Illustration by Matt Chase

This summer, the Times reported that, under President Trump, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had acquired a new focus. The division, which was founded in 1957, during the fight over school integration, would now be going after colleges for discriminating against white applicants. The article cited an internal memo soliciting staff lawyers for “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” But the memo did not explicitly mention white students, and a spokesperson for the Justice Department charged that the story was inaccurate. She said that the request for lawyers related specifically to a complaint from 2015, when a number of groups charged that Harvard was discriminating against Asian-American students.

In one sense, Asian-Americans were overrepresented at Harvard: in 2013, they made up eighteen per cent of undergraduates, despite being only about five per cent of the country’s population. But at the California Institute of Technology, which does not employ racial preferences, Asian-Americans made up forty-three per cent of undergraduates—a figure that had increased by more than half over the previous two decades, while Harvard’s percentage had remained relatively flat. The plaintiffs used SAT scores and other data to argue that administrators had made it “far more difficult for Asian-Americans than for any other racial and ethnic group of students to gain admission to Harvard.” They claimed that Harvard, in its pursuit of racial parity, was not only rewarding black and Latino students but also penalizing Asian-American students—who were, after all, minorities, too.

The complaint against Harvard is fairly recent, but the issue is not: in 1981, the Times wondered whether an influx of Asian-American students at the University of California, Berkeley, was effectively “squeezing out others.” Who, exactly, was being squeezed out? The Times mentioned “blacks and Chicanos-Latinos,” implying that Asian-Americans were jeopardizing the university’s fragile affirmative-action system. But the anxiety over high-achieving Asian-Americans also evoked an older fear that the white majority was under threat. A century ago, a number of selective colleges grew concerned about the burgeoning cohort of Jewish students; some used a de-facto quota system to limit their numbers, and to protect access for non-Jewish whites. A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, proposed capping the proportion of Jews at fifteen per cent, partly for their own good—more Jews, he argued, might further inflame “anti-Semitic feeling among the students.” Harvard’s Jewish-quota system began to fade away in the nineteen-thirties, under Lowell’s successor, and it now seems unthinkable. In 2002, Gordon Gee, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, told the Wall Street Journal that he planned to improve the school’s reputation by “targeting Jewish students” for recruitment. No doubt some enterprising chancellor, a few decades hence, will make a similar play for Asian-American students, viewing them not as a problem but as a potential solution.

The plaintiffs in the Harvard case argue that we will eventually consider the recent treatment of Asian-Americans just as shameful as we now consider the old Jewish quotas. And some of their supporters are sure that, one day, we will see the folly of all race-conscious admissions policies. (One of the legal architects of this case is Edward Blum, who has mounted a series of challenges designed to dismantle affirmative-action programs.) In this view, Asian-Americans are merely the latest victims of a college bureaucracy that victimizes everybody, by treating each applicant as a member of a racial group in need of either extra assistance or extra scrutiny. The universities’ goal, inevitably, is diversity, a quality that just about everyone can love, not least because no one can define it. Diversity is often a comparative term: a college might strive to be as diverse as its community, or as its state, or as the country as a whole; often, in debates over diversity, the unspoken expectation is that the racial makeup of an institution should reflect the racial demographics of the nation. Colleges, especially the most selective ones, have become the chief setting for the country’s ongoing argument over whether we should take account of race and, if so, how.

This makes some sense. Colleges are transparent, at least compared with private corporations, and they are highly responsive to pressure from outsiders; because their student bodies turn over every few years, changes in policy have nearly instantaneous results. Of course, selective colleges are also, by definition, unusual. So there is something odd about the way that our debates over opportunity and discrimination have been so heavily influenced by the experiences of college students, who are essentially customers, rather than workers. (At top private institutions, where the majority of revenue comes not from tuition fees but from alumni and other donors, it might be more accurate to say that the students are the product.)

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The doctrine of diversity, honed on college campuses, is today preached just as loudly in the workplace, where it tends to be practiced rather differently. Social scientists and historians have begun to investigate just how differently. In “The Enigma of Diversity,” the sociologist Ellen Berrey studies the divergent uses of “diversity,” which serves for some executives as an “aspirational ideal,” and not necessarily a transformative program. And David Goldberg, a scholar of African-American history, has written an engrossing history of an institution that has proved singularly resistant to the rhetoric (and the reality) of diversity: the Fire Department of the City of New York, which a federal judge called, in 2011, “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege.” Goldberg’s new book, “Black Firefighters and the FDNY: The Struggle for Jobs, Justice, and Equity in New York City,” traces the shifting arguments made by the workers and the politicians who sought to transform an agency that was fiercely opposed to transformation. At one point, the head of the firefighters’ union suggested that a proposed reform amounted to “lowering standards in order to address the diversity issues.” Because the Fire Department is an arm of municipal government, this question is necessarily a political one, appropriately answered not by labor leaders but by the firefighters’ ultimate employers, the taxpayers. How diverse do we want our fire departments to be? And how much should we care?

The modern history of diversity began on June 28, 1978. That was the day the Supreme Court decided a case brought by Allan Bakke, a white military veteran who had applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis. The school had a special admissions process for students who were “economically and/or educationally disadvantaged,” which helped non-white students gain admission; Bakke, a strong candidate, had applied under the general admissions program, and had been rejected. The Court’s decision was not particularly decisive—there were six separate opinions. The Justices granted Bakke admission and generally outlawed racial quotas, while nevertheless giving admissions committees the right, in certain circumstances, to consider an applicant’s race. Writing for the Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., found that “racial and ethnic distinctions of any sort” were “inherently suspect,” requiring “exacting judicial examination.” But Powell also found that the school had a legitimate interest in fostering a campus “as diverse as this Nation of many peoples,” so that students might learn from one another. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, affirmative action was presented as a form of redistribution in recompense for past discrimination: a transfer of opportunities from the dominant majority to the marginalized minority. But the ideology of diversity suggested that every group had something to learn, and something to gain; no trade-offs would be required.