Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

From Judge Ho Boycotts Yale. Yale Boycotts U.S. News Rankings. by Josh Blackman.  

Elite universities have been eager to continue their long tradition of discriminating against candidates based on race.  While clearly unconstitutional, the courts, most notably in the majority opinion of Justice O'Connor in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, have continued to find reasons extend such discrimination.

But as the racial discrimination has become more obvious, more blatant, and more egregious, there seems an emerging opinion among legal scholars that the Supreme Court will soon find it to be unconstitutional (as it always has been.)  There are two cases that have already been heard this session and which will be decided in coming months which will reveal whether this opinion is valid.  

There remains the residual issue of what can be done to stop the universities from racially discriminating even if it is found to be unconstitutional.  They did not significantly reform their ways after the minor checks introduced with Grutter v. Bollinger.  There is little reason to presume they would adhere to the law this time either.  But given enough time and enough monetary settlements, they presumably will come around.  They might not wish to be moral but they might not be able to afford to be immoral.  

One of the more vocal advocates for racial discrimination, and for the Wokeness of Social Justice and Critical Race Theory in particular, has been the Dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken.  To the dismay of many Yale alum, she has relentlessly pursued dubious social justice reforms.  To such an extent that there is now a boycott by some Judges of clerkships to Yale alumni.  

As Blackman reports, Dean Gerken is launching her own boycott.

Yale Law School is withdrawing from the rankings compiled by the U.S. News World Report. The rationale? The rankings are biased against the progressive institution!

"The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed," Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said. "Its approach not only fails to advance the legal profession, but stands squarely in the way of progress."

Specifically, she said, the rankings devalue programs that encourage low-paying public-interest jobs and reward schools that dangle scholarships for high LSAT scores, rather than for financial need.

I had seen this reported earlier and had seen the putative justification.  Blackman adds an insight.

I would add one other possible rationale. This decision was made in the shadow of Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. The Supreme Court will very soon make it difficult for elite private universities to use racial preferences for admission. Post-SFFA, the law school could no longer justify wide gaps between admission rates for applicants of different races. They can no longer rely on "personal" scores and other subterfuges. As a result, if Yale wants to keep its racial diversity numbers high, the overall LSAT and GPA scores would have to drop. And that decrease would affect the law school's rankings.

This is a little paradoxical.  Yale has dominated the U.S. News rankings for years.  It seems to have been practicing racial discrimination for years as well, admitting students by race but also with lower LSAT scores (which go into the U.S. News rankings).  If they are already admitting students with low scores to boost their racial profile and are also dominating the rankings, what is the issue?

As best I can understand it, what is actually happening is that Yale will no longer require the LSAT scores in their admissions considerations.  This makes it much easier to admit students based on a "holistic" approach which facilitates racial quotas while hiding any consequent decline in student quality.  

Yale is not, if I understand the sequence correctly, so much withdrawing from the U.S. News rankings as they are refusing to provide the LSAT inputs (because they ditched them) which go into establishing those rankings. 

They might be an elite institution but they are like everyone else.  They want their cake and eat it too.  They also don't want to play by the same rules which constrain everyone else.

Personally, I'd rather see ratings and rankings which were based on outcomes (student incomes, default rates, employment stats, career progression stats, etc.) rather than inputs (LSATs) but that is not the issue on the table.  

It appears that Yales wants to discriminate based on race.  And when they do so, they anticipate their average LSAT scores will fall.  When those scores fall, so will their ratings and rankings in the U.S. News.  They do not want people to see how much they are discriminating (big LSAT score gaps) so they will not require the LSATs and therefore must effectively withdraw from the rankings.  

And now they are trying to dress this all up in virtue.  Forget the details of the law.  Come back to fundamentals.  "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."