Name: WSJ Opinion: Duke Law Admissions, Haverford's Legal Settlement, and Michigan's Grading Policy
Uploaded: 2026-08-13T19:25:00Z
Duration: 22 min 9 s
Description: The Justice Department accuses Duke Law of illegal race preferences and flouting the Supreme Court. Haverford College settles claims of a hostile environment for Jewish students. And the University of Michigan ends grades for first-semester freshmen.

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The Justice Department accuses Duke Law of illegal race preferences and flouting the Supreme Court. Haverford College settles claims of a hostile environment for Jewish students. And the University of Michigan ends grades for first-semester freshmen. Photo: Christopher Arbisi

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The Justice Department accuses Duke Law of illegal race preferences and flouting the Supreme Court. Haverford College settles claims of a hostile environment for Jewish students. And the University of Michigan ends grades for first-semester freshmen.

WSJ Opinion: Duke Law Admissions, Haverford's Legal Settlement, and Michigan's Grading Policy

Duke Law School is accused by the Justice Department of using illegal racial preferences. Haverford College settles a lawsuit accusing it of a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus, and the University of Michigan drops first semester grades for about half of its freshman class.

From the opinion pages of the "Wall Street Journal," this is "Potomac Watch."

Welcome. I'm Kyle Peterson with the "Wall Street Journal." We're joined today by my colleagues on the WSJ's opinion pages, columnist Bill McGurn, and editorial board member Elliot Kaufman for a tour of the latest at some of America's top institutions of higher learning. Let's start, Bill, at Duke. Three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down college racial preferences in admissions. That case was called Students for Fair Admissions. The question since then has been how much admissions offices are complying with the ruling versus trying to circumvent it. Last week, the Justice Department in a letter from the Civil Rights Division said that Duke, in its view, continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race after the Supreme Court's decision in SFFA. Bill, what do you make of this and the case that the Justice Department is laying out against Duke?

Well, for one thing, we knew in general this is coming. Because ever since the Supreme Court ruled, the effort has been to find ways to go around it, to sneak racial preferences back in. The universities and colleges are very committed to this. So they're outraged by the Supreme Court decision and they're trying to find other proxies. So this month, the Justice Department, specifically Harmeet Dhillon, singled out Duke Law School. Here's what she said. "Duke Law School doesn't get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions," by which it means racial equity in the school. "Using diversity essay questions to identify preferred races for admissions is still illegal discrimination based on race." I don't see insofar as the Justice can prove any of this, I don't see how Duke gets out of it. I think they're clearly trying to go around it. And it's led to all sorts of disparities. Ms. Dhillon also pointed out in 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected, rejected, white and Asian applicants exceeded the median LSAT scores of Black students who were admitted. So they have a tough one on their hands because they're trying to get it in, but they have to sneak it in because of the Supreme Court decision.

The Justice Department's saying that it wants a voluntary resolution of that. Duke's initial response was that it complies with the law and it intends to keep complying with the law, but that statistical evidence, pretty compelling if Asian and white students who are not getting into Duke Law have higher LSAT test scores than Black applicants who are getting into Duke Law. A couple other things that really stuck out at me from the Justice Department's letter. One is it cites some internal communications where Duke Law deans and so forth are quite closely tracking the race of incoming students. One piece of internal traffic noting broad diversity in an incoming class, 27 Latino students, 23 Black students, 67 Asian, Asian American students. And then the other is the description of how the Justice Department alleges that Duke is using proxies for race. So here's a piece of the letter that says, "Duke Law states that it values students with a wide range of experiences, backgrounds, and interests that may not be directly related to their legal ambitions. It encourages applicants to highlight different elements of themselves so that we get a full picture of who you are. The record shows those variables were used to advance racial diversity goals and thereby operated as material race-related proxies in admissions outcomes." Bill, we will have to see what Duke does here, whether Duke Law gives a formal rebuttal to this letter by the Justice Department, whether it has any interest in entering some kind of voluntary deal to come into compliance with what the Justice Department says is the correct reading of the Civil Rights Act and the law. But Bill, part of what has been difficult to figure out in the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions process is how widespread these kinds of tactics are in admissions offices around the country because, you know, it is not often easy to get access to the kind of data on Duke Law that is being cited in the letter. The Trump administration has been trying to increase the mandatory reporting on test scores, for example, in college admissions that has been blocked in court by a group of states led by Massachusetts that have sued. But it would make for some pretty fascinating reading, I think, because my suspicion, I think the suspicion of a lot of people is that these kinds of things are quite endemic in admissions even three years after the Supreme Court said pretty clearly in my view that racial preferences are unconstitutional and individual students, individual applicants are supposed to be taken and evaluated by admissions offices on their own terms.

You're exactly right. And everyone knows that. So the key for them is to try to make race a factor without ever spelling it out. And they're looking for proxies. Like if someone writes an essay, you know, where it talks about his experience as a minority in some majority white environment, anything like that where they write about, they can kind of guess. And the key is to find these things that you can sneak racial preferences in. And when you couple that with looking at, as Harmeet did, the comparison of those who were rejected, their scores against those who were admitted, it really stands out, but it takes a lot of work. And what you basically describe is what we have today, a bad-faith effort not to abide by the Supreme Court's decision, which was pretty clear about what it thought about racial diversity.

Let's turn to Haverford College near Philadelphia. On Friday, Haverford announced that it was settling a lawsuit against it, accusing the college of a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus. Here's a piece of what Haverford said. It wanted to underline in a statement following the settlement, quote, "Harassing, excluding, or seeking to silence Jewish community members on the basis of their beliefs, their commitment to Jewish observance, or any other element of their Jewish identity, including Zionism, is anathema to the college's core principles of trust, concern, and respect," unquote. And Elliot, that is obviously good to hear. What was happening on Haverford's college that it required a legal settlement to get to a point where the college is trying to emphasize that?

Well, Haverford fought off this settlement, tried to avoid this happening for more than two years, actually. So many of the facts are in dispute. But I think what really happened at Haverford isn't that different from what happened at all kinds of campuses around the country following Hamas's attack and massacre on October 7th, 2023. And that is, Jewish students were harassed, excluded, and bullied by other students, and sometimes other professors who were permitted to break all the rules on campus and have university administrators appease them precisely because they were willing to break the rules. What do I mean by that? Occupying parts of campus, harassing identifiable Jewish students who walked by, which they had to on the way to, say, the library or the dining hall. Aggressively disrupting events on antisemitism even. Jewish students pressured by administrators to cancel an event on antisemitism because they knew it would provoke other students into taking aggressive, disruptive action. And then when students or parents complained about these sorts of things, what happened? The university sent them to the Honor Council, complained to the Honor Council, which was staffed by left-wing anti-Israel activists who wrote the Campus Honor Code explicitly distinguishing between the speech rights of the so-called privileged versus the feelings of the marginalized. And when those two were in conflict, the privileged, under this Honor Code, had to change. We're not even entitled to basic respect, the Honor Code said. And of course, Jews by these activists were slotted into the privileged camp consistently, stymieing inability to get really any results on campus. Administrators were not sympathetic, and they ended up being embarrassed by it before Congress at a hearing. And I think that is a crucial factor in what actually drove change here, drove this settlement.

And Haverford, not the only institution of higher learning that has been embarrassed by what happened. I'll ask you a similar question to the one I asked Bill, three years now from the Students for Fair Admissions decision, also almost three years from the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel that prompted a lot of this outpouring on these college campuses, the subsequent encampments, the seizing of that university building at Columbia University. And it's been interesting to watch these claims percolate now through the courts in response to what happened. There's a suit that was filed against UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. How much of this still remains to be decided by the courts or through negotiation settlements with parties? Is there more of what's happening to Haverford that the admin buildings that university campuses are in for still, even as we get distant from that craziness on college campuses after October 7th?

It remains a tricky matter in the courts. I think politically, at least while the Trump administration is in office things have been clarified on that front. So right after October 7th, you had the largest pro-Palestinian anti-Israel student activist group in the country called Students for Justice in Palestine on October 8th sent out to all of its chapters nationwide celebrating the attack and the massacre and calling on its students to normalize the resistance and organize in support of that sort of resistance activity, as they call it on October 7th. At Haverford, that happened. Students shared proudly images of paragliders, Hamas, paragliders who infiltrated Israel in order to massacre Jews. A few professors defended the attack by Hamas. Schools now know that is not a good look for them before Congress. And if they're going to sit up there, university presidents, and say they see nothing wrong with that and calls for this sort of mass slaughter doesn't bother them it's not going to end well for them in their own jobs. Legally, however proving this under Title VI, as it's called, discrimination is more challenging. Why? The students always say, "We have nothing against Jews, only Zionists." When it's then said that all the major Jewish denominations represented on campus certainly, you know, Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Reconstructionist, include Zionism as a sort of basic support for the right of a Jewish state to exist. Where does that play in the courts? If you want to look at national origin, Israelis, discrimination against them would be clearly illegal under the law. But looking at it as Jews, it is actually still a contested legal question. Ethnicity does it fall under? Religion does it fall under? It's sort of in between categories. And we actually just saw a US district court throw out a lawsuit against Harvard on grounds that, well, this happened between 2023 and 2024. It was sort of a, you know, episodic incident. You can't use that now to prove a discriminatory culture. But if in September this continues, I don't think that argument will hold up.

Let's turn now to some breaking news this week. This is at the University of Michigan on Tuesday. I will read part of the "Wall Street Journal" news story. University of Michigan will drop grades for first semester freshmen next year in an effort to quote, "Curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-age individuals," unquote. Bill, what do you make of this? It apparently applies to freshmen that are incoming in the fall of 2027 in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, about half of Michigan's first-year students.

Well, I think that the mental health crisis in colleges is primarily that their brains aren't learning anything. And that's because of the faculty and the administrators not demanding anything. Look, mental illness is real, but that's a separate subject. What these administrators don't want is to challenge students. The best professors I had were those who challenged me and made me work hard. Actually, some who didn't, they were fun to have, but they didn't really help me in my goals. The ones who were demanding did. That's why we talk about a school being demanding. This is a joke. Everyone knows it's a joke. And it ill serves the population that they claim to be helping to spare these... Part of growing into an adult and maturing, it's learning how to deal with your feelings and learning how to deal with bad news, disappointments and stuff, and treating them like a three-year-old or a four-year-old is not the way to do it. I'm surprised what's next even, do away with pass-fail? I don't know. I certainly, as a parent, wouldn't want to be paying for that.

Elliot, a line from the "Journal" story that made me laugh is this: Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates. They were either happy or jealous the policy didn't exist when they were freshmen. A couple of thoughts here. One that that gets to is the idea more and more, it seems to me, that colleges, administrators see the student population and the applicant population as their customers. And that has been, I think, underlying a lot of the dysfunction on college campuses. The inability, the refusal of many of these administrations to discipline or suspend or expel students that are engaging in pretty awful behavior of the kind that we were just discussing at Haverford on these campuses. And then two, I think there's also a problem of lack of preparation in many high schools. And then colleges closing their eyes to that, the movement of colleges to go test-optional. So they're letting in freshman classes without ever demanding to see ACT or SAT scores that have proven to be pretty good predictors of academic performance and college success. You've seen an epidemic complaints, for example, at the University of California system that students are now showing up and they're having to go straight into remedial math because they are not prepared, not ready to take the math classes that freshmen used to take. And it all is a stew of problems. To my mind, this policy of just not grading the freshmen is a way to quit looking at the problem rather than to make the problem go away or to really address what is driving it.

You are absolutely right. This is pandering. Just as colleges all across the country pandered to loud groups of protestors, this is pandering to an even larger group that would rather not be graded hardly. Very few people would. And professors at so many schools are complaining their students can't write. They can't read in the same way they used to. Many people blame AI. There are all sorts of causes. But there is a real problem here that won't be solved by lowering standards, that won't be solved by getting rid of grades and pretending the problem doesn't actually exist. And that's how I see this. Rather than teaching the students and insisting that they meet an established standard here, colleges, universities are covering up the evidence that their students can't meet those standards no matter how many tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands they're paying for a four-year college education.

And what a life lesson, Bill, to teach, we'll give you the last word, but many, most, I think, young people do not go to a four-year college, much less a pretty well-regarded institution like the University of Michigan. And when they graduate high school and go get a job as a electrician or an apprentice or a plumber, it's not pass-fail for the first five months of their tenure. And the idea that we are teaching the next generation of state elites at the University of Michigan, certainly that is how society is supposed to function. That is how society is supposed to treat them. Suggests to me, again, that the mentality is to coddle the incoming freshmen rather than to give them a real lesson in the realities of life.

Yeah. And it's bad for society. Look, my daughter just graduated from med school. Would you want her to examine you if she had all pass-fail courses and she was applauded for a mediocre effort? No, you want the best that's there. And actually, the kids don't appreciate it at the time. Look, when I was in school, if I was given an easier option, I'd probably take it, right? But that doesn't mean I would value it. When you're older, you realize that the best lessons you've learned have been the hardest ones. And universities used to understand it. What does this say about society today that lax standards are being embraced not only by the students who have a vested interest in having low standards, but the professors and the universities themselves? This is a disgrace, really is disgraceful. And it's a fraud committed on them.

Thank you, Bill and Elliot. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast@wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that Subscribe button and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of "Potomac Watch."

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