The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian American plaintiffs, a historically underprivileged minority group and not the usual aggrieved white applicant. This is a detail that has also complicated, and maybe even confused, the picture.

If this conservative Court strikes down affirmative action, which many legal experts expect, the decisions will likely have profound and immediate consequences for many institutions. When Michigan voters banned affirmative action by ballot measure in 2006, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan dropped to 4 percent, in a state that is 13 percent Black. The effects ripple out. Elite institutions produce politicians and doctors and future leaders of all kinds. But as Adam Harris, a longtime education writer for the Atlantic and this week’s Radio Atlantic guest, points out, we’ve lost sight of universities as serving this broader good. Instead, we tend to see them narrowly, as vehicles for individual advancement.

These cases have been kicking around for nearly a decade, and I have followed them loosely. But until this conversation with Harris, I did not realize how hazy I was on some very important questions: how universities have been using affirmative action all these years, and how much groups such as SFFA had co-opted the conversation.

Harris is bracing for next week’s decisions but would not be surprised if the Court eliminates affirmative action. What he clarifies for me in this episode is that affirmative action has been heading in this direction for many decades. Almost as soon as affirmative action became an important tool in the 1960s to redress past racial injustice, it was met with a backlash. The backlash chipped away at the tool until it was just a tiny scalpel. And these latest decisions are potentially the backlash’s final triumph.

“When I think of higher education, it’s a great democratizing way to expand civic good. But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: A lot of attacks on higher-education admissions, particularly at these highly selective institutions, gain traction. And that’s because they’re such black boxes. You think about what these institutions sort of bestowed on students in terms of the prestige that they have on the back end, and the fact that, on the front end, you have this sort of black box in terms of how people get into them.

They’re seats that people want to get to because they know the potential benefits. I mean, all but one of the Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale’s law school.

Hanna Rosin: I can never get over that. I mean, honestly, I just find that just unbelievable. Like, it’s so specific.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: The Supreme Court is about to issue a set of rulings on affirmative action and higher education. These decisions are a big deal because, if it goes the way we expect, it could change how universities decide who to admit and therefore who gets what kinds of opportunities in life. Like, for example, being a Supreme Court justice.

Now, these cases have been kicking around for almost a decade, and here are the basics. They were brought by a conservative group of activists called Students for Fair Admissions—one against a private university (Harvard) and one against a public university (UNC). The plaintiffs are Asian Americans who say affirmative action is shutting them out, which adds complications. The cases would overturn a 2003 decision allowing some affirmative action, and do away with it for good.

But I realized only recently that I’m a little hazy on some important things, like how universities have been using affirmative action all these years. And how really—no matter what the Supreme Court decides—the backlash against affirmative action already has the upper hand.

So to understand these latest cases, we need to get clear on a pattern that’s been going on since the 1960s. In this episode, we’re gonna talk to Adam Harris, a staff writer who covers higher education for The Atlantic. Hi, Adam.

Harris: Hey, how’s it going?

Rosin: Good. Okay, Adam, so what is the fundamental question the Supreme Court is considering?

Harris: So the big question in this case, which has effectively been the big question in all of the race-conscious-admissions cases, is whether or not institutions can use race in the admission of their students.

Rosin: You know, when I hear that question, I tend to make some assumptions. Like, a basic one is that universities do use race as a deciding factor in admissions and that it’s an important tool for racial justice.

Harris: So, sort of. They use it in a limited way, and they can never use it as the deciding factor. The only rationale allowed by the Court is to increase diversity in the student body, which is very different from trying to atone for a legacy of discrimination. And also some states have already banned the use of affirmative action entirely, like California and Michigan.

Rosin: Which is what the Supreme Court might do nationally.

Harris: Right. And after those states banned affirmative action, we saw the number of Black students enrolled at their universities drop dramatically.

Rosin: You know, I read your book, The State Must Provide, and various other things that you sent me. It was my homework. And mostly what I discovered is that I had fundamentally misunderstood what we talk about when we talk about affirmative action and its connection to racial justice. So one of the things I want to talk to you about is how did we get here? How did we arrive at this point?

Harris: Yeah. So affirmative action or race-conscious admissions kind of first came into the lexicon in the 1960s as a way to fix some of that harm that had been done from legalized segregation in higher education.

If you looked across the landscape, there were all of these really minute ways that institutions had segregated and discriminated against students. In the 1960s and 1970s, institutions started to create programs that would help enhance their Black enrollment. (Typically, it was their Black enrollment.)

And some of this, of course, was under their own volition. And some of this was because in 1965, you got the Higher Education Act; you got some of the civil-rights laws that are effectively saying: If you are a program or anything that is receiving federal funding and you are discriminating against people, you will have that federal funding revoked.

And so they were trying to figure out ways to build out their Black population that they have been keeping down for so long.

Rosin: Okay, so affirmative action began as this civil-rights-era project in all kinds of universities around the country. But I guess the thing that really struck me in doing my homework for this episode about the current Supreme Court cases is that affirmative action, as I understood it—it barely makes it out of that era.

Harris: Yeah, you know, at the time, right, we’ve seen the civil-rights movement, we’ve seen the advances that had been made. And those were met with a, Perhaps we’re going too far into the: We’re discriminating against other people by trying to address this past harm.

Effectively, they’re trying to kill this program in the cradle before it even has a chance to make a dent in that discrimination.

Rosin: So the backlash moment happens pretty much right away, but what happens that kills affirmative action “in the cradle”?

Harris: So what happened is a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s known as Bakke.

Archival [Justice Warren Burger]: First case on today’s calendar is No. 76-811, Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

Harris: So Allan Bakke is a white veteran who is trying to get into medical school. He’s in his early 30s, which at the time people thought was a little bit too old to first enroll in medical school. But he has these credentials that he thinks should really benefit him. He’s effectively worked at a NASA hub for a little bit. And so he applies to several schools, including the University of California Davis’s Medical School.

Archival [Bakke lawyer Reynold Colvin]: From the very beginning of this lawsuit, he stated the case in terms of the fact that he had twice applied … and twice he had been refused ... Both in the years 1973 and in the year 1974.

Rosin: So if he was rejected from all these schools, why does he sue UC Davis?

Harris: So Bakke gets a tip from an insider at the university who tells him: Hey, we have this admissions program that allots 16 seats that were effectively designated for students who were from insular minority groups. And perhaps one of the reasons that you didn’t get into this 100-person class is because of one of those 16 seats.

Rosin: Okay, so it’s October of 1977. Bakke’s case is now before the Supreme Court. How do the justices respond?

Harris: Well, there’s a great moment with Thurgood Marshall, who of course had argued Brown v. Board of Education, and was now a justice on the Court.

Archival [Justice Thurgood Marshall]: Your client did compete for the 84 seats, didn’t he?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: And he lost?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: Now, would your argument be the same if one instead of 16 seats were left open?

Archival [Colvin]: No. Most respectfully, the argument does not turn on the numbers.

Harris: It was one of those times where you almost hear him being sort of sarcastic in his questioning. He’s really needling Bakke’s lawyer and saying, “So it depends on which way you look at it.” And he’s like, “Well, yes, it does.” “It does?”

Archival [Colvin]: The numbers are unimportant. Unimportant. It is the principle of keeping a man out because of his race that is important.

Archival [Marshall]: You’re arguing about keeping somebody out and the other side is arguing by getting somebody in?

Archival [Colvin]: That’s right.

Archival [Marshall]: So it depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?

Archival [Colvin]: It depends on which way you look at the problem.

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: If I may finish—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem is—

Archival [Marshall]: You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged people have some rights?

Archival [Colvin]: They certainly have the right—

Archival [Marshall]: The right to eat cake?

Harris: It’s a very: Why are we here arguing about this when just two decades ago, I was before this very Court trying to get students into segregated elementary schools?

Like, we just had this debate. We just had this argument about this historical discrimination and ongoing discrimination. Why are you back in front of me arguing that we’ve gone too far when we’ve only just started?

You know, when Marshall says, “You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged folks have rights too?,” he’s pointing to all of the different ways that higher education had discriminated against Black people. And so, I think he’s pointing to the fact that there is a harm that needs to be addressed, a past harm that needs to be addressed. And these people should have the rights to have that harm addressed.

Rosin: That’s what he means by “Don’t underprivileged people have some rights?” He’s basically trying to frame a purpose for affirmative action that is redressing past wrongs.

Harris: Exactly. As a remedy for past discrimination.

Rosin: And so where do the justices land? What ends up being the outcome?

Harris: The outcome is sort of a compromise. It’s ultimately what becomes known as the diversity bargain. So, as opposed to the original conception of affirmative action, where they were trying to provide some redress for historical discrimination, this case effectively says: Look, we can’t hold students nowadays—white students nowadays—accountable for what happened in the past and to provide additional seats or to set aside seats for certain classes of students. That would be an impermissible benefit for those students, because it would be harming or potentially alienating those white students who otherwise may have been able to get into it.

And so the Court ultimately says, Look, we do think that it’s important to use race in admissions, because we think that diverse classes are important for the benefit of all students. So the use of race in admissions goes from being a tool to address historical discrimination to ultimately being this sort of amenity that was good for all students on campus. It was good for white students to interact with Black students. It was good for Black students to interact with Hispanic students, right? It was good for the entire student body, as opposed to, you know, accounting for a legacy of discrimination.

Rosin: Interesting. So already, right away, affirmative action has one hand tied behind its back. Like, they don’t ban it outright, but they won’t use it. They won’t let it be used as a tool for racial justice.

It sounds like what they’re saying is that essentially, it has to work for the white students too. Like, it can only exist if it makes the white students’ lives better, which means the backlash kind of won?

Harris: In some sense. It doesn’t sort of wholly say that you have to eliminate the use of race altogether. It’s saying that you can look at race in an admissions process, but only in concert with a host of other factors and never as the factor that decides whether a student gets in or does not.

Rosin: And then what I understood is that over the next many years, in a series of Court cases, the Supreme Court leans in and sort of codifies this diversity bargain.

Harris: Right, the Bakke decision was this very tenuous compromise. It’s not until 2003 that we got a majority of the Supreme Court validating affirmative action. And that comes in a case against the University of Michigan called Grutter v. Bollinger.

Rosin: So the Michigan case is a win for advocates of affirmative action because it settles that as a rationale, but all it actually is doing is confirming the limited diversity bargain that we talked about.

Harris: Exactly. If we think of redress for past discrimination as the entire pie, this case effectively salvaged that little slice of the pie that they actually ended up getting in Bakke.

And you even have Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sort of putting a timeline on the need for the use of race in admissions, effectively saying, 25 years on from the end of this case, it may no longer be necessary to use race in admissions.

Rosin: So it’s like, We’re gonna give you this tiny little tool, and this tiny little tool is gonna solve the problem in 25 years.

Harris: That was the logic of the Court. Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, when I started off saying I misunderstood something, I think I misunderstood the degree to which my thinking about affirmative action and the role it played in higher education had been colonized by this shrinking. Like, I just am thinking about this in a small box. It’s not even part of the effort to redress past wrongs anymore. And it has not been for a long, long time.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: So what did happen? I mean, Sandra Day O’Connor had a vision for what happens 25 years down the road. What happened on the ground in states and in universities?

Harris: So on the ground, you had a couple of different things that happened. Michigan, of course, this was the state that did it. This was the state that protected the use of race in admissions.

And just a couple of years later, Michigan voters ultimately proposed and voted on a ballot measure that would eliminate the use of race in admissions altogether.

And very quickly, we saw what happens when an affirmative-action program goes away. There was a precipitous decline in Black enrollment at the University of Michigan, from around 7 percent, then to around the 4 percent that we regularly see today.

Rosin: I think I’m confused about something. If the Supreme Court ratified it, why were Michigan voters allowed to do that?

Harris: So the Supreme Court effectively just said, you can use, but the voters had the right—

Rosin: But the voters had the right, I see. So the ballot measure is essentially another data point in a history of backlash.

Harris: Yes. Michigan, California, and nine states in total have banned the use of race in admission either through their legislature or through public propositions

Rosin: It’s weird. It’s like a double whammy. Like we still talk about affirmative action as if it’s trying to accomplish the same goals it did in the late 60s. And it never has—

Harris: And it never has. Exactly.

Rosin: So yeah, it’s sort of two hands tied behind its back. You mentioned the numbers dropping at the University of Michigan; so it’s down to 4 percent.

Harris: Yeah, it hovers around 4 percent now.

Rosin: But in a state that is what percent Black?

Harris: Around 13 percent.

Rosin: So it’s well below.

Harris: Well below. And if you look across the landscape at most public flagship institutions, the big institutions in the state—the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, University of Alabama, LSU—most institutions do not come close to meeting its public percentage of high-school graduates in terms of their Black enrollment.

I mean, look at a place like Auburn University. In 1985, Bo Jackson won the Heisman there as the best college football player in the country. That same day, a federal judge said it was the most segregated institution in the state of Alabama.

Fast-forward to today, and they have roughly the same percentage of Black students now. And so the idea that we have around the admissions system, who’s getting in, and how they’re getting in—it’s just very warped.

Rosin: It’s so warped. Listening to you say it, like, how could it have changed? And these cases make it into the news and you have this sense that affirmative action is this incredibly powerful tool that has been transforming universities since the 1960s. And it’s not. It’s like a teeny, tiny little scalpel.

Harris: Yeah. We had a brief period where it was a really aggressive tool, and then after Bakke that sort of went away.

Rosin: I mean, the way you’re talking about it, it feels like we’re rolling backwards.

Harris: In a lot of ways, we are. You know, affirmative action and the use of race in admissions of course has not been perfect. It hasn’t been a remedy for past discrimination in higher ed. But it was a tool to sort of keep things where they were.

If it goes away, there’s a lot of concern that—that tool is now gone. And we know what happens when that tool goes away and we have these precipitous declines.

Rosin: This is a bad place to be, because now we have to contemplate this actual decision that we’re faced with. I mean, one of the pieces of homework you gave me was this conversation you recorded with Lee Bollinger.

For people who don’t know who he is, Bollinger has been the president of Columbia University for the past 20 years, but before that, he was the president of University of Michigan, which is why that 2003 opinion is called Grutter v. Bollinger. Anyway, you guys have this pretty depressing exchange, so I just wanna play it:

Harris: What happens to the texture of America’s most selective higher-education institutions if affirmative action goes away? If they’re no longer allowed to use race in admissions?

Lee Bollinger: So I think we have to imagine what it’s like to go back to a world before affirmative action. There was virtually no ethnic diversity, but no racial diversity. Very few African Americans, and what does that look like in an America we know today?

If our universities—our top universities—have a very small number of African Americans, that says a lot about not attending to it, especially since we spent 50 years really trying to change that, and changing it.

Rosin: Okay, so that brings us back to the cases today. These cases have a slight twist because they involve the rights of Asian Americans, a group that’s also been disenfranchised in certain ways. So it’s not the typical white student that we see in other cases.

Harris: Right, exactly. And that factor of it is something that made people take a second look. This is a case that had some twists and turns because of the ways that admissions officers had portrayed Asian American students in their notes.

Rosin: So does that make you feel differently about these cases than the previous ones we’ve been talking about?

Harris: In some ways it makes you take a closer look at what the actual facts of this case are. And it was interesting because at the district-court trial, there was a lot made of the several different factors that went into a student’s admissions decision.

And one of the big ones that came out of that was the sort of “ALDCs,” right? The athletes, legacies, donors, and children of faculty. And that was really focused on. They really sort of drove at that, the Students for Fair Admissions, as one of the reasons and ways that Asian Americans were sort of left out, and there was a side process, and it was always a question of how you were going to wrap that back to: Okay, are they being discriminated on the basis of their race? Is this because Black students are getting in? Asian American students aren’t getting in? And ultimately, what Harvard is arguing is: Listen, we may have an issue with the way that we have sort of calculated those numbers, but you can view these two things on different tracks. They’re not necessarily connected.

Rosin: I see. So what they’re saying—which it sounds like you agree with—is: Sure, we accept there may be an issue around the admission of Asian American students. There may be issues around the admissions of legacies and very, very many things, but that doesn’t have much to do with affirmative action and Black and brown students. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Effectively, yes. They are saying that just because they’re using race in their admissions decision, that is not the thing that is ultimately keeping Asian American students out. Because the ways that you can use race is never as the final thing. So say if you have two students with identical backgrounds, and one student is Black, one student’s Asian American, the university isn’t going to say: Well, we have enough Asian American students. We don’t have enough Black students. And so the Black student’s gonna get put over the top, effectively. There may be issues with the admission system, but that doesn’t have to do with the fact that Black students are getting into the university.

Rosin: Right. Like that side is arguing it very literally. Like Student A, who is Asian, did not get in because Student B, who is Black, did get in. But of course, it’s not like that. There’s a million different factors involved in why anybody does or doesn’t get in, and it’s all really complicated, including how they use race.

Harris: Exactly. So it may have been that, you know, they needed an additional polo player, or maybe they needed an extra tuba, right? The first-chair tuba had graduated and so they needed to replace their tuba player. There are all these different ways that universities are thinking about shaping an admitted class of students that aren’t limited to this sort of, who scored the highest on the SAT or who has the highest GPA.

Rosin: Right. Right. Because one thing I’ve been thinking about is: You’ve talked about a history of backlash. Even if it’s tiny amounts of progress, there’s a sort of solidifying of the diversity rationale, then there’s a backlash against that. And I’m trying to understand if this latest case is just part of that many-decades-long backlash.

Harris: In some ways, yes. The way that higher education is being attacked in this moment—the tenure battles that are going on, the fights to control curriculum—a lot of that backlash stems from this idea of losing out on what is effectively a private good at this point. People don’t think of higher education as: Oh, if this person gets a college degree, it’s good for everybody. It’s: That person got a college degree that’s going to enhance their job prospects. They could be president or, if they go to Harvard Law School, a Supreme Court justice one day.

You know, this case sort of falls squarely into that early-2000s [era of] Brown saying, Hey, we want to study our history and legacy of segregation and discrimination at Brown University. And Harvard’s like, Oh, I want to do the same thing. We’re in a moment where those institutions are finally having to account for that. And at that very moment, you have this attack that may remove one of the tools that has helped to have that enhanced minority enrollment.

Rosin: Okay. Oh, I see. So this is essentially a bookend to the late ’60s. This is a moment when universities, either because it’s been forced on them or because they wanna do it, are doing some racial reckoning, and it’s just at this very moment that it gets shut down. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Essentially, yeah.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny, Adam, I know you’ve written about higher education for a long time.

I feel like you care about higher education, like you believe in higher education at some level, right? As what? Like, as a vehicle for what?

Harris: So, George Washington, in his first address before Congress, gets up and he talks about this list of priorities. All of these big things that America absolutely needs.

And included in that is this really interesting paragraph where he says: “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

Effectively, at the time, they were thinking of ways to build a national character.And that’s George Washington. That’s Benjamin Rush. That’s James Madison. That’s Thomas Jefferson. They were thinking of these different ways to build a national character. And they thought that universities were the way to do that, to build good citizens, because you could teach people to be a citizen in K through 12 or in primary schools.

But they weren’t really grasping it. This was the real place where you would develop those citizens. And at several times of national disruption you’ve had these calls back to, We need to invest more in higher education. With the War of 1812, you already had West Point there, but the federal government says, Okay, we need to give additional money to West Point because this is a good for the public.

The Civil War breaks out and you have the 17 million acres of land doled out during the Morrill Act.

The G.I. Bill, right? All of these big, grand investments in a public good and something that was not only good for the private individual, but good for everyone.

And so when I think of higher education, it’s a great sort of democratizing way to expand one’s sort of civic good.

But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, part of what you’re saying is that we just talk about Harvard, Yale, the sort of elite institutions all the time, but there is this whole other universe of things and people, which represents a much larger number of people than these elite institutions.

Harris: Yes. The majority of students who are enrolled in higher education attend institutions that accept more than 50 percent of their applicants.

And so I think that our understanding of the issues in higher education gets a little bit warped because of the sort of power dynamics of these institutions, right? So you look at the Supreme Court; you say that, Wow, everybody but one person went to these two law schools. And that sort of shapes your perception of higher education generally.When there are millions and millions and millions of students who go to community colleges, who go to public regional institutions who are being well served by these institutions, but that could be better served if these institutions were funded in the same way as the sort of important work they do.

I look at a state like North Carolina, for example. If you are a Black student in North Carolina attending a public college: 23 percent of Black students attend one of the 12 predominantly white, four-year institutions; around 27 percent attend one of the five public HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities]; and around 50 percent attend one of the community colleges in the state.

And so if you’re pushing students out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pushing them out of North Carolina State University, it’s only going to become more important for the state of North Carolina to fund those community colleges that the students are attending, to fund those HBCUs and other public regional institutions that those students are attending.

Rosin: And that’s definitely a good thing. It’s like you divert the attention towards the places where education is actually happening.

Harris: Absolutely.

Rosin: So it’s, you’re saying its utility is that it might reveal a truth. I think what’s hard about that for me is that, I mean, Bollinger himself talked about how frustrated he seemed that, why can’t people connect with this issue? Like, it was so obvious to him as not an activist, but just as the president of Michigan, that universities should play a role in redressing wrongs.

And he banged his head a little bit, like, why, can’t they, why isn’t this obvious to everybody, you know? Yet I feel like you’re still optimistic in saying just this decision will make, you know, people will finally understand.

Harris: You know, in the same way, as I was writing through the book, right, it’s like there have been instance after instance after instance of the ways that institutions have shown and the ways that the courts have shown and the ways that the, you know, states have shown that they were willing to discriminate against Black students in higher education. And that needs to be addressed.

I do have some pessimism about what it would take for the courts to reverse that. You know, because, of course, at the minimum it’s like, okay, you hold on to this little bit of race-conscious admissions that we have, that’s kind of been preventing the dam from just opening, and everything falling apart. But I don’t know. I think that I still have to remain hopeful.

Rosin: I don’t wanna bust your optimism. I feel like you’re temperamentally a hopeful person.

Harris: I am temperamentally hopeful. And I think it’s not necessarily optimism as much as it’s a silver lining. That in some ways this iteration of affirmative action, of race-conscious admissions, that we have is a veil that just sort of obscures the reality of what we have in higher education. It is a veil that has been helpful. But I think a natural system would be something along the lines of what, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg says when she was dissenting in Gratz [v. Bollinger]. She effectively says: Wouldn’t it be better for universities just to be honest about what they’re doing and trying to make up for this past harm? So we’re not just sort of dealing in this black-box environment?

I think in that same way, this will show that those gaps in terms of the funding are only going to grow wider. The disparities are only going to get worse in terms of the funding for students. And if that’s not a wake-up call for people, I have a hard time seeing what will be.

Rosin: Yeah.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Theo Balcomb. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checkers are Sam Fentress and Michelle Ciarocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back next Thursday.