Actually, until very recently race-based discrimination in college admissions was required wasn’t it?

It has never been required.

It was if they had any interaction with the US Federal Government, which almost all colleges or universities do in various ways.

[https://www.oeod.uci.edu/policies/aa_history.php]

There is still an active executive order requiring all government contractors to do it too. Which includes companies like Google.

It’s been a thing since the 70’s - to various degrees of enforcement.

Can you point to the requirement? I see that it says you can’t discriminate and enforcement mechanisms to document that discrimination isn’t happening.

I’m really not sure what you’re asking. You can paste the executive order #’s into google. You can search for affirmative action lawsuits on google, they are all related.

Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].

Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.

When they can’t do that, guess what happens [https://www.npr.org/2024/08/22/nx-s1-5086410/the-diversity-w...].

The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.

Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.

But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.

So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.

This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.

But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.

Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.

Fun times.

No one has been prosecuting it, or none of the 6000 some odd universities/colleges have discriminated in the last 20 years?

I can believe the former, but not the latter. If it's the former, why do you think they would suddenly start prosecuting now for a difficult to prove criminal conspiracy to allow legacy admissions? Political reasons?