Against Country-Club Colleges

This June, pointing to both the plain language of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court ruled race-based college admissions unconstitutional. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

The college–industrial complex immediately announced its intent to subvert the ruling. Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to argue that colleges shouldn’t “help promote the covert segregationist agenda of a reactionary faction of the court.” The American Education Research Association insisted, rather bizarrely, that “the Court did not expressly overrule prior rulings that allow race as a factor in admission.” Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said: “No matter what this court says, nothing can deprive us of what we call a race conscious future.” The Washington Post editorial board helpfully floated work-arounds, such as eliminating merit-based scholarships and favoring applicants who claim “challenges relating to their race.”

Continue reading at National Review.