AFP, published Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 4:35 p.m.
The very conservative US Supreme Court on Thursday put an end to affirmative action programs at the university, a new historic reversal a year after its abortion reversal.
Contrary to the opinion of the three progressives, its six conservative judges ruled that campus admissions procedures based on the color or ethnic origin of the candidates were unconstitutional.
Many universities “have mistakenly assumed that the basis of a person’s identity is not their credentials, skills acquired, or knowledge gained, but the color of their skin. Our constitution does not condone this,” Magistrate John Roberts wrote on behalf of the university by majority.
“In other words, the student should be treated on the basis of their individual experience, not on a racial basis,” he adds.
Several highly selective universities had introduced racial and ethnic criteria into their admissions procedures in the late 1960s to correct inequalities resulting from the United States’ segregationist past and to increase the proportion of black, Hispanic, or Native American students in their enrollment.
These measures, known as “positive discrimination”, have always been heavily criticized in conservative circles, as they consider them to be non-transparent and regard them as “reverse racism”.
The Supreme Court, which has been referred to on several occasions since 1978, had banned quotas but always authorized universities to take racial criteria into account, among other things. So far, she has considered striving for more diversity on campus to be “legitimate,” even if it violates the principle of equality for all American citizens.
On Thursday, progressive judges were deeply touched by this about-face.
The court “looks back on decades of jurisprudence and tremendous progress,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote on her behalf. It “consolidates an artificial rule of color indifference as a constitutional principle in a highly segregated society where race has always been and will continue to be important,” she reiterated.
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This ruling follows a lawsuit filed in 2014 against the oldest private and public universities in the United States, Harvard and North Carolina.
At the head of a group called Students for Fair Admission, a neocon activist, Edward Blum, had accused them of discriminating against Asian students. The latter, whose academic performance is well above average, would be more numerous on campus if their performance was the sole selection criterion, he argued.
After suffering multiple defeats in court, he turned to the Supreme Court, which ironically has never been more diverse than it is today, with two African American judges and one Hispanic judge.
But the Supreme Court was fundamentally transformed by Donald Trump and now has six out of nine conservative justices, including African-American Justice Clarence Thomas, an advocate of affirmative action programs that he nonetheless benefited from to study at the prestigious Yale University.
The administration of Democratic President Joe Biden had advocated the status quo in vain. “The future of our country depends on its ability to have leaders with different profiles, capable of leading an increasingly diverse society,” his representative said.
Likewise, large companies, including Apple, General Motors, Accenture or Starbucks, had pointed out that “a diverse workforce improves their performance” and that they “rely on schools across the country to train their future employees”.