Will the Supreme Court turn the tide on racial preferences in higher education?
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CounterCurrent:
We'll See You in Court, After All
Will the Supreme Court turn the tide on racial preferences in higher education?
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, bringing you the biggest issues in academia and our responses to them.
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Category: Racial Preferences; Reading Time: ~2 minutes
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** Featured Article - Anti-Asian Discrimination at the Heart of the Progressive Education Agenda by Wenyuan Wu ([link removed])
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Three weeks into January, the spring semester is now in full swing on most campuses. Questions still remain about the shape the semester will take—especially for those who have found themselves in Zoom classrooms yet again. But for the most part, students and faculty across the country are back to the grindstone (and perhaps counting the days until summer break).
For college applicants, the start of the semester brings with it a different type of waiting. After spending months working on application materials, there is now nothing left to do but watch as the admissions decisions roll in. National College Decision Day is on May 1st, but schools will send out acceptances and rejections in waves before then.
Unfortunately for Asian-American applicants, racial preferences in higher education ([link removed]) mean the deck is stacked against them from the start—and it’s been that way for a long time. Colleges and even high schools across the country have been openly working to decrease the number of Asian Americans walking their halls for years now.
Why do I bring this up again? Because the injustice these students face is a perennial issue, and the injury deepens every semester that discriminatory admissions policies remain in place. But also because there are several new developments that suggest the regime of racial preferences in academia may be on the verge of collapse—or at least, it’s on significantly shakier ground than we’ve seen in some time.
Last month, National Association of Scholars Communications & Research Associate David Acevedo wrote to you in these pages ([link removed]) about the Students for Fair Admissions’ (SFFA) lawsuits against the University of North Carolina and Harvard. Despite hard evidence that both schools were engaging in blatant racial discrimination, lower courts ruled in favor of the university in both cases, arguing that their “holistic” admissions processes satisfied tests established by the Supreme Court. Their decisions relied on two primary cases: Regents of the University of California v. Bakke ([link removed]) (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger ([link removed]) (2003). Together, these cases upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions provided the process is “narrowly tailored” to achieve “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” Undeterred, SFFA responded by appealing
the cases to the Supreme Court (the NAS submitted amicus briefs supporting SFFA in both the UNC ([link removed]) and Harvard ([link removed]) appeals).
In spite of the Biden administration’s brief ([link removed]) urging the Court to dismiss the cases and leave the race-based policies untouched, SCOTUS announced yesterday ([link removed]) that it will hear challenges to both UNC and Harvard’s admissions policies. The two cases will be combined into one case in which the Court will formally reconsider its ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger. If the Court overturns Grutter, colleges across the country will be forced to revise their race-based admissions policies or else face legal challenges of their own.
The announcement comes at a time when admissions officials are more brazen than ever about the discriminatory motivations behind their decisions. Just this month, school board members in Fairfax County—home to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the top-performing public high school in the nation—openly admitted ([link removed]) that their new admissions policy was designed to target Asian students. Board members Abrar Omeish and Stella Pekarsky exchanged the following damning text messages about the new policy:
Pekarsky: “It will whiten our schools and kick [out] our Asians. How is that achieving the goals of diversity?”
Omeish: “I mean there has been an anti asian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol.”
Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation ([link removed]) , catalogs “the nonchalant bigotry of the establishment educrats” in this week’s featured article ([link removed]) . She lays out both the quantitative evidence and the first-person testimony that demonstrates the widespread discrimination against Asians in American higher education. “Anti-racist discrimination,” she reminds us, “is not a victimless offense.” Wu continues:
A glaring skeleton in the closet of American education is its intentional and long-established discrimination against Asian Americans, both in college admissions and in access to quality K-12 education. ...
Like a parasite overtaking its host, the woke dogma of diversity, equity and inclusion has operated through unjustifiable penalties against an inherently diverse and dynamic racial minority group. ‘Give us more diversity, and just remember: we want fewer Asians because their statistically significant excellence in academics insults the progressive pursuit of mediocrity. Also, their non-Western faces don’t enhance diversity.’
The Supreme Court has propped up racial discrimination in this country for over four decades. It’s time for a new ruling to turn the tide.
Until next week.
Marina Ziemnick
Communications Associate
National Association of Scholars
Read More ([link removed])
For more on racial preferences and higher education:
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November 17, 2020
** Surprise! Americans Oppose Discrimination ([link removed])
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John Rosenberg
When you spell out what "affirmative action" actually entails, Americans of every stripe vote against it. Race and sex preferences only pass when lawmakers obfuscate their true meaning.
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May 26, 2020
** Testing Affirmative Action ([link removed])
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George W. Dent and Hal R. Arkes
The Supreme Court has held that courts must strictly scrutinize systems that give preferences to people based on their race. Judges need to insist on disaggregated data and evidence that a university has truly proven that “diverse” classrooms lead to better education.
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April 12, 2019
** Racial Preferences at Texas Tech ([link removed])
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National Association of Scholars
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights negotiated an end to racial preferences at the Texas university. What does it say about the future of these policies at other schools?
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June 25, 2018
** A Ceiling on Asian Student Enrollment at MIT and Harvard? ([link removed])
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Ashley Thorne
A new study, Too Many Asian Americans, provides evidence for racial discrimination in college admissions.
** About the NAS
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