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.”
“Of course, because Harvard is populated with woke ideologues who lack a grasp of objective merit, they will fight back, and further campaigns will be needed to quell their noncompliance. But a positive decision will give us legal precedent to do what we need to do to restore colorblind treatment of individuals,” Xu told The Daily Wire prior to the court’s decision.
Dr. Lance Izumi, director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Education, hailed the court’s decision as a step in the right direction.
“This decision underscores that constitutional rights adhere to all Americans and cannot be ignored, even for good intentions,” Izumi told The Daily Wire. “Harvard and UNC used subjective factors like personality traits to stereotype Asians and discriminate against them in the admissions process, despite Asian applicants having the highest objective academic ratings. Asian Americans, as the Supreme Court emphasized, are not just a generic group, but come from a huge range of diverse cultures.”
Izumi added that the real systemic problem is not systemic racism but the K-12 public schools that are “failing underrepresented minority students.”
“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.