The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College signal the end of “affirmative action” in higher education.
Chief Justice John Roberts pilloried the liberal dissenters and “[t]he repeated demands that race-based admissions programs must end go overlooked — contorted, worse still, into a demand that such programs never stop.”
“Most troubling of all,” Roberts continued, “is what the dissent must make these omissions to defend: a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is ‘inherently unequal,’ said Brown. 347 U. S., at 495 (emphasis added). It depends, says the dissent.”
Back here at home, the deans of New Jersey’s public law school unsurprisingly lined up with the minority and admitted to being “disappointed” by SCOTUS’s obvious conclusion that reverse racism is still discrimination.
“Rutgers Law School’s core values include advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our admissions process, and we will continue to pursue those goals through legally permissible means as we have done throughout our history,” Kimberly Mutcherson, Rose Cuison-Villazor, and Johanna Bond declared in a joint statement. “The richness of our student body is a critical element of the education that we provide to our graduates, hundreds of whom are first-generation college and/or law students. We create access to higher education to students who face significant barriers in their journeys to law school. And we strive to build a community in which learning happens inside and outside of our classrooms as our students learn from and challenge each other and our faculty.”
“This kind of engagement is foundational to creating a diverse legal profession and, ultimately, producing the lawyers and leaders who help to build the equal society that we all yearn for and which has not yet been achieved,” the deans added.
What those “means” might look like wasn’t elaborated upon.
In his own statement, Governor Phil Murphy – who substantial extended tuition assistance to illegal aliens during his tenure in office – condemned the opinion and promised that he would “remain committed to working with our partners in higher ed to find ways to promote equitable admissions in New Jersey.”
