![]() Third: there must be some point at which racial preferences in admissions will come to an end. Second, no insulating some ethnic groups from competition against others ethnic groups. The notion adopted in Bakke and Grutter that schools can discriminate to achieve diversity, writes Chief Justice John Roberts, raises “serious problems of justice”-and for that reason, the Grutter case included a number of limits on acceptable “diversity” programs. Today’s decision reiterates that racial discrimination violates our constitutional commitment to the equal protection of the laws. Evidence shows that students “benignly” admitted to colleges their backgrounds haven’t prepared them for are more likely to drop out-and they will never be able to avoid the stigma of being an “affirmative action case.” Nor are such racial preferences a real benefit even to their recipients. In fact, Harvard officials worked quite hard to discriminate against Asian students, often concealing its discriminatory policies under the disguise of vague “personality” tests. Under the school’s admissions policies, for example, black students whose test scores fell in the fourth decile were more likely to be admitted than Asian students in the first decile. As today’s ruling makes clear, Harvard’s discrimination was quite unjustifiable. The problem, of course, is that discriminating in favor of someone based on race necessarily means discriminating against another person based on race, at least when you’re talking about the chance of being one of the tiny number (about 4,000) of students admitted to a place like Harvard. Limited as that seemed to be, advocates of race preferences saw Grutter as permission to engage in racial balancing across the board. The court held that judges would defer to the choices of university administrators as to whether counting race as a criterion for admission was the best way to “diversify” the student body-and it set a 25-year deadline for the end of race-based admissions. But since the 1970s, universities devoted to racial balancing have seized upon it, even creating entire offices at their schools devoted to this “diversity.” Then in the Grutter case in 2003, the court gave that “diversity” rationale a boost. That idea has long been regarded as suspicious, in part because only one justice in the Bakke case even bought the theory to begin with. Bakke (1978) have given rise to the theory that colleges can discriminate based on race if they’re doing so in order to increase “diversity”-that is, if they’re attempting to balance the racial population in the school in order, or so it is said, to improve the educational experience. It might seem obvious that the answer is no, but legal precedents such as University of California v. The only question was whether that discrimination-which the colleges claimed was done for “benign” reasons-was tolerable under the legal rules that forbid either public universities like UNC, or private universities that receive government funding, such as Harvard, to discriminate based on race. There was never any real dispute that Harvard and UNC discriminated based on race when choosing which students to admit. … Our constitutional history does not tolerate that.” The ruling is a vindication of the principle that people should be rewarded or punished for their own actions, not for those of their ancestors-and it brings us closer to the day when the Declaration of Independence’s principles are made a reality. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. Each student, the court said, “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual-not on the basis of race. Harvard, the justices declared that the race-based admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional. Supreme Court this morning reminded Americans of the significance of the nation’s most basic principle: that all men are created equal. Just in time for Independence Day, the U.S.
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