U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch: What is Harvard’s view on how long this will take?
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Harvard Lawyer Seth P. Waxman: Harvard’s view about when doesn’t have a date on it.
— Oral Arguments, U.S. Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Monday, October 31, 2022, page 83, page 85, transcript
For at least 50 years, Harvard University has favored some students over others on the basis of race.
That’s disgusting and wrong.
Affirmative action was once sold as a temporary fix to certain imbalances in society. But that was always a lie. Harvard officials, for instance, had no intention of ever ending it, as the exchange quoted above shows.
In the meantime, whites have suffered. But not as much as Asians – especially the 11.1 percent who would have gotten in if not for their race.
But there’s something even worse than that. (After all, not going to Harvard can be the greatest thing that ever happens to some people.)
That worse thing is the message Harvard’s admission policies have sent – that it’s O.K. and even somehow morally correct to segregate applicants by race and make decisions that are heavily influenced by race.
That’s pernicious. It takes something none of us can control – who are ancestors are and what we look like – and makes it a controlling factor for no good reason.
It also violates the spirit and letter of the United States Constitution.
“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” Chief Justice John Roberts writes in today’s majority decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The outcome-based nature of Harvard’s decision-making has been obvious. As Roberts points out, admissions officers at Harvard made sure they fixed the percentages of students admitted by race. A breakdown of admissions for the classes of 2009 to 2018 shows that African-Americans made up between 10 and 12 percent of every class, and Asian-Americans between 17 and 20 percent of every class.
“For all the talk of holistic and contextual judgments, the racial preferences at issue here in fact operate like clockwork,” Roberts writes in a footnote.
He also rightly trashes the dissent of the three liberal justices, noting that what they want is “a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin.”
“While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue,” Roberts writes. “In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is ‘inherently unequal,’ said Brown. … It depends, says the dissent.”
There is a back door for Harvard, though. The court’s decision applies to schools that take federal funding.
Now, Harvard doesn’t need federal funding. For that matter, with an endowment of $53 billion, Harvard doesn’t need to charge tuition.
If Harvard insists on judging people in part on the basis of their skin color, it may continue doing so on its own dime.
And may serious scholars of whatever race go somewhere else.
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