America's Talking - SCOTUS Strikes Down Affirmative Action Policies at Harvard, UNC

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s race-based affirmative action admission policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is the Center Square, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper. We're recording this on Friday, June 30th. Tuesday is July 4th, so I just want to take a moment in which all of our listeners a happy Independence Day. So we had a pretty significant Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court decision this week, Casey, ruling in two separate cases. one, a case against the University of North Carolina, the other against Harvard University. The Supreme Court essentially ruling that their affirmative action admission policies violate the U.S. Constitution. Tell us what this ruling was and what does it mean. Yeah, well said, Dan.

So SCOTUS ruled this week, as you said, in a case about two well-known universities, Harvard and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now, the group suing them is SFFA, which is a student group that has, they claim about 20,000 members. It's nonprofit students for fair admissions. And what they say is that the affirmative action policies at Harvard and UNC are unjust, unfair to white students and Asian students. And the Asian students is kind of an interesting thing we can get it to a little bit in a second. But they've sued, they sued both Harvard, UNC back in 2014, actually. And they actually lost.

They really didn't do well in their quills. court cases at the lower levels, but it did make its way up to the Supreme Court. And really, what was on trial here this week are these affirmative action policies, which are not just at Harvard, not just at UNC, but which have become really the industry standard in higher education, as many people know. The way it works in many places is when you apply, there's kind of a weight applied to your race. And so different races get different weights. Right. Let's explain that a little bit to listeners. Essentially, in efforts to be more diverse, to have more diverse campuses, these affirmative action policies allow students of different races to essentially score better

when it comes to being admitted to universities. Is that I don't feel like I'm explaining that. It's kind of like an algorithm. And so you might imagine if you apply for school, what are they going to consider? They're going to consider your extracurriculars, your SAT score, your GPA, and your interview. And you might say, okay, well, how do we wait? Which of these is most important? Let's say GPA should account for this percentage or should have this much weight. We wouldn't say necessarily that interview in GPA are equally important, right? And different schools might have different ways of weighing them. Some might focus more on the SAT.

Some might focus less. But another variable in this whole equation is your race. And increasingly, the race component was getting weighed heavier and heavier to where test scores, even, you know, two students who were about the same in test scores and GPA and things, the black student would almost always, you know, be weighed more heavily or more favorably, not just a little bit more. So if someone had a test school, maybe 100 points higher on the SAT, they could still be passed up by a black student, even though they had made, you know, maybe had a lot better GPA or something. And the weight varied from school to school.

But just to give context, I mean, I think Yale or Harvard, actually, yeah, it's Harvard in this case. Over half of their admissions were African American students, even though they're only 13% of the U.S. population, right? So you see that this wasn't just a slight tweaking on the edges. And the court were only kind of hinted at it. This is not like, it was not just a temporary thing that gave a slight advantage or, you know, kind of tried to make up a little bit of the gap. It was being weighed so heavily. The Supreme Court said two things.

One, yes, we allowed for this in the past, but it was meant to be temporary. And it was meant to be a very narrow thing, like in very narrow perimeters. And at this point, it's become the norm. It's become just too heavily weighed and too influential. And, you know, a lot of people would say it's racist. because you're basically discriminating against white students and also Asian students, and because Asian students outperform all these groups for the most part. And yet these affirmative action policies, which are supposed to increase racial diversity,

we're actually targeting disproportionately Asian students in a negative way. So it's a very big decision. You can't necessarily, it's not an exaggeration to say this could upend all of admissions, policies in the U.S. So as with many things with the Supreme Court and most things in Washington, D.C., this was viewed as a partisan conservative ruling on behalf of the court. What's the differences here between, just say, generally speaking, Republicans and Democrats. What was their reaction? Yeah, I mean, I think there may be not total surprise, but this is one of those big decisions that everyone feels

the need to react to all the different conservative and liberal groups. Lawmakers on the right were praising this. Those on the left were, and honestly, the mainstream media was pretty pretty partisan on this one and negative. I mean, I think in the New York Times, their initial breaking story was like, you know, Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action. And the subheadline was policy will make campuses more white or something like that. You know, another element of this, though, is people who are pretty critical of Justice Katanji Brown Jackson because she's on the Harvard Board of Overseers.

And she still voted on the case, even though when going through a confirmation hearings, she pledged to recuse herself. And then she kind of found a loophole and said, well, I wasn't voting. on the Harvard case. I was voting on the UNC case. But anyway, I mean, I don't know. I think there could be some, you know, aftermath for her and that, especially as many more conservative justices take fire for their ethical questions. So I think it was maybe a bad time for her to do something ethically dubious. When you look at the votes, you know, the North Carolina case was six to three. And the courts, it was the courts, more conservative members voted to strike down

affirmative action. And all of more liberal members of the court, wrote it against it. So it's definitely, it became a conservative, liberal partisan issue, whether it should be or not. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but the affirmative action thing is just a main feature of how the left views identity politics now. Many Republicans are basically kind of in an old way of thinking and maybe, I'm not saying it's bad, but just kind of a 1990s way of thinking of we should be blind to race and we should treat people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And the left has totally transformed into this very aggressive of identity politics where race is a fundamental part of your identity, you should be as well as

sexuality, but that's a side issue. And it should be talked about all the time. And we should use it to reshape society in a way that's totally equitable for every nuanced, different identity. And so without affirmative action, this is like a key piece of their execution of that way of thinking. One last question for you, Casey, before we wrap up, what's the real world implications of this? Because certainly the courts, whoever, can't go into universities and said, hey, you're using affirmative action to select this student and this student and this student. Is it really going to be, is this going to have a big effect on university admissions policies, you think? I don't know. I think long term it will, but you're right to say that in the short term,

these universities, many of them are chalk full of far left administrators. And so it wouldn't be surprising if they still try to implement the policies, whether there's a law or not, whether they're doing it formally or not, right? But I think what you're going to see is a lot of lawsuits. So if a white student who had a great GPA and good test scores doesn't get admitted or doesn't get a scholarship, he could theoretically, I think, try to sue the school. And then through discovery, find out that there were, you know, plenty of students of other races who performed too much more poorly than him who were admitted. And then if there's emails dug up, I mean, he could probably try to make a case because there is real injury there if he was discriminated against it would be a law student. If those happen all around the country, people do pursue those, then universities could be kind of bullied into. into complying, but this is, it's going to take time to kind of play out.

And these affirmative action policies are not all equal. They're some more severe in some places than others. But I think lawsuits are going to be the only way to really enforce this. I'm sure people will pull back. But the lawsuits will lead to maybe a more of an enforcement on this. So more money for trial lawyers to sum up your three. Yeah, thank you. That's right.

Thanks for that. Well, we'll certainly pay attention to what the ramifications of this lawsuits are across the country, Casey, but we are out of time. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at the center square.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulip. Please subscribe. Thank you for listening.