Thread by @SethAbramson

Pro tip: in any sentence you read today from a Republican that lauds the striking down of affirmative action, replace the word “merit” with “legacy admissions of White students whose parents are alumni or donors” and see how it sounds

I worked as an education activist for years; my dual focuses were the admissions process and student debt.

It’s *amazing* how little most understand the higher ed admissions process.

And honestly, the folks who understand it the least are the ones who oppose affirmative action.

The admissions process has long taken into account “academic merit” in the preposterously narrowly defined sense of GPA and standardized test scores—but everyone in education deems those measures flawed (especially the second) and academic merit has *always* been just one factor.

Colleges look at geographic diversity, legacy status, donor status, special skills (e.g., musical ability), athletic prowess, those with a unique personal history as expressed via admissions essays, strong interviewing skills, synchronicity with a college or department mission...

...and so many other considerations that those who act like academic merit is the exclusive basis for college admissions are simply proving themselves to be bullshitters who have no idea what they’re talking about. And *no one* in education has confidence in standardized testing.

Beyond this, the twin realities of grade inflation and wildly divergent practices/cultures in high schools across America make it incredibly difficult to compare the meaning of GPAs between high schools—to the point that “academic merit” is mere *theory*, not some sort of *math*.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. College admissions is very much about building a *community*—not merely ticking boxes under some benighted theory of academic merit. Why? Because colleges are communities and students are paying to be in a community—not just in a classroom.

Students expect musical performances, athletic events, social gatherings made more interesting by the diversity (in every sense) of those who attend them. They demand a community that broadens their understanding of the world in a way that benefits *all of us* once they graduate.

I’d say that those who oppose affirmative action not only have no understanding of what a college is but see the admissions process through the lens of grievance—but that’s untrue.

Because they do not feel aggrieved by the unfair admissions of rich Whites.

And that’s revealing.

But even this is just the tip of the iceberg, because college admissions have *their own culture*.

That culture is one in which applicants understand that there are thousands and thousands of schools in America and in which virtually no applicant applies to only a single school.

So many of the lawsuits involving affirmative action come from an applicant who appears to have no real understanding of how college admissions works. They have applied to a single school, only want to go to a single school, and portray college admissions as mechanical judgments.

But it’s precisely because college admissions *aren’t* mechanical judgments that applicants who understand the process apply to so many schools at once and *know* that not getting into a given school is *not* being denied an education—it just means you go to a different school.

Yet just this morning the GOP Speaker of the House said that affirmative action denies people “an education” on the basis of race. That is precisely what it does *not* do. Rather, it has only ever been an acknowledgment that colleges are communities *admitting community members*.

What *can’t* be explained in this way is the admission of rich Whites whose parents were alumni of the school in question—or rich Whites whose parents agree to be donors to the school. Those are rank *business decisions* that have nothing to do with either education or community.

All of which creates a rather odd scenario: those who are okay with legacy and donor admits are definitionally *admitting* that colleges and universities can and do and even must—to survive—make admissions decisions involving factors other than “academic merit.” The problem is...

...the moment opponents of affirmative action admit this, the question of affirmative action is permanently transformed in a way their preposterously puerile and ignorant rhetoric about college admissions and what colleges and universities actually *are* is unable to accommodate.

And it’s here that we learn the darkest truth about conservatism in modern America: the things conservatives say they feel the most deeply about are the things whose fundamentals they know the least about. And this extends all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States.

No one knows less about how our justice system works than a conservative advocate for criminal justice reform.

Period.

No one knows less about how colleges and universities work than an advocate for the abolition of affirmative action.

Period.

The GOP pandemic is *ignorance*.

At some point, the rest of us have to start asking: why are the far-right radicals of today’s America so desperately exercised about institutions and processes they not only don’t understand in the slightest but appear to have no interest at all in doing the *work* to understand?

The only answer I’ve been able to come to so far is that MAGAs are generally—not exclusively, but generally—most or all of the following:

🔻 Poorly educated
🔻 Self-righteous
🔻 Incurious
🔻 Smug
🔻 Highly emotional
🔻 Incapable of basic logic or reasoning
🔻 Indifferent readers

🔻 Media illiterate
🔻 Culturally isolated
🔻 Oversensitive
🔻 Bigoted
🔻 Overconfident
🔻 Self-deluded
🔻 Willfully ignorant (especially of history)
🔻 Spiteful
🔻 Vengeful
🔻 Bitter

Is it any wonder—given the foregoing—that Donald Trump is their patron saint and Dear Leader?

But this *also* explains why conservative positions on basic policy issues seem always to be ignorant of not just the fine points but even the broad strokes of those policy areas.

Fundamentally, what the rest of us are dealing with are ignoramuses throwing adult temper tantrums.

Amy Coney Barrett is a religious radical. Brett Kavanaugh was a political operative. Clarence Thomas admitted to his clerks that he has dedicated his life to revenge. Sam Alito is just—I don’t know how else to put this—a born asshole. He really has been a schmuck his whole life.

Neil Gorsuch is a highly intelligent *actual* libertarian, and as someone who has known and spent a lot of time around highly intelligent libertarians I can confirm that these are some of the craziest and most self-deludedly disingenuous people I have ever encountered in America.

I met John Roberts, and it took only one interaction to understand that he’s a snob—the sort of person who makes it his business to believe he understands situations, people and phenomena he’s never personally encountered in his life.

These aren’t people you put on a high court.

There are, surely, conservative attorneys who belong on a high court. But they are not religious zealots, libertarian nuts, vengeful bastards, career political operatives, born shitheels, or world-beater snobs.

They simply have—and have always had—a “conservative” jurisprudence.

Conservative jurists are obsessive researchers, aficionados of history, slavish to precedent, susceptible to American exceptionalist rhetoric, and, yes, have biases: soft spots for inhuman corporations, inhumane government force, and human greed dressed up as entrepreneurialism.

So you can read the majority decision today eviscerating affirmative action, or listen to the haughty pronouncements of GOP leaders on how the ruling is just, or watch MAGAs dancing in the digital streets on social media and they’re just different acts in the same national farce.

None of these people know anything about colleges.

They have not and will not put in the work to understand the phenomena that define colleges and universities.

Rather, they’ll consider colleges and universities exclusively through their usual lens—their Big Important Feelings.

It’s horribly demeaning and degrading to our great country that our public discourse has devolved to the point it has.

But this devolution does adequately explain Supreme Court decisions that seem wholly ignorant of the fields they operate upon and the people they are affecting.