Like most legal anniversaries, this year’s anniversary fell quietly on a Sunday. Seventy-two years have passed since nine justices signed a ruling that altered the nation’s moral framework, and the atmosphere surrounding it has changed. less joyous. more vigilant. Walking past a university bulletin board that is still covered in notices about diversity programming from the previous semester gives the impression that the document that everyone keeps bringing up is being carefully and slowly placed on a shelf.
The desks were never the main issue in Brown v. Board of Education. It concerned who was allowed to sit at them and what it meant to be seated there. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose doll experiments revealed something the nation didn’t want to know about the children it was raising, and Thurgood Marshall both recognized this. Almost reluctantly, the Court acknowledged that segregation could mold a child’s heart in ways “unlikely ever to be undone.” Even now, that phrase sounds weird. unlikely to ever be reversed. They intended it to be a warning when they wrote it in 1954.
The warning was meant to be addressed in higher education. For many years, Brown’s downstream evidence was the gradual integration of college campuses, such as Alabama’s freshman classes and the first cohorts at law schools that had previously barred Black applicants by law. Real, disputed, and imperfect. Little Rock is home to federal troops. At Ole Miss, James Meredith. From elementary schools to lecture halls, the narrative advanced through the system, and the nation largely convinced itself that progress was being made.
Then came June 2023. In Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court abolished the majority of racial admissions practices in American universities. The opinion may be interpreted as a limited technical modification. The majority of legal scholars do not. Nowadays, it’s more difficult to discuss Brown in the present tense without someone at the table pointing out that the Court that once broadened its definition now seems determined to restrict it. According to admissions officers I’ve spoken to, there is a strange new caution: lawyers reviewing recruitment brochures, workshops on essay-prompt language, and the entire inclusion apparatus suddenly speaking in euphemisms.
The initial goal is lost in the legal back and forth. Brown was not a procedural decision regarding bus routes. It stated unequivocally that the state could not separate children based on race and claim that the outcome was equal. It was a traveling principle. Housing, voting, public accommodations, and yes, eventually the freshman dorm were all affected. It’s difficult to ignore how much of the language used by a generation of university administrators now veers around the term “diversity” without quite landing on it as they attempt to navigate the post-2023 landscape.
Beneath all of this, the numbers continue to be obstinate. By some measures, segregation in public K–12 schools has increased since the late 1980s. According to EdBuild’s 2019 analysis, districts that serve primarily students of color receive about $2,200 less per student annually than majority-white districts. When those students do make it to college, it’s after attending institutions that the Brown framers would have identified as the issue they were attempting to resolve. Years ago, Wendy Vitter declined to comment on whether Brown’s decision was the right one during her confirmation hearing. That was astounding to most people. Today, fewer would.
Nevertheless, the thing’s durability is a plus. No serious person is willing to publicly state that the 1954 decision was incorrect, even in this divisive moment. They simply don’t agree on what it needs. The current state of American higher education lies in that gap between respecting a decision and carrying it out. The courts will have less of an impact on whether that gap closes or widens over the next 72 years than what universities and the public that supports them decide they truly want a campus to mean.
