Supreme Court ends race quota program on US universities

Students at Washington Adventist University look at their phones as news of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action is released outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building on June 29, 2023 in Washington, DC.

a The Supreme Court of the United States closed, This Thursday, the twenty-ninth, by six votes to three, Program racial quotas and campus admission procedures based on applicants’ skin color or ethnicity. Justice John Roberts wrote, “A student shall be treated on the basis of his experience as an individual and not on the basis of his race.” This historic decision comes a year after a setback for abortion rights. Conservative judges believe that universities are free to consider an applicant’s personal experience, for example whether they have experienced racism, when comparing their application with others. But they argue that deciding primarily on whether black or white is not allowed, is racist and would be unconstitutional. “Our constitutional history does not condone this option,” Roberts added. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy He estimated that the end of affirmative action restores “equality”. On Thursday, progressive judges said they were upset with the ruling. Court ‘reflects decades of case law and tremendous progress’Written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “By doing so,” he wrote, “the Court is enshrining a superficial rule of ‘indifference to skin color’ as a constitutional principle in a society endemic in apartheid.”

Many highly selective universities introduced racial and ethnic criteria into their admissions procedures in the late 1960s to correct disparities caused by America’s segregated past and to increase the proportion of black, Hispanic, or Native American students in their classes. This policy, known as affirmative action, has long been widely criticized in conservative circles. The Supreme Court has ruled against affirmative action on several occasions since 1978, but has always allowed universities to take racial and other criteria into account. Until now, I’d considered it “legitimate” to seek greater diversity on campus. The new decision stems from a lawsuit filed in 2014 against the oldest public and private universities in the United States: Harvard and the University of North Carolina..

A neoconservative activist, Edward Bloom, led an association called Students for Equitable Admissions and accused them of discriminating against Asian students. He said Asian students, whose academic results are well above average, would be more numerous on college campuses if their performance was the only selection criterion. After several court defeats, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which, ironically, had never been as diverse as it is now, with two black and one Hispanic justices. Former Republican President Donald Trump This court has been radically reformed, and now includes six conservative justices out of a total of nine, including African American Clarence Thomas, a critic of affirmative action programs who took advantage of it to study at the prestigious Yale University. Administration of the Democratic President Joe Biden Vainly defend the status quo. on the same line, Large companies like Apple, General Motors, Accenture, and Starbucks have asserted that “having a diverse workforce improves performance.” and that they “rely on the country’s schools to train their future employees.”

* With information from AFP