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“Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled skepticism on Monday toward the legality of race-conscious admissions policies in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that could imperil affirmative action programs often used to boost enrollment of Black and Hispanic students.” Reuters
Read our prior coverage of the case. The Flip Side
The right urges the Court to rule against affirmative action, arguing that race should play no role in college admissions.
“[Harvard] uses a ‘personality rating’ for each applicant that measures things such as ‘likability,’ ‘courage,’ and ‘kindness.’ But a statistical analysis of these personality ratings found that Harvard consistently gives low scores on these qualities to Asian American applicants and gives high scores to black applicants. The differences in these scores were so great that an Asian American in the top 10% academically has only a 13% chance of being admitted to Harvard, whereas a black applicant with the same academic record has a 56% chance of getting in…
“Harvard may claim that its admissions process is not racially discriminatory. But at the very same time as it claims race is not a ‘determinative’ factor in its admission process, the school also says that if it were barred from using race as a factor, the share of black students at the school would fall from the current 14% to 6%. So which is it? Is race ‘determinative’ or not? Harvard cannot even get its story straight.”
Editorial Board, Washington Examiner
“Centuries of racial discrimination have left black Americans and other historically-marginalized groups with disproportionate economic and educational disadvantages, but not with exclusive economic and educational disadvantages. There are poor and disadvantaged Americans of all races, and systems that privilege, say, a wealthy black or Hispanic student over a poor white student both fail to recognize the real adversity faced by poor students of any race and diminish the true diversity of the incoming class…
“If schools truly want to prioritize diversity, they should focus on class. Fostering greater class-based diversity can help achieve greater diversity across the board: More racial diversity, more economic diversity, more ideological diversity, and more diversity on the basis of religion. Emphasizing diversity of class doesn’t just create a student body that looks like America. It creates a student body that is like America.”
David French, The Dispatch
“Racial representation’s ultimate sin is that it dehumanizes. When Harvard rejects some Asians because they are already ‘represented’ by other Asians, in order to admit some blacks to ‘represent’ other blacks, it collapses these students to their skin colors…
“The phrase ‘people who look like me’—which one hears so often these days—is profoundly reductionist, implying that all blacks look alike, that all Asians look alike, and more essentially, that they are alike. This is racism. It obliterates each student’s full humanity… “When Harvard pontificates that the institution must look more like America, just which one of us Americans does Harvard think doesn’t look like America and doesn’t belong here?… This is not the America we strive for. We can do much better.”
Wai Wah Chin, City Journal
The left urges the Court to allow affirmative action to continue, arguing that it is necessary to level the playing field.
The left urges the Court to allow affirmative action to continue, arguing that it is necessary to level the playing field.
“From 1988 to 2014, the number of K–12 schools in the U.S. that had a 99 percent nonwhite student population more than doubled, from 2,762 schools to 6,727. By the 2010s, the percentage of Black students attending schools across the South that were at least 50 percent white had plunged by nearly half, from a peak of 44 percent to 23 percent. Predominantly white school districts collectively receive $23 billion more a year than predominantly nonwhite school districts… It is impossible to argue that Black Americans enjoy equality of opportunity.”
Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, The Atlantic
“Eighteen Civil War and Reconstruction historians submitted a ‘friend of the court’ brief in the pending affirmative action case to underscore the 14th Amendment framers’ race-conscious intentions. They pointed to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that all persons would have the same rights ‘enjoyed by white persons,’ including the power to own property and enter and enforce contracts. And the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, they noted, offered a phalanx of goods and services to Black Americans in order to facilitate the transition from slavery to full citizenship but gave white Civil War refugees more limited assistance…
“None of this legislation was color blind — it was expressly designed to treat the races differently in the service of making them more equal and adopted over President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes and cries of reverse-racism against whites… If judicial originalists want to stay true to their originalist values, they should be supporting rather than undermining that reckoning.”
Sheryll Cashin, Politico
“Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty… In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants…
“Black Americans were shut out of education for centuries by law, then by custom; from 1890 to 1940, Harvard admitted an average of three Black students a year… Legacy admissions maintain the chain of racial privilege awarded to white families with longstanding ties to schools like Harvard…
“[Similarly, the boost for athletes] benefits applicants who can afford to participate in expensive ‘country club sports’ like fencing, polo, and lacrosse. Parents may need to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to help their kids play niche sports competitively. Once again, the families who can afford this luxury are disproportionately white… If and when the Supreme Court eradicates race-conscious admissions, no one should accept the collapse in diversity as an inevitable outcome.”
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
A libertarian's take
“If the Supreme Court decides to end affirmative action in college admissions, the decision will likely be greeted with support by most Americans, including majorities of the very racial groups affirmative action policies are designed to benefit. According to 2022 polling from Pew Research, 74 percent of Americans believe that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions decisions, while only 7 percent believe it should be a ‘major’ factor. A majority of all racial groups polled believed that race should not be a factor in college admissions, including 59 percent of black respondents and 68 percent of Hispanic respondents.”
Emma Camp, Reason
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