 Hi, my name is Deshaun Carter, a policy analyst on the higher education team here at New America. Two cases currently sit with SCOTUS student for fair missions versus Harvard College and student for fair missions versus the University of North Carolina, which could likely ban colleges and universities from considering race and their missions process. If SCOTUS decides to overturn affirmative action, we can expect to see many damaging and rippling effects throughout the higher education system and other institutions. Here in New America, we acknowledge that we are not experts on affirmative action. However, we are very dedicated to making higher education more equitable and accountable, fighting for inclusion rather than exclusion, so that everyone can obtain affordable, high quality education. Therefore, we are very committed to using our platform to uplift those with deep expertise and knowledge to raise awareness and spark cohesive dialogue on creating policies to ensure that higher education institutions are a guiding light in embracing diversity, equity and inclusion. I want to welcome Dr. Liliana Garces, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and with the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. Her work has been focused on race and equity and higher education. Don't want to say too much because I do want to give her the floor to share more about her work. So thank you so much again, Dr. Liliana Garces, for joining me on this call today. I'm very interested to learn more about your work and what brought you into this particular policy space. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to join this important conversation. So I'll just say broadly my research, my work examines how law and education systems come together to shape opportunity or exacerbate inequality for historically marginalized populations in higher education, particularly for students of color. And I came to my work as an academic and researcher after having worked in law for about five years. My partner likes to call me a recovering lawyer. And it was my personal journey that really brought me to my work in law. And in that journey itself is what motivated my interest to then work in education. I'm someone who started from very humble beginnings. I grew up in a very small farm in Columbia in South America and I immigrated with my mom to the US. She came as a single mom. I was about 11. We made the very dangerous journey, actually, without documents. And I didn't speak any English at the time. And about less than 20 years later, I was working for the American Civil Liberties Union advocating for the constitutional rights of other immigrants before the highest court in the nation, the US Supreme Court. And the journey from where I began to that moment really represents the very best of what our education system has to offer to open up opportunity and help individuals realize their highest aspirations. But we know that that's not the case for the majority of students of color in our country, where education really serves to close doors of opportunity and oftentimes entrench racial and ethnic inequities. And so after working as a lawyer and realizing my highest aspirations, I wanted to really dedicate that next stage of my career to help education really serve this role of opening opportunity rather than further entrench inequities. And all really the motivation for my work, everything that drives it is a democratic theory of education, a working assumption that our racial and ethically diverse democracy individuals with diverse set of experiences should really be helping shape laws and policies that affect us all. But we know that the majority of individuals who are in positions of power and influence are predominantly white. And as long as that remains the case, we end up with a system of racial hierarchy, where selective institutions, you know, where students of color are severely underrepresented provide pathways to positions of power and influence the United States. And so a large part of my work as an educational researcher has focused on examining policies that are intended to provide pathways of opportunity to these places, to these selective places that are providing those pathways to positions of power and influence in our society. And policies like affirmative action has been an important part that has served this goal in our society. And so it's a critical study area for studying access and equity and higher education. And not just because it's policy that has opened up access and opportunity with an original intent of helping level the playing field. But because when we talk about legal and policy debate around these this topic, it really has a much larger and lasting deep influence outside of not just admissions, but in other practices. And really just reflects debates about how we as a society address racial discrimination and a history of racial oppression. How we engage in thinking about merit, who's meritorious, how we engage with questions of race and power and identity. So that's the frame generally my work and how I came to this area of study. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. Again, yeah, I guess I thank you for sharing your journey. And you made a couple of great points about, you know, opportunity and, you know, the history of this country's. Yeah, when it comes to denying people access to just basic and vital resources and institution. So I want to get into talking a little bit more about, you know, what is the previous cases of around affirmative action. So this is not the first time a legal challenge, you know, to raise conscious emissions has come up. Do you see any differences between the Harvard and UNC cases with like Fisher versus Texas? Are there any similarities? And do you think the higher education policy arena has changed since affirmative action was last on the chopping block? Well, I would say that these are cases that have come back to the court in light of a very well coordinated effort to bring the issue back to the Supreme Court at a time when we have a changed composition and the votes to interpret the law in a way that really limits the consideration of race altogether. There's been a lot of different challenges to the policy. But all these prior challenges haven't fully been successful in limiting the consideration of race altogether. They have already shaped the practice in a way that's already limited. But we are at a time when three of the justices on the court who was recently as 2016 with the Fisher case voted to uphold the constitutionality of the practice have since each left the court and each of them has been replaced by a conservative justice appointed by former President Trump. And they're all expected to form a new majority as they join longer standing justices who in the past have criticized the practice. So that's really what's new with these new legal cases. In addition to having a strategy of with the Harvard case, having an Asian American plaintiff, which in arguments that really rely on perpetuating a lot of myths and stereotypes about Asian Americans and in divisions among communities of color. But in terms of where we are with the law, I think it's important to remember that we have we've had a series of cases already that have really limited what institutions can do with affirmative action. In fact, I don't really think that what we have in place right now, we can call affirmative action. What we have in place is a type of race consciousness that preserves the ability for students of color to present their full selves. It is far from the type of policy that affirmatively addresses any kind of past ongoing consequences of racial discrimination. In the past, when we think about the original beginnings of affirmative action, and, you know, beginning with the executive order issued by President Johnson back in 1965 that required federal contractors to including public universities to take affirmative steps to promote the full realization of equal opportunity for women and for people of color, really the intent there was to help level the playing field. But that's an approach that the court already closed off back in 1978 with Bakke, which struck down that approach as unconstitutional. And what we have in place is a diluted form of affirmative action, which I think at most we would just call race consciousness. And it really is a very common sensical approach to admissions. It's an approach that considers all aspects of an individual's identity, including race or ethnic background. These are all factors that end up shaping our experiences, especially in a society where race and ethnicity really matters for shaping educational experiences and opportunities. And so when you're not able to consider those experiences, you end up denying students, especially students of color, marginalized students, the ability to present their full selves. And you're asking them to not really identify an important dimension of their multifaceted identity that ends up then leading us in a place where we're discriminating against a particular population instead of trying to provide a very common sensical approach that allows us to consider everybody's experiences. The other thing that is, I would say, related but maybe slightly different with these cases, in addition to having a very changed composition in the Supreme Court, is that the plaintiffs are presenting arguments that rely on these racial stereotypes about Asian Americans that try to prioritize standardized test scores as the primary of not the sole measure of a student's merit of what is deserving of admission at selective institutions. But we know from a large body of research that these are measures that are far from objective measures of merit, potential or talent. They really end up being more highly correlated to family wealth and resources. And this is something that institutions of higher education have started to realize as they begin to make tests, their admissions practices become test optional or just not require them all together. So that's, yeah, that's the two I think main things that I would say about these new cases and how they fit into the development of what's already been constrained and now trying to eliminate the consideration of race altogether. Yeah, thank you for sharing because it just seems like this issue will continue to come up over the years. And it's just, yeah, it's like 25 years later, 10 years later, and we're steadily seeing the same issue come up. And yeah, thank you for sharing. Sorry, as I said too, it's connected to our struggle as a society and how we engage in these issues. And so it's not surprising that it comes back and ebbs and flows as we debate this at the highest levels of the Supreme Court. Yeah, and with also the shift in our politics too. And like you said, who's sitting on the court and the shift in certain states, which I'm about to get into next about certain states who have been affirmative action. And I'm thinking about California and Michigan, particularly, you know, both have acknowledged that they have seen a decrease in diversity on their campuses, especially at their flagship and selective universities. What can we learn from these states and what should federal policymakers know? Well, the substantial body of research shows, including some of my own work, which has looked at what has happened with enrollment of underrepresented students, minoritized students at, in graduate fields of study, for example. And we see that these bans on affirmative action in states like Michigan, California and others have led to substantial declines in the enrollment of minoritized communities across a number of educational sectors in at the elective undergraduate schools and graduate fields of study, which have been my own, my own studies and that cuts across fields like engineering, the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, also at schools of medicine who are training future doctors who are going to need to be equipped to serve a multiracial democracy in society, in law schools, at schools of medicine, I mentioned, sorry, at business schools as well. These are all studies and a substantial body of research that has been presented in arguments before the court. They came before the court in last in 2016 when the issue was last deliberated before these more recent cases. And what it would require for the court in the way that I know many expect given the ideological makeup and the change composition is that, you know, just to be clear, it would really require extraordinary steps for the court to create a shift in the very commonsensical approach and admissions. The court would need to ignore that large body of evidence. It would also need to overrule for 40 years of precedent. And we'll look all the evidence that the trial court has, the trial courts that both the trial and the court of appeals and the Harvard case, at least, carefully considered. And you look at the evidence, it's about 250 pages of meticulous legal analysis combined. And you have also the interest of the business community, the professional fields of law, medical community, the US Armed Services, all of all organizations that have continued to try to defend a very limited consideration of race in their policies because they are, they play, they have deemed race conscious policies to play a very critical role in helping serve their goals and mission. And so these are all a very large body of evidence and research that the court would need to ignore and if it were to overrule prior precedent. Yeah, that's insane. And as someone who is, you know, interested in data and policy is like the evidence is right there and for them to ignore that that would be completely insane. And still talking about I guess states, still in the same line of around states. You know, many interesting and particular things are coming out of Florida and Texas, especially around their DEI efforts. Do you see their actions as a precursor to what we might see unfold nationwide, affirmative action is overturned? And what is that stake for higher education institutions and their current DEI efforts? Yeah, so, you know, these proposed bills and legislation that has passed target that's targeting diversity, equity, inclusion efforts, they're targeting not just what happens in admissions, but what happens throughout the educational journey after students are admitted. And these are really efforts that are intended to expand the reach of the Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action beyond just admissions. The problem is that diversity is in, you know, realizing the educational benefits of diversity. It's not just about numbers of students on campus. It's really about the educational experiences that students are able to engage in. In my scholarship, I call this dynamic diversity, right? It's not just having a critical mass of students on campus who come, you know, from marginalized communities or, you know, students of color, but really about the engagement across racial difference among students. We have decades of diversity and inclusion-related research that consistently shows that programming and support to help those cross-racial interactions is essential for realizing the benefits of diverse learning environments, like helping build critical thinking skills, preparing future leaders to lead in a multiracial democracy, helping break down racial stereotypes, promoting cross-racial understanding, and just having students of color and increasing the numbers and sort of on campus on its own doesn't result in these benefits or for white students in choosing to interact with people of different racial backgrounds. Rather, what we need is the kind of interaction that is, that can provide those long-term benefits. And DEI programming helps across all those efforts. You need not just numeric representation, but a positive or a healthy campus climate. And that's what those, that programming can help facilitate, assess, support faculty to become better equipped in addressing impediments to productive interactions, like when you have small number of students of color in a classroom, for example, when we think about racial stereotypes or tokenism and becoming more aware of how to overcome some of these barriers and support the educational experiences for all students in that space to help really realize the benefits of diversity is what all those efforts are about. And so in the same way that considering race as a factor in admissions has been really central to achieving the mission of institutions of higher education, that is exactly what diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and policies do. They help realize the mission of institutions of higher education for providing a high quality education for all students, for opening doors of opportunity and supporting the educational experiences in a way that is promoting the mission of the institution. So, yeah, I think what's at stake for institutions of higher education is really their mission and their ability to help sustain and contribute to a healthy democracy. Yeah, thank you for that. I think you kind of answer my next question about, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, and also belonging is so important to have on college campuses. I mean, it's like you said, it's one thing to admit the student, but we also have to be able to provide those supports for those students to stay there and also follow through and succeed. So thank you for sharing because it seems like with what's going on and I would say most concerted leaning states is that it's like so many like laws are just coming out or bills are being, you know, pushed through or introduced day by day to like ban diversity and equity and inclusion like through the whole entire education system. So thank you for sharing. Kind of want to jump into, I guess, a little bit more about the decision overall. So what would you like the general public to take away from what is unfolding and what is one hope and also one fear you have about the upcoming decision? So in terms of what is unfolding, I would come back to understanding that this is really a very important debate that relates to how do we tackle racial inequity in our society? Do we do that by attending to the ways in which race really shapes opportunity and in educational trajectories and address that head on? Or do we do it by ignoring or thinking that we can overcome those inequities by not addressing it directly? I think these are two perspectives that are at play with the kind of fundamental arguments that these cases represent and grounded in what we know from research is that when we don't attend to the way that race shapes education opportunity, we end up exacerbating those inequities. So we don't get to a place where race no longer matters by not looking at race and the way that it actually matters so that we can tackle it head on. In terms of, I'll start with a fear. I think one of my greatest fears is, well, the larger sphere is that this is really going to undermine a healthy multiracial democracy, connecting back to the very fundamental role that institutions of higher education play in helping provide a high quality education for all students and providing pathways of opportunity for leadership and areas of influence in our society in helping reduce the racial prejudice and stereotypes that we carry in creating leaders who are more prepared to address the needs of a multiracial society. So that's one of kind of like a large fear. Another fear, which is related to lessons from my research, is that even if we have a favorable ruling, let's say, or maybe a narrow ruling, that the decision would be interpreted more broadly than it calls for. Because legal decisions don't implement themselves. All of us in various roles at institutions and administrators, faculty, give them meaning through the ways in which they come to be enacted. And that meaning is going to have very important consequences for democracy overall. And what I've learned from my research is that administrators can interpret or implement a decision more restrictively than necessary. Even when we have a policy that doesn't prevent a particular practice, it can still lead to responses that are motivated by fear and not the decision itself. I've seen that in studies that have looked at institutions that have chosen, for example, to not have race conscious admissions, even if they're in states that allow for it. And I've seen it in responses of the work of administrators, for example, who are charged with supporting an educational environment for students after they're admitted. And they're in a state, for example, where a ban on affirmative action has passed, they all of a sudden they feel like they can't talk about race or engage in those efforts, even when that work is outside the context of admissions, right? So the policy has to do with admissions, but it's taking an effect in other areas of the institution. So my concern is that a decision would lead to kind of overcorrection in the way that programming and policies happen on campus in admissions and in other areas as well. And so we really need to understand how the law can shape our actions in ways that end up having this really powerful influence on actions that undermine equity and inclusion more restrictively than necessary. I guess one hope is that we can think about what new practices we need that can come from a more expansive view than what the legal framework has already circumscribed. So I know there's a lot of concern around how might the decision further restrict our work, but we need to remember that prior decisions have already restricted the work of racial equity. And those restrictions have had to happen with this narrow opening of diversity and attending to the educational benefits of diversity, the forward-looking benefits of this, but that has come with some trade-offs. And in some ways I think it's an area that has left us less fluent in how we talk about race and racial inequities almost in a place of being too comfortable and not maybe not engaging the creativity that we need to really tackle the very fundamental problems of racial inequity in our society and in the role that institutions of higher education can play in addressing them. So my hope is that we can realize the opportunity that the challenge might present by becoming what I like to call more racially literate. And this is a term that comes from legal scholar Lonnie Guinear who is a former mentor of mine. And she talks about the importance of being racially literate, of understanding how structures in our society shape inequity, how race and class and power intersect and how all these pieces need to be attended to so that we can address these really fundamental issues in our society. And one of the really fundamental, I think, aspects that will require a reimagination from institutions of higher education is this question of merit and how we capture it in admissions. How what we attempt to in that at that stage is actually aligned with what we value in as an institution in the contribution that we want to provide. So how is the mission of and values of institution aligned with what's considered at the point of admission. So if you think of it as an incentive system that is rewarding the actions that we care about, then how are those factors aligned with values of a democracy of the we think about maybe the ability to cooperate with one another to think creatively to to face obstacles and overcome them to just to name a few of the pieces that that is society we value, then those are the factors that we should be considering in admissions and addressing other pieces that might be in place that are creating inequities that for too long affirmative action or race conscious admissions has been more of a band-aid on the system. And yeah, so my hope is that we can realize that opportunity that a potentially more restrictive decision will will help us come to. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing all those great, they're all great nuggets. I was like, oh, wow, I was like, I always had like a fault to each one, but you you you made a lot of great interesting points about, especially the point that that I resonate with so much is with reimagining institutions. And like you said, taking the band-aid off and like the band-aid is just affirmative action is like a band-aid to like, okay, let's patch things up, let's patch up our systems to try to make this sound cute and that we're trying to support communities of color. But we're really not, but it needs to go like the action has to go further than just affirmative action. So thank you for sharing all those great nuggets. My next question, I think you may be already touched on a lot of a lot of things, but I want to think more towards what federal policy to look like. You know, in New America, we are focused on federal policy, just given our location being in Washington, D.C. What would you like Congress and the White House to know about the fallout in front of actions of return? And how could the decision affect federal policy? And what can Congress do to maintain and improve access for students of color? Oh, this is a this is a large question, this is not one that I'm fully prepared. No, it's take your time. This is like, like I said, it's I know it's a lot to take in. But yeah, we will be interested in I mean, I'm interested, but also I think the general public is interested in what, you know, what can Congress and the White House do like, to just make sure that we're ensuring that students of color from all walks of life, have their opportunity, you know, it's secured for them. Yeah. Yeah, I know so much, I think, begins at the K-12 level, and making sure that we're funding schools in a way that is providing the rigorous academic training where students are prepared to engage in the types of yeah, sorry, this is too large of a question for me. No, no, go ahead. No, take your time. Yeah, I think I think one of the important parts that I don't know how you get at this through federal policy, but we do need to incentivize I think public institutions in a way that can help align with what needs to happen in what is valued at the point of admissions and things like the rankings, right? Here's where I'm not sure how policy connects to what the current rankings are, but we should be ranking institutions on how racially diverse are their student bodies? What is the educational experiences that they're providing? What are the employment opportunities that they're providing across race and promoting these goals of what institutions of higher education should be doing and contributing to a multi-racial democracy? So whatever those policies are, I think they need to incentivize a different approach and admissions that really attends to what that alignment needs to be. Yeah, and I think you answered it perfectly. Transparency, I think that's one thing about universities and institutions of higher education is that we need more transparent and vocal about what is going on on the actual campuses because as a student of color, as someone who identifies as a student of color once myself, you know, thinking about if you're going to be able to see students that look like you and you see someone or faculty that look like you. I think that's so important to have on campus and also be very transparent about at these universities because a lot of these students who are going to these college campuses, they're going for the first time. They're first generation students and they have no idea of what's yet to come when they step foot onto that campus and I think just having some type of sense of belonging on the campus is a start to just making sure that they're on the right path for post-secondary success. I would add that it'll be really important too to make sure, you know, there's the kind of usual areas of financial aid, making sure that we're doing that equitably given the different contexts for different populations. But when we think about other sectors in higher education like historically black colleges and universities, minority serving institutions who are also training and providing those pathways for in our society for future leaders and future doctors or future lawyers, they need much better funding to be able to because, you know, from I'm not an expert in that area, but these are spaces where students feel a sense of belonging and are empowered and are learning great things but institutions are doing that with a lot less resources than selective institutions. So I think targeting efforts toward these really important places is also should be a priority. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Yeah, like I said, myself in America, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and talk about what what the future of higher education is going to be when come June 30th is when we'll find the decision. So thank you so much again. And yeah, I really appreciate this. Thank you so much to Sean for the invitation. I really appreciated it too.