All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
The Supreme Court is once again trying to answer the decades-old question: What constitutes racial discrimination? On one side is Students for Fair Admissions, an organization that has fought racial preferences in school admissions. On the other side, Harvard and the University of North Carolina contend that they aim for a student body this is demographically diverse, and their admissions committee “need not ignore a candidate’s race any more than it does a candidate’s home state, national origin, family background, or special achievements.” Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette argues that it’s ridiculous to suggest elite schools like Harvard are lowering their standards by including race in admissions criteria.
Americans waited decades for the definitive word from the Supreme Court regarding affirmative action in college admissions and all we got was a bunch of lousy arguments.
The Supreme Court doesn’t dive into this contentious issue very often. It did so in 1978, 2003 and 2016. And again in October, when it heard arguments by the conservative activist group Students for Fair Admissions. They’re arguing against the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. The activists want to prevent colleges from diversifying their student bodies by taking race into account in admissions, along with other factors. They claim that affirmative action – a phrase coined by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, when he signed an executive order requiring contractors who did business with the government to ensure their workforce was diverse – that this program somehow gives an unfair advantage to Latinos and African Americans while discriminating against white and Asian American students.
Look, I’ve studied affirmative action for nearly 40 years and that argument is just plain dumb. At selective schools like Harvard, standards don’t get lowered. You have more than 60,000 applicants competing for fewer than 2000 seats in the freshman class, you can have your pick of the litter. There are plenty of Latinos and African Americans to choose from, world class valedictorians or student body presidents or star athletes. Besides, it’s absurd to suggest that whites and Asians are being discriminated against in admission when they represent most of the student body.
But it wasn’t just the flow of arguments that bothered me. It was the fact that the six conservative members of the high court – Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett – all of them, by the way, received elite education at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Oxford – seem to have already made up their minds to deny that opportunity to Black and brown kids.
