That’s the headline of this Chronicle of Higher Education news story this afternoon, but it’s not true.
Princeton does not deny that it weighs race in admissions, and the Obama administration did not find to the contrary. It just found that the discrimination was not illegal. The administration took the university at its word that there were amorphous “educational benefits” in “diversity,” and that the use of skin color was “narrowly tailored” to achieve these benefits because, for example, the school avoided the most blatant sort of quotas.
The way that Princeton and the Obama administration have interpreted the law will not, I suspect, be the way the Supreme Court will interpret it in Fisher II. Here’s my suggested approach. So stay tuned.