Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C.
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful, putting the fate of affirmative action in higher education at risk. The court has repeatedly upheld similar programs, most recently in 2016. But recent changes in the court’s membership have made it more conservative, and the challenged programs are almost certain to meet skepticism.
The case against Harvard accused it of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions. Lawyers for Harvard said that the challengers had relied on a flawed statistical analysis and denied that the university discriminated against Asian American applicants. More generally, they said that race-conscious admissions policies are lawful.
“Under established precedent, to achieve the educational benefits that flow from student-body diversity,” they wrote in a brief urging the justices to deny review, “universities may consider race as one factor among many in a full, individualized evaluation of each applicant’s background, experiences and potential contributions to campus life.” In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made more familiar arguments, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones.
The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents. Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal entrepreneur who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court. In the recent suits, the universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard’s favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/politics/supreme-court-affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Have no idea what this SCOTUS is going to do with this. It's been almost 44 years since Bakke.
I can only imagine...
Good morning.
Title VII included the prohibition discrimination based on "gender" (among the other categories), but it seems they had to keep "adding" more to that to underscore the point (i.e., with Title IX that happened in '72). 
"Giveth and then taketh away". 
if you don't move fast, you lose! 
The NYT breaking popped up and I got on it. About a minute or so later, the WaPo one popped up.
And top of the morning to you! 
and a couple other news sites (like CNN or AP), in tabs, and as soon as the breaking comes through, usually (but not always) the news sites tweet it out right away with a link directly to their breaking news articles. Makes it easier to have it ready to post in LBN! 
Thx!
I totally agree that Civil Rights legislation is CORNERSTONE to our democracy. However I'm not convinced that the private universities should be held to the same standard as state-funded ones.
My own experience was at the University of Notre Dame, back in the late 60's and early 70's. At the time Notre Dame had all-male undergraduate enrollment and they were told by the federal government that they had to go co-ed. In other words they had to enroll women in their undergraduate programs. Many ND alumni (all male of course) were totally against this and tried to fight the enrollment of women. The University President Father Ted Hesburgh said "OK fine, then we can never accept federal monies ever again, and the ROTC program needs to be shut down immediately. Our research grants will disappear too. How much are you alumni planning to donate to keep this school operating?" As a result women students were enrolled starting in 1970, so it has been over 50 years as a co-educational school. If Notre Dame had refused the federal monies it would have hurt a lot of educational programs and research funding that has kept it going to this day.
Harvard University has such a rich endowment from alumni and benefactors. I'm not even sure if Harvard accepts federal monies now. But if it does, the funding can be easily replaced by alumni donations to the endowment. I have no doubts that Harvard sees the benefit of enrolling minority students, and I don't believe that is at issue. The problem is the pressure from legacy applicants who are denied a spot, when maybe they weren't good enough students to get in on their own. They believe they would have gotten in if there were fewer minorities and more legacies. In my mind, "fairness" is secondary, because the legacies are trying to skip the line.
