Does the pursuit of admissions diversity by Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate civil rights laws? Supreme Court to decide.
Following last term’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade and an expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are moving now to sharply limit or strike down affirmative action at colleges and universities.On Monday, the court will hear challenges to the “race conscious” admissions policies at Harvard, the nation’s oldest private college, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the oldest state university.
But the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., have argued in recent years that in order to comply with the Constitution and 1960s-era civil rights laws, admissions policies should be “colorblind” and “race neutral.” “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote in a 2007 decision that ended a high school diversity policy in Seattle.
Civil rights leaders said they fear the court could close the door of opportunity to the next generation of students of color. The group says its mission is “to restore the original principles of our nation’s civil rights movement: A student’s race and ethnicity should not be factors that either harm or help that student to gain admission to a competitive university.”
The suit against Harvard said it should devote more time and money to recruiting and admitting talented students from low-income families, including Black and Latino people, and give less preference to children of Harvard alumni and donors, who tend to be white and affluent. In their suit, challengers alleged that Harvard systematically discriminated against Asian Americans, who tend to score high on academic measures but low on the school’s “personal rating,” which considers factors such as “leadership, integrity, self-confidence and likeability.”
UNC has a similar admissions policy that seeks to overcome a history of racial exclusion. It did not admit its first Black students until 1955, a year after the Supreme Court struck down state-enforced segregation. And even with its affirmative action policy, Black students remain underrepresented at Chapel Hill.Opinion polls show that most Americans support racial diversity at colleges, but oppose the use of race as an admissions factor.