Advocates for eliminating affirmative action hailed the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to scrap race-based criteria in college admissions.
The Supreme Court ruled against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action policies in a decision that will have a profound effect on the admissions processes at universities across the country.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion for the majority.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions had sued the elite schools, accusing them of unfairly factoring race into their admissions processes. The group pointed to the high test scores of Asian-American and white applicants who were rejected.
Students for Fair Admissions celebrated their win Thursday, with the group’s founder Edward Blum saying the decision “marks the beginning of the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation.”
“The polarizing, stigmatizing and unfair jurisprudence that allowed colleges and universities to use a student’s race and ethnicity as a factor to admit or reject them has been overruled. These discriminatory admission practices undermined the integrity of our country’s civil rights laws,” Blum said.
Kenny Xu, the author of “School of Woke,” an upcoming book on Critical Race Theory in K-12 education, said the affirmative action issue is vital for Americans “because it reflects the sense of justice that we want to instill on our children and our children’s children. Justice should be about merit, not the color of your skin.”
Xu, the son of Chinese immigrants, previously successfully lobbied the University of North Carolina to abolish its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring and promotion requirements.
Xu slammed Harvard’s “invidious ‘personality score,’ which they use to viciously attack Asian applicants and smear their accomplishments.”
“If we want all students to have an equal chance for college admission, then the public schools have to improve drastically their performance in getting all students college ready,” Izumi said.
Do No Harm, a group of doctors and others working to protect healthcare from politicized ideologies, said Thursday’s two rulings are also important for medical schools.
“Because of these decisions, medical schools can no longer racially discriminate against applicants,” Do No Harm said in a press release reacting to the court’s decision.