Amidst the right’s celebration over the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, there were some voices cautioning against being too optimistic about the result. University administrators are one of the groups most dedicated to leftist orthodoxy, the theory went, and are therefore likely to find ways around the decision. As one Fox News op-ed put it:

You probably think the Supreme Court just ended racial discrimination in university admissions, euphemistically called affirmative action, and a new day of equal treatment without regard to race or skin color has dawned.

You are mostly wrong.

Various admissions offices did their part to confirm that more pessimistic perspective. One university leader, then-president-elect Claudine Gay of Harvard, informed the student body in an email on June 29th that “the Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions ‘an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.’” (Disclaimer: I currently attend Harvard College). Rachel Lu collected a number of similar statements here at National Review.

But SFFA’s efforts were not entirely in vain. Last week, the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), the other defendant in the affirmative-action case, announced that they have directed their admissions office to comply with the ruling. They clarified that the admissions office was prohibited from using application essays or other means to impose back-door racial preferences. The board went further still, also enjoining the university from considering race in hiring decisions.

These changes came despite the dissent of trustees such as Ralph Meekins Sr., who argued that the Court’s decision didn’t mean the university had “to come forth with a resolution within 30 days.” The idea that the university should have debated longer on how to comply with the Court’s ruling is absurd. The only reason for such a delay would have been to try to identify ways around it, and failing to adapt the university’s application process in time for the class of 2028 to begin applying would likely have exposed it to further legal liability.

It turns out that being sued is expensive and unpleasant, even if you have a massive endowment. Schools that would like to avoid taking their own trips to federal court should take a page out of UNC’s book.