Could an affirmative action ban be enforced?

Even if the Supreme Court decides it wants to end affirmative action, it may discover that it is not able to.

Oral arguments on Monday in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and SFFA v. Harvard raised the possibility that the court may strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, reversing decades of precedent going back to the Bakke case of 1978.

If such a ruling is issued, does anyone really believe that Harvard will throw up its hands and admit a freshman class based on academic achievement alone—which, according to a 2013 Harvard Office of Institutional Research study, would mean a class that was 43 percent Asian and less than 1 percent black?