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Months after the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of justices declined to reconsider whether the updated admissions policy at Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), one of the nation’s top-ranked high schools, discriminates against Asian Americans. A lower court’s decision supporting the admissions process remains intact.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues that the chief justice got it wrong and the consequences will “perpetuate the injustice of racial discrimination.”
The case presented the very challenge the court seemed to want to preempt in its landmark SFFA v. Harvard decision outlawing race-based admissions. Then, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, warned that schools thinking of skirting the ruling through using clever proxies for racial preferences to engineer desired racial mixes in classes — that is, to pursue the ends of affirmative action through alternative means — better think twice.
“Despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary,” the chief justice wrote, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
Yet in Coalition for TJ, one school seems to have done just that. Only two of the nine justices stood ready to fight. Chief Justice Roberts was missing in action.
The “TJ” stands for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a highly selective magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Before 2020, the school had a race-blind admissions policy based largely on standardized test scores. Asian Americans dominated under this system, typically receiving 65 to 75 percent of offers to attend the school. But as the woke, anti-cultural revolution roiled the country that summer, some rebelled. The school’s principal and a board member complained the institution didn’t reflect the racial makeup of the community.
The board member demanded, in communications with the superintendent, that he “be explicit in how we are going to address the underrepresentation of [B]lack and Hispanic students.”
