Adam Harris

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of New College of Florida earlier this year, giving the oversight panel of the public liberal-arts college in Sarasota a decidedly right-wing bent, there was no ambiguity in the message he was sending. But in case anyone had doubts, one of his appointees, Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the push to redefine critical race theory, quickly eliminated them.

The Supreme Court’s decision today that the race-conscious admissions programs as practiced at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard—the nation’s oldest public and private universities, respectively—are unconstitutional upends more than four decades of precedent on the use of race in college admissions.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.The World Cup is never short on magic, and today, South Korea needed some.After conceding an early goal to Portugal in the game’s first half, the Reds had fought back to level the match that could send them to the knockout stages of the competition. But a tie would not be good enough. They needed a goal.

Yesterday, an hour and a half into the marathon hearings about whether colleges can use race as a factor in admissions decisions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson began to rub her temples as she looked down at her notes.“We’re entertaining a rule where some people can say what they want about who they are and have that valued in a system,” she said. “And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express our identity.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases that could end America’s experiment with affirmative action in higher education.

For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

On Monday, campus life at at least seven historically Black colleges and universities was interrupted by bomb threats. School leaders alerted students, faculty, and staff. Law-enforcement officers swept the grounds. By midday, some campuses had issued an all-clear while others continued assessing the situation.

Schools may not be the ticket to victory that a lot of Republicans hope they will be, despite what the top-line results of last night’s election seem to suggest. For the past several months, Glenn Youngkin has blanketed Virginia cable networks, mailboxes, and radio airwaves with advertisements about dysfunction in the state’s public schools. His Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, did not believe parents should have any say in what their children learned, Youngkin would declare.

On August 9, faculty and administrators in the Clark County School District—which serves Las Vegas and surrounding areas—welcomed students back to classrooms for full-time in-person instruction. And, at the beginning, leaders of the nation’s fifth-largest school district were cautiously optimistic; aside from difficulty with air-conditioning in some buildings, the first day went off without issue.Eight days after classes began, though, there was already a coronavirus outbreak.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil*
This article was published online on July 26, 2021.One afternoon, during my freshman year at Alabama A&M University, my homework was piling up, and I was feeling antsy. I needed a change of scenery from Foster Hall. I’d heard that the library at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, 10 minutes away, was open three hours longer than our own.

Stephen Menendian, a researcher at UC Berkeley, has long worried that Americans don’t understand how pervasive housing segregation is. They couldn’t, he reasoned: Much of the research on it has failed to fully capture its scope. The dominant tool that scholars have used to assess the problem, known as the dissimilarity index, measures how racially mixed a given area is. According to the dissimilarity index alone, America is more integrated now than at any point in the 20th century.

The rich have grown richer and the poor poorer during the pandemic, and institutions of higher education have been no exception. Colleges that primarily serve students who are an unexpected expense away from leaving school bore the brunt of the crisis. Community-college enrollments were down 9.5 percent last fall; historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) saw a decline of 5 percent. Despite a year of record philanthropic giving, 2020 was financially devastating for many of them.

On January 12, Keith Ammon, a Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar schools as well as organizations that have entered into a contract or subcontract with the state from endorsing “divisive concepts.” Specifically, the measure would forbid “race or sex scapegoating,” questioning the value of meritocracy, and suggesting that New Hampshire—or the United States—is “fundamentally racist.

Jahana Hayes stood before her history class at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, Connecticut, trying to assuage her students’ fears. Someone had started shooting at an elementary school 18 miles away; Hayes’s students were scrolling through texts and social media, trying to understand what was going on. She tried to keep everyone calm—to put the students first—even as she was still processing what was happening.Just after 9:30 a.m.

On March 6, Levar Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia, released a 2020 budget proposal full of promises. The plan featured more money for education, funds to keep people from being evicted, millions for infrastructure, and a new fund to address racial disparities in maternal health. Twelve days later, Stoney announced Richmond’s first positive cases of COVID-19. The following weeks and months created a budget crisis.

On November 7, after four days of counting votes, Democrats celebrated the end of a “long national nightmare.” And when former Vice President Joe Biden took the stage in Wilmington, Delaware, to deliver his victory speech that Saturday night, he quickly extended a hand to President Donald Trump’s supporters, who may have felt demoralized by the loss.“I understand the disappointment tonight,” Biden said. “I’ve lost a couple of times myself.

On June 27, 2019, just under an hour into the first Democratic primary debate, Kamala Harris turned her attention to the front-runner, Joe Biden. A week earlier, during an event in New York City, the former vice president had riffed about his relationships with segregationist senators, such as James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, to illustrate a point about civility and compromise in politics. Harris, who was the only Black person onstage that night, took offense.

Updated at 5:38 p.m. ET on July 18, 2020.John Lewis believed in the American project and wanted to perfect it.On August 28, 1963, Lewis stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before hundreds of thousands of people, but his mind was on those who could not be there.

Updated at 5:38 p.m. ET on July 18, 2020.John Lewis believed in the American project and wanted to perfect it.On August 28, 1963, Lewis stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before hundreds of thousands of people, but his mind was on those who could not be there.

In the absence of clear federal guidance, the fall semester’s layout varies widely from campus to campus. Some institutions, such as the California State University system and Hampton University, have made the decision to keep students online and campuses closed. Other colleges, such as Harvard, have opted for a hybrid model—holding classes online but bringing some students back to live on campus.