The Importance of Diversity in the US

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The strongest justification for affirmative action in the United States is specifically tied to historical injustice and some desire to rectify it. Given the reality of slavery and Jim Crow it would indeed be troubling if today Harvard and Yale and Stanford only had a tiny number of black students. So I see this sort of compelling justification for some form of rectificatory justice there. The one of the interesting things about that court case was that it clunked for the slightly different permissible grounds of diversity.

Peter Arcidiacono is an economist at Duke University and an expert on affirmative action. Arcidiacono served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) in SFFA v. Harvard.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Peter Arcidiacono discuss the role that racial preferences have played in the admissions processes of elite American universities in recent decades; the workarounds that universities are likely to use in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision; and why real progress for less privileged students will require fundamental changes that look beyond the admissions practices of a few elite universities.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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