Preview Analysis: Supreme Court to hear challenge to consideration of race in college admissions In 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the "swing"-- or deciding-- vote in a landmark Supreme Court case over race-- perhaps the most divisive social, political, and cultural issue in the country's history. While upholding the University of Michigan's affirmative action policies for minority law school applicants, the court majority led by O'Connor offered this caveat: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." Fast-forward 19 years, and a seemingly impatient 6-3 conservative court majority is poised to severely limit when colleges and universities can use race as part of the competitive admissions process.
Supreme Court seems open to ending affirmative action in college admissions Conservative justices on Monday seemed open to ending decades of Supreme Court precedent allowing race-conscious admission decisions at colleges and universities, repeatedly expressing doubt that the institutions would ever concede an “endpoint” in their use of race to build diverse student bodies. After nearly five hours of argument, the affirmative-action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seemed seriously endangered. The question is how broad such a decision might be, and what it would mean for other elite colleges and flagship state universities that say relying on grades and test scores alone could result in a dramatic drop in Black and Hispanic students.
Americans BACK the end of affirmative action and want race kept out of college admissions, new poll suggests: Supreme Court now widely expected to ban it A YouGov survey found that 54 percent of adults in the US were against universities considering race as a factor in selecting applicants — even as part of efforts to boost diversity on campus. That far outweighs the 23 percent who wanted admissions tutors to use race to guide selections, and similar numbers who were unsure. Democrats were much more supportive of affirmative action policies than were Republicans.
EDUCATION Harvard’s new president is the next chapter of its racial spoils system Claudine Gay wants to exploit the ‘legacy of slavery,’ now and forever December 23, 2022 | 4:31 am Claudine Gay (Wikimedia Commons) Written by: Roger Kimball Share Text Peter Salovey must be fretting. The longtime president of Yale University has done everything in his power to pander to the forces of woke identity politics. He changed the name of Calhoun College at Yale because students didn’t like that it was named after John C. Calhoun, a supporter of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Salovey covered over or ripped out artwork across the university that a specially appointed committee deemed insensitive or offensive. He shoveled tens of millions of dollars into “diversity” initiatives in an effort to appease student crybullies. RELATED STORIES Revealed: Russ Vought’s budget roadmap for House Republicans The outrage fever over Critical Race Theory But Salovey has one insuperable handicap. He is white. In the great racial sweepstakes of the day, that is (if I may so put it) an insuperable black mark. Harvard understands this. Which is the world’s richest university has just named Claudine Gay, a black woman, to be its next president. Would she have been appointed had she been white? To ask the question is to answer it. Gay will take office this summer, just when the Supreme Court will decide an important affirmative action case against the university. How can Salovey compete with Gay? Is he thinking fondly of Al Jolson? I suspect that one way or the other, Salovey will have to leave the presidency of Yale soon. As a fully paid-up member of the racialist sisterhood, Yale will have to emulate its cousin in Cambridge if it is to maintain its bona fides as a suitably progressive institution in the vanguard of virtucratic fatuousness. It will be hard to do better than Claudine Gay. Plaudits to Penny Pritzker, head of Harvard’s search committee. Name sound familiar? Yep, she was Obama’s commerce secretary, finance chair of his presidential campaigns. She is also the sister of J.B. Pritzker, the current Illinois governor. The New York Times reports that some 600 people were considered for the top spot at Harvard. Gay, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had all of the key credentials. As I say, the conditio sine qua non was race. Beyond that, though, Gay is the right kind of black, which is to say she is all in on the Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bandwagon. As Francis Menton explains in “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — a wide-ranging outline of Gay’s career — she has long been “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.” For example, she worked to bury complaints that one Harvard scholar, Ryan Enos, had falsified data in a study about public housing. Why? Because Enos had come to the right, i.e., the left-progressive conclusions in his study. At the same time, Gay went out of her way to destroy the career of the economist Roland Fryer because, though black, he published a study showing that there were “no racial differences” in the use of force by police. “In other words,” Menton observes, “Fryer’s research was becoming threatening to the racial justice crowd at Harvard, not the least to Claudine Gay.” When Fryer was implausibly charged with sexual harassment by an assistant whom he had fired, Gay asked Harvard’s president to revoke his tenure. That didn’t happen, but Gay helped engineer his suspension without pay for two years as well as the shuttering of his research lab. Quoting from a 2020 article in Harvard magazine, Menton shows how Gay has devoted herself to the work of promulgating “racial justice initiatives” designed to “to address racial and ethnic equality — including faculty appointments and the addition of an associate dean of diversity, inclusion and belonging.” A dean of “belonging?” I’m afraid so. In an embarrassing PR video released by Harvard, Gay speaks of pursuing a “bold agenda of reckoning and repair inspired by the groundbreaking report of Harvard and the legacy of slavery.” Forget about Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge people by their character rather than the color of their skin. Gay is part of the racial spoils system that wants to exploit the “legacy of slavery,” now and forever. Her own scholarship, such as it is, is little more than an accumulation of racial grievance mongering. The chief point is that black voter turnout is greater in districts where they are the majority. The unspoken but implicit gravamen is that we should therefore create more black-majority, i.e., more Democratic, districts. By devoting themselves to the racialist agenda of woke identity politics, super-rich progressive institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford — the Ivy and near-Ivy educational establishments — have embarked on a slow-motion form of intellectual and moral suicide. Their riches make them essentially unaccountable to public scrutiny — a scrutiny they hold in contempt because it issues from an unenlightened commitment to such antique values as impartial judgment and colorblind justice. Which is why it is likely that the best we can hope for is an increase in the velocity of their self-immolation. The elevation of race hustlers like Claudine Gay is an important step in this acceleration. THE SHOP THE MAGAZINE PODCASTS Stay informed Thought-provoking commentary and opinion on politics, books and the arts. THE SPECTATOR WORLD MORE INFORMATION RADIO Web-only content Copyright © 2022 The Spectator // Magazine content Copyright © 2022 The Spectator
College Admissions by several top tier universities are may be banned (college admission practice ended) by the Supreme Court but Affirmative Action will remain considering most states in America have existing laws or university rules in place for many years now to keep race out of college admissions (I posted a state-by-state list of such in another thread). In addition, recently, the list of states that have banned Affirmative Action in college admissions while not banning Affirmative Action in other areas of college life has grown... Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington. Thus, other issue of Affirmative Action has been very beneficial in other areas of University life far beyond college admissions such as its fight against discrimination because of sex (title IV). Simply, there's no Title IV if there's no Affirmative Action...the two are deeply connected although there are many other important issues associated with Affirmative Action that has absolutely nothing to do with college admissions. Thus, the small number of universities that use Affirmative Action in college admissions should stop using it because its no longer needed. As many states have already stop using it for many years now not just on the University level but on other academic levels. To those that are curious, the states that banned Affirmative Action...their black student population and Asian student population were already low. It dropped an additional 50% for both groups and other non-white groups after the universities banned Affirmative Action. Simply, it has negatively impacted all non-white groups...so far for many years concerning college admissions. This is why I strongly believe the Supreme Court will ban this in college admission but will leave Affirmative Action alone in other areas of university life and life in general considering its needed in other areas (e.g. discrimination against women). The good news, these non-white groups are now finding other ways around the university bans of Affirmative Action for many years in that students are now better prepared for entry into top universities by changing the rules of the admission process and recruitment process without Affirmative Action. For example, I recently attended orientation at two particular top universities over the summer with my son (he's being recruited)...SAT/ACT are listed as a "choice" and not as a requirement even though my son's pre SATs are off the map and plans to take the SATs in two years. wrbtrader