George Clooney and Julia Roberts are the stars of Ticket to Paradise. They’re not the only boldface names of the ’90s back in a mid-budget film.
Welcome to Noticed, Vox’s cultural trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.
What it is: Charming, romantic, and frivolous mid-budget films of the kind we’re used to saying “don’t get made anymore” are back in theaters! The twist: they all feature the same people who used to be in this kind of movie back when they did make mid-budget films and put them in movie theaters on a regular basis. The stars of the ’90s and 2000s are back in a rom-com near you.
Where it is: Currently, you can see George Clooney and Julia Roberts bickering, falling in love, and drunk dancing in theaters in Ticket to Paradise. (Julia does a wasted white girl hair dance of searing authenticity.) Earlier this year, it was Sandra Bullock in The Lost City. In 2018, it was Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder in Destination Wedding. Jennifer Lopez, never one to underachieve, has two of these movies coming out within the space of 11 months: this past February’s Marry Me with Owen Wilson, and Shotgun Wedding with Josh Duhamel, slated to premiere next January.
Why you’re seeing it everywhere:
Sometime in the 2010s, the mid-budget film began to disappear from Hollywood. Movies for grownups about love, justice, and the American way used to be a central part of the movie business. Since they lacked expensive stunts and explosives, they would rely on the power of their stars for appeal. When you went to the movies in the 1990s, odds were good you were going to see a movie star’s charisma on the big screen: Julia Roberts’s brilliant smile; George Clooney’s Cary Grant cool.
As the market contracted under the twin pressures of the 2008 financial crisis and the advent of streaming, studios stopped relying on mid-budget films. They began to focus their energies on tentpole blockbuster movies filled with superheroes and CGI, with a little room in the margins for Oscar-bait prestige films and indie art movies. The easy and reliable charms of the mid-budget film were by and large shuttled over to TV, or went straight to streaming.
None of these new formats, though — the superhero movie, prestige films, or the TV series — are well suited to making movie stars in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Superhero movies are about their IP, not the actors who animate them. Television creates an easy intimacy between audience and actor that doesn’t always translate to box office appeal for the big screen. And while prestige films can still mint stars like Jennifer Lawrence or Anya Taylor-Joy, the whiff of disreputability that lingers around the romantic comedy from its death throes in the 2000s means our latest crop of leading ladies seem little inclined to pick them up again. The new generation of actors who do make romantic comedies, like Zoey Deutch, find themselves stuck in the direct-to-streaming realm.
All of which means that on the occasion a studio does consider making a mid-budget film like a rom-com again, there are very few movie stars available to carry the film.
Without a true star in the lead, a mid-budget film simply won’t be able to justify a theatrical release. People won’t go to a movie theater to watch it, not when they can stay home and watch the Hallmark Channel’s flood of Christmas rom-coms from their couches. So the solution studio execs apparently came to is: go to the previous generation of movie stars. They are, perhaps uniquely in the history of stars, well suited to going back to the trenches of cheerful middlebrow movie-making.
Today’s stars have access to what we might euphemistically call “anti-aging technologies”: the professionally optimized diet, exercise, and skin care regimens that all of them will admit to, and the use of plastic surgery and steroids, which remain shrouded in secrecy. These arcane arts allow Clooney to strip off his shirt on camera at age 61 and Roberts to wear a bikini at age 54 without shocking the prudish and age-phobic American public. After all, Clooney and Roberts don’t look the way normal middle-aged people look. They look like movie stars.
So when you watch one of the new nostalgic rom-coms, you’re generally not watching a romantic comedy where part of the hook is that the lovers are old, à la the Nancy Meyers oeuvre. Instead, you’re watching a romantic comedy just like the ones you grew up on, the ones you still watch every year at Christmas or on a fall night, or when you’re feeling particularly cozy. They even still star the same people.
The mid-budget film may never again take on the cultural supremacy it held in the ’90s. Movie theaters belong to the superheroes for now, to the comic book costumes and the massive crossover events. But for a few more years at least, we can go back to theaters and dream of getting mail again.
Researchers are using drones, AI, and digital recorders to create a “zoological version of Google Translate.”
The world around us is vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. Bats chitter and babble in ultrasound; elephants rumble infrasonic secrets to each other; coral reefs are aquatic clubs, hopping with the cracks and hisses and clicks of marine life.
For centuries, we didn’t even know those sounds existed. But as technology has advanced, so has our capacity to listen. Today, tools like drones, digital recorders, and artificial intelligence are helping us listen to the sounds of nature in unprecedented ways, transforming the world of scientific research and raising a tantalizing prospect: Someday soon, computers might allow us to talk to animals.
In some ways, that has already begun.
“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Karen Bakker in her new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.
Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and miniaturization has allowed scientists to stick microphones onto animals as small as honeybees.
“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes.
All those devices create a ton of data, which would be impossible to go through manually. So researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (which studies sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (which studies the sounds made by entire ecosystems) are turning to artificial intelligence to sift through the piles of recordings, finding patterns that might help us understand what animals are saying to each other. There are now databases of whale songs and honeybee dances, among others, that Bakker writes could one day turn into “a zoological version of Google Translate.”
But it’s important to remember that we aren’t necessarily discovering these sounds for the first time. As Bakker points out in her book, Indigenous communities around the world have long been aware that animals have their own forms of communication, while the Western scientific establishment has historically dismissed the idea of animal communication outright. Many of the researchers Bakker highlights in her book faced intense pushback from the scientific community when they suggested whales, elephants, turtles, bats, and even plants made sounds and even might have languages of their own. They spent nearly as much time pushing back against the pushback as they did conducting research.
While that seems to be changing with our increased understanding of animals, Bakker cautions that the ability to communicate with animals stands to be either a blessing or a curse, and we must think carefully about how we will use our technological advancements to interact with the natural world. We can use our understanding of our world’s sonic richness to gain a sense of kinship with nature and even potentially heal some of the damage we have wrought, but we also run the risk of using our newfound powers to assert our domination over animals and plants.
We are on the edge of a revolution in how we interact with the world around us, Bakker told Recode. Now, we must decide which path we will follow in the years ahead. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Neel Dhanesha
Let’s start with the big idea that you lay out in your introduction: We’re using technologies like AI to talk to animals. What does that look like?
Karen Bakker
We can use artificial intelligence-enabled robots to speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication. Researchers are doing this in a very rudimentary way with honeybees and dolphins and to some extent with elephants. Now, this raises a very serious ethical question, because the ability to speak to other species sounds intriguing and fascinating, but it could be used either to create a deeper sense of kinship, or a sense of dominion and manipulative ability to domesticate wild species that we’ve never as humans been able to previously control.
Neel Dhanesha
How would that work?
Karen Bakker
I’ll give you one example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. That robot is able to use the honeybees’ waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it’s able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we’ll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way we’ve never done so before. This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there’s a long history of the military use of animals, so that’s one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells.
So these are the sorts of ethical questions that researchers are now starting to engage in. But the hope is that with these ethics in place, in the future, we — you and I, ordinary people — will have a lot more ability to tune into the sounds of nature, and to understand what we’re hearing. And I think what that does is create a real sense of awe and wonder and also a feeling of profound kinship. That’s where I hoped we would take these technologies.
Neel Dhanesha
How did we first realize that animals — and even the Earth — were making all of these sounds outside of our hearing range?
Karen Bakker
It’s funny, humans as a species tend to believe that what we cannot observe does not exist. So a lot of these sounds were literally right in front of our ears. But because of a tendency, especially in Western science, to privilege sight over sound, we simply hadn’t listened for them.
The game changer, and the reason I wrote this book, is that digital technology now enables us to listen very easily and very cheaply to species all over the planet. And what we’re discovering is that a huge range of species that we never even suspected could make sound or respond to sound are indeed sort of participating in nature’s symphony. And that’s a discovery that is as significant as the microscope was a few hundred years ago: It opens up an entirely new sonic world, and is now ushering in many discoveries about complex communication in animals, language, and behavior that are really overturning many of our assumptions about animals and even plants.
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Alexis Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Neel Dhanesha
Elephants seem to be a particularly good example of that inability to listen.
Karen Bakker
One story I tell in my book is that of Katie Payne, who’s one of the heroes of 20th century bioacoustics. She was actually a classically trained musician. After doing some amazing work on whale sounds, she was the one to first discover that elephants make sounds below our human hearing range, in infrasound. And this explains some of the amazingly uncanny ability of elephants to know where other elephants are over long distances. They can coordinate their movements and almost communicate telepathically. They’re pretty amazing animals, using this infrasound that can travel long distances through soil, through stones, or even walls. But the way that was discovered was simply by sitting and attentively listening.
Katie Payne described that feeling of elephant infrasound as a strange throbbing in her chest, a strange feeling of unease. And that’s often how we can, as humans, sense infrasound. But until the advent of digital technology, the only way we could find out about these sounds was kind of haphazardly, we might go out and record something and painstakingly listen to it in the lab.
Neel Dhanesha
I’m curious about how animals experience these sounds themselves. You said we experience infrasound as a sort of throbbing in our chest — is there any way to tell how the elephants themselves are experiencing these sounds? Are they also hearing a low throbbing sound? Or are they hearing something that’s so complex that we don’t quite understand?
Karen Bakker
We are limited because these digital technologies are, at the end of the day, only a simulacra. When we want to listen to those sounds, which are often much higher or lower than the human hearing range, those sounds have to be altered. So we can’t ever really know what a bat sounds like to a bat.
The term that scientists use for this is the umwelt, the embodied experience of an animal that’s listening, that’s sensing its environment in its own skin. And we can only guess at that. But as we tried to do so I think it’s really important to put aside some of our human-centered ideas about what language is and what communication is. In the book, Mirjam Knörnschild — who’s an amazing German researcher who works on bats — makes a really great point: It’s actually not that interesting to ask what we can understand about language or how that sounds to us. What’s much more interesting is to try to understand what bats are saying to one another or to other species. So if we have a more biocentric approach to understanding animal communication, I think that’s when some of the most exciting and interesting insights arise.
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Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Neel Dhanesha
Early in the book, you mention the idea of a zoological version of Google Translate. This idea that you’re talking about points to something else, though. Translation in the past has always been about what one group can do to interact with the other, but you’re talking about an idea that involves actively choosing not to interact with a group but instead sort of just observing. That’s very different from how we usually might think of these kinds of applications.
Karen Bakker
So many of the attempts to teach primates human language or sign language in the 20th century were underpinned by an assumption that language is unique to humans, and that if we were to prove animals possess language we would have to prove that they could learn human language. And in retrospect, that’s a very human-centered view.
The research today takes a very different approach. It begins by recording the sounds that animals and even plants make. It then uses essentially machine learning to parse through mountains of data to detect patterns and associate those with behaviors to attempt to determine whether there’s complex information being conveyed by the sounds. What [these researchers] are doing is not trying to teach those species human language, but rather compiling, essentially, dictionaries of signals and then attempting to understand what those signals mean within those species.
They’re finding some amazing things. For example, elephants have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human. Moreover, they distinguish between threatening human and nonthreatening human. Honeybees themselves have hundreds of sounds. And now we know their language is vibrational and positional as well as auditory.
Neel Dhanesha
I was absolutely fascinated by your chapter on coral and the way coral reefs not only make sounds of their own but also attract baby coral, who seem able to hear them despite not having any ears. I’m curious, what does a healthy coral reef sound like?
Karen Bakker
A healthy coral reef sounds a little bit like an underwater symphony. There are cracks and burbles and hisses and clicks from the reef and its inhabitants and even whales dozens of miles away. If you could hear in the ultrasonic, you might hear the coral itself.
Even coral larvae have demonstrated the ability to hear the sounds of a healthy reef. These creatures are microscopic, they have no arms or legs or apparent means of hearing and no central nervous system. But somehow they hear the sounds of a healthy reef and can swim toward it. So that’s astounding. If even these little creatures can hear in a manner that’s much more precise and attuned than humans, who knows what else nature is listening to?
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William West/AFP via Getty Images
Neel Dhanesha
There’s a point that you bring up about how digital listening is new but deep listening is not. What do you mean by that?
Karen Bakker
The way Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear puts it is, “The human brain is like a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations … the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.”
The Indigenous writers John Borrows have Robin Wall Kimmerer described deep listening as a sort of venerable and ancient art. Before the advent of digital technologies, humans had lots of practices whereby they listened to nature. Animals’ complex communication abilities were well known to Indigenous peoples, who had various strategies and tactics for interpreting those sounds and engaging in cross-species communication. So deep listening provides us with another window into the soundscapes of the nonhuman and it does so with a sense of rootedness in place and a sort of sacred responsibility to place and a set of ethical safeguards that digital listening lacks.
Neel Dhanesha
It seems every person you write about who has studied these animal sounds received significant pushback from the scientific establishment, and they spent half their time pushing back against the pushback until finally they were proven right. I can’t help but think that acknowledging these forms of communication requires us to confront our ideas of sentience and intelligence in ways that make us uncomfortable.
Karen Bakker
Yes, the scientists whose stories are told in the book often encountered very stiff resistance. They had their funding revoked. They had their lapels shaken at conferences. They were laughed at. They were sworn at. They were dismissed frequently. And yet they persisted, because the empirical evidence was there.
We have a residual sort of human exceptionalism in science and in our public discourse, where we want to believe that humans are unique at something. We used to say humans were unique at toolmaking. Now we know that not to be the case. Wouldn’t it be nice if humans were uniquely gifted at language? Well, maybe that’s not the case, either. Maybe as we refine our understanding of nonhuman language, we’ll have a much more inclusive definition or understanding of language as a continuum across the tree of life.
This is pretty profoundly destabilizing. And it’s also destabilizing to realize that we were essentially deaf to all of these sounds going on all around us. We were the ones who were hard of hearing. And there’s a feeling of, I think, chagrin, and maybe mild embarrassment, that all of these sounds were there all the time, and we just never realized. So the feelings associated with this research are complicated. The philosophical debates are intense. And yet the sheer weight of the empirical evidence brings us to a point where we do need to start having these conversations.
Neel Dhanesha
You write that climate change is directly impacting the Earth soundscapes in sort of physical ways. How does that work?
Karen Bakker
If you think of the planet as being like a symphony or a jazz band with lots of seasonal rhythms, the noises that we’re hearing ebb and flow according to life’s rhythms. And climate change disrupts those rhythms.
In some cases, climate change could even inhibit the ability of species to communicate. So for example, the dawn and dusk chorus of birds and many other species in the African savanna happen at those times because dawn and dusk are moments when you have higher humidity in the air. So sound travels faster and farther at dawn and dusk. It’s a great moment to communicate with your far-off relatives, right?
But now, as climate change affects the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere, we are going to be affecting the dawn chorus in ways we cannot yet fully understand. We may make it harder for species to communicate in drier and hotter environments. If they can’t communicate as well, they’re less safe, they can’t warn each other of threats, it’s harder to find mates. And this will also affect their ability to survive and thrive.
Neel Dhanesha
You write that these digital technologies might help undo some of that damage too, though. Is there any project or application of these digital technologies that you’re particularly excited about?
Karen Bakker
One project that really excites me is the use of bioacoustics to create a form of music therapy for the environment. It turns out that some species, like fish and coral, will respond to sounds like the sounds of healthy reefs. And this could help us regenerate degraded ecosystems. That research is in its infancy. We don’t know how many species that could apply to, but it could be fantastic if we could actually begin using essentially bioacoustics-based music therapy as a way to help with ecosystem regeneration.
Neel Dhanesha
That’s such a fascinating idea to me, to undo our sonic damage with healthy sounds.
Karen Bakker
Yeah, or in a world with so many environmental crises, to have this be a tool in our toolkit as we try to triage saving species amidst the onslaught.
Everything you need to know about two Supreme Court cases that could have sweeping implications for race-based admissions and beyond.
This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two related cases that are likely to drastically transform how admissions officers consider race as a factor in college applications, and possibly ban its consideration altogether.
The Court has supported the use of race in admissions for nearly 50 years, but what’s different now is its new conservative supermajority. Out of nine justices, six are now conservative, and with Chief Justice John Roberts’s acknowledgment of his preference for race-neutral admissions policies, a sweeping ban on affirmative action may be on the horizon.
The immediate question in the two lawsuits now pending before the Supreme Court — Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students For Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — is whether the Supreme Court should overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case that held that race may play a limited role in college admissions. In practice, race often functions as a tiebreaker when universities are deciding among many well-qualified students.
The overarching stakes in these cases, however, are much broader. The plaintiffs advocate a “colorblind” theory of the Constitution that would prohibit the government from considering race in virtually any context, including efforts to voluntarily integrate racially segregated grade schools and other institutions. Decisions such as Grutter have given the government limited authority to foster racial diversity. Though decisions in each case most likely won’t be released until the end of the court’s term in spring 2023, the Harvard and UNC cases are likely to eliminate that authority altogether.
The case against Harvard, a private university, contends that the school’s race-conscious selection process discriminates against Asian American applicants in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that they are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified candidates who are Black, Hispanic, or white. The case against UNC, North Carolina’s top public university, claims that the unfair use of race among other admissions criteria gives excessive preference to applicants of certain underrepresented groups, discriminating against Asian and white students in the process. The plaintiff in that case is arguing that the practice violates both Title VI and the guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. Both cases argue that the schools ignore race-neutral alternatives that might help them achieve their diversity goals.
Students For Fair Admissions, spearheaded by conservative legal strategist and former stockbroker Edward Blum, filed both lawsuits in 2014. Blum isn’t actually a student: He’s aided by millions in funding from conservative donors, and he’s known for recruiting plaintiffs to challenge race-based policies he deems unfair. Since the early 1990s, Blum has filed more than two dozen lawsuits against affirmative action practices and voting rights legislation.
Affirmative action has been used for more than half a century by colleges and universities, initially to encourage the participation of historically marginalized groups and mitigate the effects of decades of segregation by university systems. Since the landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case in 1978, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that such programs can be used as a tool to foster diversity among a university’s student body and that an applicant’s race or ethnic background could be deemed a plus when deciding between applicants who are similarly qualified. The court determined that students from underrepresented racial backgrounds could “promote beneficial educational pluralism” that benefits all students — a goal compelling enough to the justices that they have continued its use. Since Bakke, the court has upheld affirmative action in admissions despite multiple challenges, including Fisher v. University of Texas, decided as recently as 2016, in which Abigail N. Fisher, a white woman, claimed that she was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin because of preferences given to applicants of color.
Although decades of research support the conclusion that more diverse campuses benefit all students, the premise of the “colorblindness” theory is that race-conscious policies are so inherently misguided that they cannot be sustained regardless of their benefits. This theory has been around for a very long time — President Andrew Johnson, the white supremacist who spent much of his time in office frustrating Reconstruction, vetoed laws seeking to lift up enslaved people who had been freed because he claimed they would “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.” More recently, conservatives including President Ronald Reagan have made similar attacks on affirmative action — often describing such programs as “reverse discrimination.”
Now, this kind of rhetoric is being echoed by Blum, the white activist behind the Harvard and UNC cases (he was, notably, also involved in the Fisher case). “In a multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation like ours, the college admissions bar cannot be raised for some races and ethnic groups but lowered for others,” Blum said in a statement in January. “Our nation cannot remedy past discrimination and racial preferences with new discrimination and different racial preferences.”
Campuses, however, continue to struggle to foster diversity, and advocates say affirmative action is still necessary even as America rapidly diversifies. For example, in 2020, 57 percent of undergraduates at UNC Chapel Hill were white, 12 percent identified as Asian, 9 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 8 percent as Black, and 4 percent were from international locations.
“Race-conscious admissions is a complicated issue because it gets deep down into who American society believes is deserving of opportunity,” said Liliana Garces, a professor of education and law at UT Austin who has co-written several amicus briefs on behalf of the University of Texas, Harvard, and UNC. “It’s about our conceptions of what we deem to be meritorious. Do we see merit as an individualized idea of working hard? Or do we believe that standardized tests themselves are biased and measure how much money someone’s family might have? [Affirmative action] touches fundamentally on issues of race and racism in our society and how we can get to the other side — to this ideal of not having race or ethnicity shape your life in a way that we think it shouldn’t.”
So how and when did race-conscious admissions become common, at least at elite universities, and how do they actually work in practice? And what could happen if the Supreme Court ends affirmative action?
Affirmative action, defined
Affirmative action refers to the programs and policies in which certain facets of identity — such as race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, even veteran status — are considered in the distribution of resources or opportunities.
They usually seek participation from historically underrepresented groups and can be found in the admissions processes of educational institutions, in hiring and promotions in the workplace, and in contracting, among other areas. Examples of affirmative action programs include the requirement that federal offices contract with racially underrepresented groups to receive federal funding, or schools that use race as a factor among many to evaluate an applicant (often called “race-conscious admissions”). When an organization sets a goal to hire or promote more women or makes an effort to recruit veterans, this is also considered affirmative action. Companies that take steps to review hiring policies to better accommodate underrepresented groups or develop training programs to support them are said to engage in affirmative action, too.
Historically proponents of affirmative action made two arguments for why it should exist. The first is simply that American society has an obligation to correct past injustices, and that means lifting up racial and other groups that have historically been marginalized or worse. But a majority of the justices rejected this argument in Bakke, with Justice Lewis Powell writing that lifting up a student from a disadvantaged racial group “does not justify a classification that imposes disadvantages upon” white applicants to a college or university.
Nevertheless, Powell did accept a different moral justification for affirmative action — the argument that diverse campuses benefit society as a whole. The “nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples,” Powell wrote in Bakke. Students who study alongside people of all races will learn from their classmates and receive a better education as a result, this thinking goes. They will also be more valuable employees when they graduate and work for companies that want to appeal to clients and customers from diverse backgrounds.
The Court’s affirmative action cases, in other words, have always centered the interests of white people. Powell’s opinion in Bakke ruled out the possibility that affirmative action may exist solely because it benefits people of color. And, while Powell concluded that some university affirmative action programs are permissible, they are permissible because they ultimately benefit white Americans and not just students of color.
If anything, the Court’s decisions in Grutter and Fisher were even more skeptical of race-conscious admissions programs than Bakke. Both decisions state that colorblindness should typically be the rule, and departures from that rule are only permitted in rare circumstances. And yet, these decisions ultimately concluded that universities may pay limited attention to race when deciding whom to admit from applicants who were all likely to thrive at the school. In so holding, the Court once again centered the interests of powerful actors rather than those of racial minorities.
“Major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Grutter.
Because the Court has historically been ambivalent about affirmative action, it has placed several significant restrictions on affirmative action programs. Some universities, for example, used to operate quota systems — setting aside a certain number of seats for students from specific groups — but this practice was deemed illegal in Bakke. Other schools used to use point systems, where applicants were awarded “points” based on factors such as grades and test scores, as well as factors such as race, ethnicity, geography, athlete status, or legacy status. In Grutter, the Court held that race could not be weighed by schools in such a mathematically precise way.
Under current law, race may be considered as part of a holistic process that, in Grutter’s words, considers “all pertinent elements of diversity,” and that will sometimes “select nonminority applicants who have greater potential to enhance student body diversity over underrepresented minority applicants.”
In practice, this means that few students will be admitted or denied admission because of their race. UNC, for example, says that it considers “more than forty criteria” when determining which students to admit, ranging from academic record to “athletic or artistic talents” to military service. A Black or Latino applicant might enjoy a slight advantage if their racial background will add diversity to the incoming class. The school also gives preference to veterans or to students from rural areas, because it also believes that these students have valuable experiences that their classmates can learn from.
In fact, a federal court found that “race plays a role in a very small percentage of decisions” at UNC — “1.2% for in-state students and 5.1% for out-of-state students.”
Affirmative action’s origins
The history of affirmative action starts not in the university system, but in labor policy. According to historian Hugh Davis Graham, the term first appeared in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a key piece of New Deal legislation that gave employees the right to form unions and required employers to bargain collectively with them. In that context, affirmative action was used as a term to compel employers who had engaged in unfair labor practices to compensate victims.
In the educational context, affirmative action began percolating among activists during the civil rights movement, and sociologists Anthony S. Chen and Lisa M. Stulberg say it became a part of higher education in two key phases. During the first phase, from 1963 to 1965, activists including Whitney Young, Kenneth B. Clark, and Martin Luther King Jr. espoused the philosophy that shaped the admissions policies. They argued that the equal treatment of Black Americans wasn’t enough to address longstanding racial inequality. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, King explains that Black people deserve “special, compensatory measures” in the workplace and in education due to the nature of American racism. In a 1965 interview, King explained that he believed it was fair to “request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group.” That same year, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University and made the case for the compensatory rationale behind affirmative action:
You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
At the same time, university leaders considered how they, too, could open up access at their institutions. “The mass mobilization of the civil rights movement led liberally minded leaders of educational institutions outside of the South to realize that their own schools were nearly as segregated as Alabama or Ole Miss, despite having had ‘open door’ policies for some time,” Chen told Vox. Racial diversity became a uniquely valued type of diversity, Chen said, and during these early years, administrators launched programs for “disadvantaged” youth, created exchange programs with Black colleges, in which Black faculty attended summer institutes at white universities and vice versa. Programs focused on recruiting more Black students from high schools that they previously overlooked and also Black faculty willing to work at all-white institutions.
Early affirmative action programs also sought to strengthen the nation’s Black colleges by pumping more resources into them and facilitating interactions between the faculty of Black institutions and white institutions, according to historian Eddie R. Cole in The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. But the motives and results of these programs were mixed, leading many to collapse after a short while. For example, white university presidents sought out publicity for admitting Black students and used the efforts to gain promotions. When it came to directing resources to Black universities, administrators ended up abandoning the cause since some of them viewed Black institutions as inferior.
The second wave of affirmative action, which began in 1965 and ended with the Bakke decision in 1978, was marked by national unrest, with college campuses at the center of agitation. Students protested discrimination, and university leaders had no choice but to act. Black students took center stage in driving the policymaking process forward, Chen said, pushing schools to develop official affirmative action programs and give race greater weight as the form of diversity being sought. Bakke marked the end of this period of experimentation with affirmative action, once the court ruled that colleges and universities could only use affirmative action to achieve the goal of diversifying their campuses.
How affirmative action actually works today
Not all schools consider race during admissions, and nine states, including California and Washington state, have outright banned the consideration of race. The institutions that do consider race typically argue that it is part of a holistic review or “whole-person” review of a candidate’s application that evaluates academic merit, leadership qualities, recommendations, achievements in athletics or the arts, community service, and other factors.
At the University of Wisconsin Madison, where the acceptance rate is about 60 percent, the admissions website states that the school’s holistic application process is designed to help identify “remarkable students” and “diversity in personal background and experience” and does not use “formulas or charts.” The University of Maryland, where the acceptance rate is 51 percent, considers more than 26 specific factors including race, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity, but doesn’t specify how these factors are weighed against everything else. “We are charged with admitting and enrolling the most talented, diverse and interesting class possible,” the school’s website states. At Ohio’s Oberlin College, where the acceptance rate is 35 percent, the school says its goal is to “assemble an incoming class that represents a variety of talents, viewpoints, and achievements,” and that its holistic review process means that “no one piece” of an applicant’s application will guarantee that they will or won’t be admitted.
Harvard, which is often credited with creating a leading model of affirmative action, uses “tips” or plus factors that might tip an applicant into Harvard’s group of admitted students. While the overwhelming majority of applicants to Harvard are rejected — the school has a 5 percent acceptance rate and receives 40,000 applications on average each year — tips such as “outstanding and unusual intellectual ability, unusually appealing personal qualities, outstanding capacity for leadership, creative ability, athletic ability, legacy status, and geographic, ethnic, or economic factors” can help an otherwise rejected student gain admission. In Harvard, however, the petitioners argue that the school penalizes Asian students when it comes to the school’s “personal rating,” which measures qualities like integrity, courage, and empathy. “Although these personalities have nothing to do with race, Asian Americans receive by far the worst scores,” the petitioners wrote.
They also argue that Harvard engages in “racial balancing,” a practice that they say occurs when a school seeks some specific percentage of a particular race. They also allege that Harvard doesn’t treat race as merely a plus and that “Harvard is obsessed with race,” since it “matters more than every other diversity factor” in an application. According to the petitioner, race is a “determinative” element for at least 45 percent of admitted Black and Hispanic students, or nearly 1,000 students during a four-year period.
Despite the historic media focus on Black Americans as the only group of people to benefit from affirmative action in admissions, the programs have supported a broad range of communities, including Native Americans, Arab Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Black Americans. Between 1976 and 2008, Black and American Indian people’s share of college enrollment increased by 39 percent and 46 percent, respectively, while Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander people’s enrollment more than doubled during that time period. Women’s college enrollment also saw increases. Between 1967 and 2009, female college enrollment more than doubled, with the percentage of white women ages 25 to 35 with a college degree growing from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent, though it is unclear how much of these gains can be attributed to affirmative action.
Critics have painted affirmative action as a Black issue because that strategy allows them to use negative racial stereotypes to argue that the programs serve an under-qualified or undeserving group of people. Media depictions — like the 2003 Newsweek cover story titled “Do We Still Need Affirmative Action? 10 Ways to Think About It Now” that featured the image of a Black male model in glasses, khaki pants, and a tie — have argued that the programs are “not about people of color and they were about extending advantages to elite Blacks, rather than impoverished African Americans,” wrote legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw at the time. “Of course nothing could be further from the truth. This is simply a gross distortion of reality, especially given that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women.” (When it came to employment, Crenshaw wasn’t wrong: Early reports found that affirmative action sometimes led to an overrepresentation of white women in managerial roles.)
Others have also noted how legacy admissions are their own form of affirmative action. A study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reviewed 30 elite universities’ admissions processes and found that a legacy connection gave an applicant a 23.3 percentage point advantage over an applicant without connections. Applicants who were the children of alumni had an average advantage of 45.5 percentage points. And since college student bodies have historically been white, white students have been more likely to benefit from legacy admissions.
The seminal book The Shape of the River by the late William G. Bowen, a former Princeton president, and former Harvard president Derek Bok examined the impact of affirmative action during its first three decades on students who probably benefited, and found that the students had better life outcomes — they were more likely to graduate from college, earn professional degrees, and have higher incomes — than peers who went to less competitive colleges and probably didn’t benefit from affirmative action. For the broader student body, particularly white students of higher socioeconomic status, affirmative action has been proven to foster positive racial attitudes toward marginalized groups, help them develop stronger leadership skills, and make them likelier to engage civically after they graduate.
Affirmative action proponents argue that the programs encourage diversity and continued integration and since certain groups are still grossly underrepresented — Black and Latino students are more underrepresented at selective universities today than 35 years ago — affirmative action is still necessary. Supporters also argue that the programs help redress past injustices such as Jim Crow and segregation.
Opponents claim that affirmative action programs undermine the Constitution’s promise of equality of opportunity. And they claim that making room for an applicant of one race necessarily requires a university to reject a different applicant. Though it’s important to note that post-Grutter affirmative action programs primarily impact who gets admitted from a pool of well-qualified applicants — they do not push unqualified applicants into the pool of admitted students.
If you group all Harvard undergraduate applicants into deciles, for example, Harvard rejects over 85 percent of applicants in the top decile. It does, however, admit over half of Black applicants in this elite cohort, and just under a third of the highest-performing Hispanic students. That does suggest that an exceptional Black or Latino applicant is more likely to be admitted to Harvard than an equally qualified white or Asian student. But it also doesn’t change the fact that anyone Harvard would even consider admitting is exceptional.
Moreover, while Blum and his legal team claim that they are acting in the interest of Asian students, polls show that the majority of Asian people support affirmative action. Higher education scholars have argued that the premise in the Harvard and UNC cases perpetuates harmful “model minority” stereotypes about Asian Americans and disregards the notable socioeconomic differences among various Asian ethnicities. Data shows that affirmative action has helped reduce severe intra-racial disparities among Asian American people.
“I don’t think it’s accidental that [Students for Fair Admissions] decided to go with Asian Americans, although I am curious why they weren’t evidently able to find an Asian American ‘Abigail Fisher’ to serve as a plaintiff,” said Chen. “Asian Americans are sometimes America’s favorite racial minority. We’re the ‘model minority.’ We are said to work hard and play by the rules, and our socioeconomic achievements are used to validate the American dream. We’re a natural fit for anyone who wants to question the legitimacy of affirmative action by arguing that it doesn’t just harm whites but also harms deserving minorities, too.”
Though both the trial court and appellate court in Harvard found no discrimination against Asian students in the school’s race-conscious admissions policy, that doesn’t mean the argument isn’t a popular one, Garces told Vox. It “capitalizes on this idea that if you score perfectly on standardized tests and get perfect grades, why shouldn’t you be admitted to this top university? This idea has taken hold in the public narrative,” she said. It is mostly up to colleges and universities, however, to determine what they believe is meritorious, as long as they don’t use race as a deciding factor.
What affirmative action has done for diversity on campuses
When schools are no longer allowed to use race-based considerations, they experience a pronounced dip in diversity. For example, California banned affirmative action in 1998, and by 2017, the percentage of Black students at the University of California Berkeley was only 3 percent, down markedly from 6 percent in 1980. Another study found that students of color experience a 23 percentage point decline in likelihood of admission to selective public colleges after an affirmative action ban takes effect.
Still, affirmative action has not produced great results for underrepresented students after more than 40 years in effect. A New York Times analysis found that even with affirmative action, Black students were just 6 percent of first-year students at selective elite schools in 2015, though they made up 15 percent of college-age Americans.
Both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill want to continue to take race into account, as one factor among many, as they sift through tens of thousands of applications each year. If the Supreme Court rules that the practice is illegal, colleges and universities would need to find new ways to produce diverse student bodies and draw from underrepresented groups.
Research has shown that the alternatives to affirmative action are limited and far less effective than race-conscious policies at fostering diversity. For example, the University of Texas’s “percent plan,” implemented in 1997, grants Texas students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class automatic admission to all state-funded universities; it was found to be unsuccessful. The growth in the share of Latinos was not a result of the plan but a result of an increase in the number of Latino high school graduates in the state. The plan has not been successful in increasing the number of Black students on campus, though the share of Black young Texans has remained constant as the number of white young Texans has drastically declined.
Researchers have also studied whether affirmative action based on socioeconomic status would be a feasible way to achieve racial diversity since Black, Latino, and American Indian families have historically earned less than white and Asian families. But complex simulations of socio-economic affirmative action have found that “at any income level, white students are twice as likely as Black students to attend a highly selective college.” Researchers ultimately included that colorblind frameworks do not seem likely to produce the kind of racial diversity achieved under race-based affirmative action policies.
Proponents ultimately fear that the removal of race from a student’s application, which Students for Fair Admissions is arguing for, would erase an important part of an applicant’s identity. But the Supreme Court is positioned to put an end to the consideration of race. Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in the court’s 2007 Parents Involved decision, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The statement has cast a shadow over the future of affirmative action.
“The point of affirmative action in higher education is not to stop discrimination on the basis of race. It’s to improve the quality of education for all students at a school, by helping to diversify the student body,” said Chen. “What might be more appropriate to say is something like this: ‘The way to compose a racially diverse class is to take race into account— until it’s no longer necessary to do so.’”