OPINION:
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” So writes Chief Justice Roberts in his Supreme Court majority opinion ending the use of race preferences in college admissions.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, which also applies to a companion suit against the University of North Carolina, is a monumental victory for proponents of race-neutral enforcement of civil rights guarantees and a colorblind Constitution.
But it is only a first step toward unwinding the divisive “diversity” apparatuses corrupting the intellectual environment at U.S. colleges and universities.
Last month’s decision effectively overturns a 2003 precedent, Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court held that promoting diversity on U.S. campuses was a “compelling interest that can justify the use of race” in admissions. Although the Grutter court forbade the use of racial quotas or set-asides, it allowed schools to consider race as part of a holistic application to achieve “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the 5-4 majority, expected her ruling to be a temporary fix: “25 years from now,” she wrote, “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
In the 20 years since Grutter, colleges and universities have developed elaborate processes that make race, as the plaintiffs put it, “an anvil on the scale that dominates the entire process.”
The court’s majority opinion this week begins by describing those processes. As Harvard’s director of admissions acknowledged during the case, the school considers race with the goal of “[making] sure that [Harvard does] not hav[e] a dramatic drop-off” in minority admissions.
In the final stage of Harvard’s process, called the “lop,” tentatively admitted students are winnowed down with four factors: legacy status, athletics, financial aid eligibility, and race. As the court concludes, “race is a determinative tip” for many of the African American and Hispanic students Harvard admits.
As a result, it is harder for Asian American applicants, despite higher academic index scores on average, to secure admission. A detailed statistical analysis presented to the court showed that Harvard admitted 56.1% of Black applicants in the top academic performance decile, compared with 12.7% of Asian applicants and 15.3% of White applicants.
So for Asian applicants, race amounts to a negative, which violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The court explains: “College admissions are zero-sum. A benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.”
The court found that Harvard violated the equal protection clause in a second way by embracing the “pernicious stereotype” that some students — based solely on their privileged minority status — can bring something to the campus that a White or Asian student cannot. Harvard’s admissions process presumes that a student’s skin tone determines how he thinks or what he can contribute to the campus marketplace of ideas, an assumption the court calls “offensive” and “demeaning.”
Justice Charles Thomas puts a finer point on it in concurring that “all racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person’s ideology, beliefs, and abilities.”
This week’s decision marks the court’s return to the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment. As Justice John Marshall Harlan explained in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which would later sound in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
The court’s powerful statement is also a step toward ending divisive, race-essentializing indoctrination initiatives proliferating under the deceptive moniker of diversity, equity, and inclusion. When Grutter said universities may treat students differently based on race if the goal is to realize the “educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” it unleashed an ideology that utterly transformed campuses nationwide.
Today, schools operate Black-only dormitories, host graduation celebrations segregated by affinity group, and even sponsor race-segregated student groups.
They employ diversity statements in faculty hiring to screen applicants based on group identity and political viewpoint.
They restrict grant programs and certain faculty positions to racial groups.
Viewpoints that diverge from the DEI orthodoxy are shouted down, and those who espouse them are investigated.
Some even mandate DEI training for students, faculty and staff, during which they are compelled to apologize for their privilege or otherwise swear fealty to the diversity ideology. In effect, universities are teaching students to judge others primarily by skin color and other features of identity.
None of this is compatible with the spirit of last month’s ruling. The vast diversity administrations on college campuses today will launch massive resistance campaigns. Some will even develop strategies to circumvent the holding.
Hopefully, the court’s powerful statement will energize state efforts to roll back divisive DEI efforts at public universities, a movement already gaining steam.
Race preferences and DEI programs reflect a foundational rejection of the justice principle upon which our entire political system is based. Justice Thomas’ concurrence acknowledges this, presenting the decision as a return to the understanding that guided the Reconstruction amendments after the Civil War: “The Constitution’s colorblind rule reflects one of the core principles upon which our Nation was founded: that ‘all men are created equal.’”
• Jonathan Pidluzny is the director of the Higher Education Reform Initiative at the America First Policy Institute.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.