Supreme Court to Wade Into Affirmative Action Again My Think Paper
Supreme Court Volition Hear Claiming to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C.
The court's new conservative supermajority may be skeptical of admissions programs that take account of race to foster educational variety.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to determine whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the Academy of North Carolina are lawful, raising serious doubts about the hereafter of affirmative activeness in higher education.
The court has repeatedly upheld like programs, most recently in 2016. Simply the court's membership has tilted right in recent years, and its new conservative supermajority is almost sure to view the challenged programs with skepticism, imperiling more than 40 years of precedent that said race could be used as 1 factor amid many in evaluating applicants.
"Affirmative action has repeatedly been administered last rites during the last 5 decades," said Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale. "But these 2 cases unmistakably pose the gravest threats even so to affirmative action's continued vitality."
The case against Harvard accused it of discriminating against Asian American students past using a subjective standard to gauge traits similar likability, courage and kindness and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.
Lawyers for Harvard said the challengers had relied on a flawed statistical analysis and denied that the university discriminated against Asian American applicants. More than mostly, they said race-conscious admissions policies are lawful.
In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made a more familiar argument, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational multifariousness and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Courtroom precedents.
If the Supreme Court follows its usual practices, information technology will hear arguments in its next term, which starts in Oct. A decision is non likely until the spring or summer of 2023.
The cases volition test the newly bolstered conservative majority'due south delivery to precedent. As in recent cases on abortion, there are reasons to remember that the majority will not hesitate to overrule major precedents if it views them to be egregiously wrong.
The possibility of a ruling that would either restrict or prohibit race as a consideration in admissions would reverberate widely across higher teaching and could fundamentally reshape college admissions in the years to come.
Such a ruling would, all concerned agree, besides probable reduce the number of Black and Latino students at nearly every selective college and graduate school, with more than Asian American and white students gaining access instead.
Both of the affirmative activeness cases were brought past Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal entrepreneur who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-witting admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which take reached the Supreme Court.
In a statement, Mr. Blum said he welcomed the court's decision to hear the cases.
"Harvard and the University of N Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas," he said. "Every college bidder should exist judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group."
Harvard and the Academy of North Carolina said in statements that the decision to hear the cases would jeopardize what has become a central principle of college admissions.
Lawrence South. Bacow, the president of Harvard, said the challenge "puts at adventure twoscore years of legal precedent granting colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities."
Beth Keith, a spokeswoman for the University of Northward Carolina, said its admissions program "allows for an evaluation of each educatee in a deliberate and thoughtful mode."
The universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard's favor was affirmed by a federal appeals courtroom.
The Supreme Court's conclusion to hear both cases may have been influenced by the differing legal regimes that apply to the two schools. Harvard, a private entity, must comply with a federal statute that bans race discrimination equally a status of receiving federal coin; the University of North Carolina, which is public, must also satisfy the Constitution's equal protection clause.
Damon Hewitt, the president of the Lawyers' Commission for Civil Rights Under the Constabulary, which represents students and alumni defending the programs, said they served a vital function.
"Selective universities similar Harvard and U.N.C.-Chapel Hill take long struggled to admit students of colour, who have over time been excluded for access to elite institutions and are historically marginalized," Mr. Hewitt said. "Race-conscious admissions policies are a critical tool that ensures students of color are not overlooked in a process that does not typically value their determination, accomplishments and immense talents."
Just Kenneth L. Marcus, who served every bit assistant secretary for civil rights at the Pedagogy Department in the Trump administration, said Harvard'southward treatment of Asian students was reminiscent of its efforts to limit Jewish enrollment.
"Just as Harvard in the 1930s thought that Jewish students lacked the grapheme to make them skilful Harvard men," he said, "so today they often view Asian students as defective the appropriate character."
The case has divided Asian Americans.
Jason Xu, the president of the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation, which filed a cursory supporting the challengers in the Harvard case, said many Asian Americans believe that their academically high-performing children were passed over because they were of Asian descent.
But some other grouping, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, took the opposite tack, saying in a statement that affirmative action was necessary considering "the reality is that race continues to unfairly limit educational opportunities for students of colour." The group added that "cold numerical indicators like grade point averages and standardized exam scores capture and magnify these inequalities."
Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, said it was fourth dimension for a course correction.
"In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, universities accept get obsessed with racial preferences to a caste that I have not seen in my 15 years in academia," he said. "Information technology seems like nothing is more important than race anymore."
Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, drew the opposite lesson from the national debate over racial justice. "Wide public awareness of the unrelenting impact of racism demands a recommitment to affirmative action, not its abandonment," he said in a statement.
Polls have found alien levels of back up for affirmative action. Most Americans believe that it is of import to promote racial and ethnic diverseness in the workplace and that there is withal racism in American society. All the same, a Pew Enquiry Heart survey in 2019 found that 73 percent of Americans said colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions most student admissions.
And in 2020, California voters refused to overturn a state ban on consideration of race, ethnicity and gender in public higher education and government jobs and contracts.
The decision to revisit affirmative action comes every bit the brownie of elite university admissions is under assault from other directions. A federal investigation known every bit Operation Varsity Blues revealed a sweeping scheme to get students admitted to prestigious universities as fake able-bodied recruits, or by cheating on college archway exams, in exchange for bribes from wealthy parents. The ringleader was an admissions consultant, and the case did not straight implicate universities.
A lawsuit filed in federal courtroom this calendar month accused sixteen of the nation'due south leading private universities and colleges of conspiring to reduce the financial aid they accolade to admitted students through a cost-fixing cartel. The accused universities have denied wrongdoing.
In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld an admissions plan at the University of Texas at Austin, holding that officials there could continue to consider race equally a factor in ensuring a diverse pupil body. The vote was four to iii. (Justice Antonin Scalia had died a few months before, and Justice Elena Kagan was recused.)
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that courts must give universities substantial but not total leeway in devising their admissions programs.
He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Chiliad. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. In an interview non long subsequently the Texas case was decided, Justice Ginsburg said it would endure.
"I don't expect that we're going to see another affirmative action case," Justice Ginsburg said, "at least in teaching."
Six years later, only two members of the majority in the Texas case remain on the courtroom. Justice Kennedy retired in 2018 and was replaced by Justice Brett Yard. Kavanaugh, and Justice Ginsburg died in 2020 and was replaced past Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Afterwards a long blockade of President Barack Obama's nominee by Senate Republicans, Justice Scalia was replaced past Justice Neil G. Gorsuch. All three of the new justices were appointed by President Donald J. Trump.
The Texas decision essentially reaffirmed Grutter five. Bollinger, a 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court endorsed holistic admissions programs, proverb information technology was permissible to consider race every bit ane factor amongst many to attain educational diversity. Writing for the majority in that instance, Justice Sandra 24-hour interval O'Connor said she expected that "25 years from at present," the "use of racial preferences volition no longer be necessary."
The court is now poised to human activity well before Justice O'Connor's deadline.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/politics/supreme-court-affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html
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