the order of like two or three percent. It would be like going back to the early 1960s. That did not happen.

[00:43:26] Many universities have been able to sustain racial diversity. It varies dramatically. MIT has seen large declines. Others, like Yale, have been able to preserve a lot of racial diversity. So so there's a print. Princeton's about the same as it was before in terms of black enrollment. Right. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So so there's there's variation.

[00:43:51] But the but it's safe to say that the disaster that universities were predicting did not occur. And I think there was some. I'll charitably call it spin. They were trying to scare the Supreme Court into not striking down racial preferences. And so they overstated the case that race with that racial diversity would would fall.

[00:44:13] We're also seeing some very promising signs of increasing economic diversity at the Progressive Policy Institute, where I work. We put out a report that looked at the percentage of Pell eligible students has increased at most selective colleges. So these are students who are eligible for federal financial aid through the Pell Grant. We've seen an increase in many cases in the share of first generation college students.

[00:44:43] So to give you one example, at Harvard, seven percent of students were first generation college in 2000, around 2014, when the when we filed the Supreme Court, the litigation. And now that's 21 percent. So they've tripled the share of first generation college students. So that's positive. Have they done enough?

[00:45:06] No, in my view, as we discussed, they still hang on to legacy preferences and preferences for elite athletes in in aristocratic sports. So more needs to be done. But I think the big picture is that we've avoided catastrophe in part because universities have began slowly to increase their economic diversity on campus.

[00:45:32] So beyond the campuses themselves, right, beyond the Harvard's and Yale's and Princeton's and of the world, there have been real repercussions for the students for fair admissions decision in 23. Right. And we've seen workplace practices and hiring practices kind of more broadly change somewhat, at least in, you know, you talk about you see law firms going to change in some of their policies about how they recruit and things like that.

[00:46:00] So, Richard, can you speak to that a little bit about what you see the kind of broader repercussions in kind of workplace settings that came out of that decision? And has it been a net positive or negative? I think the jury is still out on how the Supreme Court decision will affect workplace settings. I do think we see some some positive developments.

[00:46:23] So there have been a number of programs at law firms that were set aside explicitly for certain racial groups. And and now they're beginning to open up those policies to working class students of all races, which is what I think they should have been doing all along. So it's not that recruitment policies for underrepresented groups are wrong. It's that they they had been racially exclusive.

[00:46:50] And now they are opening to the people of all races. We've seen that in the financial aid context as well. The Gates Foundation had a scholarship that was the poor whites could not apply to. Now they've gotten rid of that racial lens and poor white students. It's based on financial need rather than than race.

[00:47:15] So I think the the the spinoff effects are going to be are going to be positive as well. There's there's also an important political dimension to this. There was a fascinating study from researchers at Yale and elsewhere who found that when you were asking people who were politically on the fence,

[00:47:40] what it would take for them to be open to a Democrat running for president? You know, what what would be a door opener? What would make you think differently about the Democrats? The number one issue they cited was not immigration or transgender youth or housing or any of the things that are talked about as as leading issues. It was racial preferences.

[00:48:07] So if a Democratic politician said, I'm open to you know, I'm I'm not in favor of racial preferences. I'm in favor of helping low income people of all races that made people say, oh, this is a different kind of Democrat. So I think beyond the workplace, there's also this important political impact that the Supreme Court could have.

[00:48:32] And there's an irony there because this is a basically a Supreme Court that ruled against affirmative action, was stacked with Republican appointed justices. But they unwittingly, I think we're we're going to help help Democrats politically, because now Democrats now someone who's like Obama, who's in Obama's position can say to the groups. Listen, I I might be for racial preferences privately, but it's not legal anymore.

[00:49:02] So we have to take the the economic approach. And I think that'll be have a very positive benefit. So let's talk again because I'm just fascinated with the politics, you know, here. I'm obviously I'm a political consultant in my day job. And so I think about these sorts of issues all the time. The students for fair emissions cases were brought by Edward Blum, activist and anti-affirmative action activist.

[00:49:30] And Edward Blum is very much a conservative, political conservative. Richard, you're the expert witness in these cases. You're a political liberal. And so what was I'm very curious, what was your relationship with Blum like? Are you all is he on board with what you're advocating as a kind of alternative pathway to do class based, you know, affirmative action approaches? And let's lean in more heavily on that. Or what was yeah. What is there attention there?

[00:50:00] What was that that kind of relationship like? Yeah, well, it was it was not easy for me to as a as a political liberal to decide to testify in these cases because it was a situation of odd bedfellows, to be sure. Edward Blum had brought litigation against the Voting Rights Act, with which I disagreed.

[00:50:24] And probably on most policy positions, we we see things differently. But we did agree on this idea that affirmative action based on economic status is better than affirmative action based on on race.

[00:50:40] Now that the Supreme Court has ruled against racial preferences, there are some conservative groups who are saying economic affirmative action is just as bad as as racial affirmative action. And the phrase they're using is this is proxy discrimination. And so the so conserve, you know, now the the issue divides against once again.

[00:51:10] And I am on the side of progressives who are suggesting that economic affirmative action is is the best path forward. So some conservatives are trying to move the goalposts. And even though for years they said they were for economic affirmative action now are are claiming it's it's proxy discrimination. So that's that's that's a new dynamic in this in this story.

[00:51:37] The educational advantage that folks get obviously starts much, much earlier than college. It's kind of the minute you're born with the silver spoon in your mouth. You know, maybe you're going to go to an elite private school and all of that is kind of reinforcing this class system. So why are we more focused on K through 12 in the first place?

[00:51:55] Because in some ways, by the time you get to college, by the time you're applying to graduate school, by the time you want to be a postdoc or you want to be a professor, you know, we kind of ideally in our society want to be looking mostly at merit. Right. Like ultimately, that's the goal. We may never really get there because we need to tinker, you know, but just what about that piece of starting sooner than than, you know, the workplace or college to try to correct some of these inequities in our society? Yeah, well, I completely agree.

[00:52:26] I've spent much of my career working on K through 12 education and have have argued that we should find ways to bring students of different economic backgrounds and different races together. That low income students who get a chance to go to middle class schools are as much as two years ahead of low income students who are stuck in high poverty schools.

[00:52:49] And so through magnet school programs and others, we can increase opportunity for students at the K through 12 level. So I agree that we should do that. I'm not holding my breath for us to get equal opportunity right. And so therefore, I think there's still a role for colleges to recognize that.

[00:53:11] And I would argue that any measure of true merit should look at academic and other qualifications in light of the hurdles that someone has overcome in life. And that and that's that that that that is it's not a deviation from merit. It's a better approximation of merit. Yeah, good point. This is something that that drives me crazy because that the whole war on the SAT. Right.

[00:53:38] That that happened over recent years where progressives attacked the SAT and the user California system right before the regions voted 23 nothing to eliminate, you know, test scores and admissions. They had commissioned a major study of the SAT.

[00:53:56] And one of the findings of the study was that it was incredibly important tool for identifying kids in minority kids, often in very poor, poorly performing high schools who otherwise had no chance to get into the more selective University of California colleges.

[00:54:15] But, you know, a kid in one of those schools who's getting twelve hundred on their SAT is probably, you know, just as capable as the kid who got fourteen fifty or fifteen hundred in a upper middle class, you know, highly rated public high school. And but there's no way to identify that kid without the that that kid in the poor community without the SAT scores. But they despite this finding of their own report, they got rid of the test requirements. Yeah.

[00:54:45] And it's and it's and it's had had really negative effects. I mean, there have been a number of articles about students failing out of courses in the UC system because they eliminated the SAT. So one thing that we we made sure to do in the litigation was to say, here's how much racial diversity you could get if you had if you used economic affirmative action. And here would be the impact on the academic preparedness of students.

[00:55:13] That was very important to make sure the students were prepared. And at Harvard, they went from the ninety ninth percentile in the SAT to the ninety eight. And even though, you know, there would be many more working class students on campus. So the argument that there were not enough working class students available who were qualified was was kind of blown out of the water with those with those data. So, Richard, we should probably close it out.

[00:55:40] But I just wanted to ask about how things have been for you kind of personally and professionally in the sense that I'm guessing I don't know this, but that a lot of college admissions counselors weren't necessarily your phone wasn't ringing off the hook with people asking you for advice 20, 30 years ago. But I wonder how much has that changed since 2023? And now it seems like you've got some answers for them. Yeah, I mean, I've had a number of productive conversations with universities that are trying to navigate.

[00:56:10] In a new system. And so it's rewarding to me that that institutions are looking for answers. I'm glad they're not just giving up on diversity. Instead, they're trying to find new and fair ways to get that economic and racial diversity on campus. And it's kind of picking up a lost thread that Dr. King left with us many decades ago.

[00:56:37] And now we're finally returning to the wisdom of his approach of a Bill of Rights for the disadvantage of all races. So I'm pleased that universities are coming around to that view. Richard Kallenberg, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and dissect these issues with us. I mean, it's a fascinating topic, as David said at the top.

[00:57:02] It's kind of central to the political and kind of policy conversations more broadly that we're having in blue America right now. And, you know, and whether I, you know, I still think progressives are very, very resistant to revisiting some of their kind of core assumptions on these questions about like race-based affirmative action and whatnot.

[00:57:27] But the conversation is being forced anyway in the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions decisions. And so it's fascinating to talk to you about how we could go forward in ways that might be productive. Thank you for coming on. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, thank you, Richard. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Thanks, everybody, so much for listening and also for donating. You can go to patreon.com slash bluecityblues.

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