After over 40 years of ‘positive discrimination’ against White and Asian applicants to American universities, the US Supreme Court ruled today against the controversial race-based policies “affirmative action”, in a 6-3 ruling based on two cases brought by Students For Fair Admissions, challenging the admissions systems used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Henceforth, the policy is now deemed unconstitutional.
The court has ruled that these discriminatory admissions practices are not lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” said the majority Supreme Court opinion. “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
The Court confirmed that institutions like Harvard “automatically awards racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics” – while penalizing White and Asian Americans.
Yahoo! News reports…
The Supreme Court decided Thursday to set new limits on affirmative action, striking down the current race-conscious admissions policies in place at University of North Carolina and Harvard University.
The decision sided in part with Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group that challenged the admissions policies. Members argued that the affirmative action policies at the schools were discriminatory against white and Asian students.
The decision states that admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment.
The decision, however, states that “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”
This alters more than 40 years of legal precedent that supports consideration of race in college admissions.
Institutions that use affirmative action policies take an individual student’s race or ethnicity into account during the college admissions selection process. It rose to popularity in the 1960s to address racial inequities in access to higher education.
The Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in 1978 in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which cemented the place of affirmative action policies in college and university admissions.
The average Black-to-white student graduation rate gap at the top dozen public universities that do not use affirmative action was 10.1%, according to research from the University of California, Los Angeles. The average gap at the top dozen public universities with affirmative action was 6%…
Continue this story at Yahoo! News
READ MORE CULTURE WARS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Culture Wars Files
ALSO JOIN OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL
SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV
