The United States Supreme Court has ruled that colleges and universities cannot consider a prospective student's race when deciding admission.
The cases concerned admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and will impact admissions rules nationwide.
“The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the affirmative action admission policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.
The ruling is a massive blow to decades-old efforts to boost enrollment of minorities at American universities through policies that took into account applicants’ race.
‘Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it’, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in.
Roberts wrote said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs ‘unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points’.
‘We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today’, Roberts wrote, finding that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The clause bars states from denying people equal protection under the law.
The chief justice added, however, that ‘nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university’.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurring opinion, said that the schools’ affirmative action admissions policies ‘fly In the face of our colorblind Constitution’.
‘Two discriminatory wrongs can not make a right’, wrote Thomas.
In her dissent to the majority, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the ruling ‘truly a tragedy for us all’.
Her fellow liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said, ‘Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress’.
Sotomayor, calling the ruling ‘profoundly wrong’ and ‘devastating’, said that the majority ‘holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits’.
In doing so, she argued the Supreme Court ‘cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter’.
Thursday’s ruling dealt with two separate, but related cases, one for Harvard, the other for UNC.
In the Harvard case, the vote on the decision was 6-2, with Jackson taking no part in considering the case. Jackson last year during her Senate confirmation hearings agreed to recuse herself in the case involving Harvard, whose Board of Overseers she served on until early 2022.
In the UNC case, the vote was 6-3, with Jackson participating in considering the case and dissenting with Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s third liberal”. -Dan Mangan, CNBC
Considering how Jews have been classified as white by the universities and have received the most preferential treatment by the admissions offices, it’s no surprise why admissions offices have defined Jewish identity downward to try to conceal their anti-European discriminatory practices for decades.
Furthermore, in an ironic turn of events, with two-thirds of American colleges and universities reporting that they collect more female than male applicants, the standards for admission to today’s most selective schools are likely stiffer for women, despite their minority status, than men.
Now that the pendulum has observably swung too far the other way, it wouldn’t come as a tremendous shock to discover that all along, the decline in the propensity for Caucasian boys to attend higher education was actually an indication of the decreasing value of a college degree rather than the increasing power of women and ethnic minorities.