RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/supreme-court-ends-affirmative-action-will-universities-defy-the-ruling

With its ruling that Harvard and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC) unconstitutionally discriminated against Asian applicants, the Supreme Court has delivered justice. Congratulations and thanks are due to the plaintiff in these cases, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), as well as to its president Edward Blum, for mounting a tireless, principled fight.

Universities, however, have made no secret that, regardless of how the Court ruled, they would continue to bring to campus students who wouldn’t have made the cut if they hadn’t been black. It is axiomatic for universities that a campus with “not enough blacks”—whatever that means—is guilty. It is the only acceptable starting point of any discussion. The universities believe, moreover, that “diversity” of student skin color—meaning having “enough,” but not “too much” of any particular group, whatever that means—can only be achieved by racial favoritism in admissions. Why are colleges able to achieve other forms of diversity without quotas or favoritism, such as diversity of religion, which the counsel for UNC conceded to the Supreme Court thrives on campus without favoritism? This question is off limits.

So if the Court won’t allow universities to take race into account, then the universities will look for other ways to do so. Some have even advocated open disobedience of this “ultra-MAGA” Supreme Court, as the White House has called it.

How can universities do an end-run around the Supreme Court? The University of California (UC) system’s recent actions are instructive. In 1995, the UC regents voted to end affirmative action, and in 1996, Golden State voters approved Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in public education, contracting, and hiring. Legislators subsequently tried and failed several times to restore affirmative action. Then, in 2019, UC president Janet Napolitano convened a faculty task force to evaluate the continued use of standardized testing in admissions. The UC faculty is well known for its devotion to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) cause. However, after a year-long study, the task force gave the sober recommendation to keep the standardized test requirement. Undeterred, Napolitano ordered the UC system to go test-optional anyway. White and Asian families soon realized that “test optional” really applied only to blacks, Hispanics, and some other groups, but not to them. Then, in 2021, the UC system went “test blind,” meaning that, even if an applicant submitted SAT scores, UC would disregard them. (Today, following California’s lead, all but a handful of top-tier U.S. universities are test-optional.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-supreme-court-finally-gets-affirmative-action-right/

After 45 years of bad decisions rationalizing discrimination outlawed by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court finally voted 6-3 to end affirmative action and the use of racial preferences in college admissions. This outcome joins the Dobbs vs. Jackson decision last June as another major pushback against activist Supreme Court jurisprudence, and a restoration of the Constitutional guardrails against an overweening federal government that bypasses the sovereign people and impugns their rights.

Racial set-asides were midwifed in the 1978 Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke decision that created by fiat “diversity” as a “compelling state interest” justifying discrimination. Since then various minor adjustments have been made in other decisions such as Grutter vs. Bollinger (2003) and the two Fisher vs. University of Texas cases (2013, 2016), which validated the magical thinking of “diversity” and the “broad state interests” and “educational benefits” it supposedly serves.

None of these decisions addressed the central begged question in affirmative action jurisprudence. As Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in Grutter put it, the majority “refus[ed] to define rigorously the broad state interest” served by “diversity,” and thus demonstrate specifically the “educational benefits that flow from student body diversity,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy said in the second Fisher case.

As a result, over the years “diversity” has metastasized throughout the body politic, from school curricula to entertainment–– and has even reached corporate board rooms in the guise of  “ESG,” environmental, social, and corporate governance guidelines for investment. This expansion has  hollowed out the principle of individual merit, and eroded the notion of individual rights and the virtues of independence and self-reliance. That’s what happens when one branch of the government, the one most unaccountable to the people, enshrines in law a politicized, incoherent idea.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/obamas-say-affirmative-action-allowed-them-prove-we-belonged-college

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on Thursday criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action by stating that they benefited from the policy themselves.

Michelle Obama, who went to Princeton for her bachelor’s degree and Harvard for her J.D., wrote in her statement, which was significantly longer than her husband’s, that she had wondered whether people thought she got into school because of affirmative action. 

“But the fact is this: I belonged,” she also wrote. “So often, we just accept that money, power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level.”

The former first lady also said her “heart breaks for any young person out there who’s wondering what their future holds” after the end of affirmative action. 

Barack Obama only wrote three sentences about the ruling: “Like any policy, affirmative action wasn’t perfect. But it allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged. Now it’s up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve — and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives.”

President Joe Biden also criticized the court’s decision. 

“Discrimination still exists in America,” he said multiple times. 

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump celebrated the ruling.