Here’s George Will on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Two slices:
In the 231 years since its first ruling, the Supreme Court has never sown more confusion than in the 45 years since it first ruled on the subject of race-based decisions in university admissions. On Thursday, the court found Harvard and the University of North Carolina guilty of doing what the court’s earlier rulings have repeatedly given universities muddled semi-permission to do: ignore the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”
The court did not “end” affirmative action. The court cannot stifle, by minutely policing, academia’s determination to continue administering racial preferences (and hence, necessarily, racial disadvantages). Thursday’s decision usefully affirms the principle of racial neutrality at a moment when public- and private-sector institutions are rejecting it.
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Progressives will struggle to ram Thursday’s ruling into their current narrative about the court jeopardizing its legitimacy with rulings counter to majority opinion (e.g., last June’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade). Leave aside the fact that the court, like the Constitution, is not a majoritarian device. But notice this: Racial preferences starkly divide academia from the public, 74 percent of which (including majorities of Democrats and Black Americans) opposes them.
Also writing about Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board. A slice:
No resistance can change the Court’s watershed declaration putting the country back in harmony with the principle of equal treatment at the heart of America’s founding promise. Notwithstanding the paean to equality in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution was flawed owing to slavery. The 14th amendment was passed in 1866 to extend the protections of the law to Americans of all races.
Ward Connerly has thoughts about the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. A slice:
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of equal rights and against race-based affirmative action in college admissions, it is realistic to anticipate some pushback. Change after 60 years rarely comes easy. For my part, and that of the majority who believe in the ideal that has guided America since its inception, this is a time to rejoice, as America will come closer to living in accordance with its creed.
In the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Neil Gorsuch devoted a portion of his concurrence to skewering the absurdities of classifying humans by race.
He notes that college applicants could choose between “American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino; or White” as their race. “Where do these boxes come from?” Gorsuch asks. “Bureaucrats. A federal interagency commission devised this scheme of classifications in the 1970s to facilitate data collection.”
There is nothing preordained or scientific about these categories — which the creators of the classification scheme were careful to point out in the 1970s, as Gorsuch notes. But their warnings have been ignored. As a result, absurdities abound.
Friedman also admits the possibility of even public corporations having charitable aims as their reason for being: “A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services.” Friedman writes, “In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.” This passage demonstrates that Friedman was not opposed to corporations fulfilling what many today would call “social” purposes; his central point was that executives—as employees entrusted with the well-being of the company—are not free to establish and pursue aims independent of those established by their employers (shareholders).
James Hanley warns of “the tyranny of the vanguard”…
… and Charles Oliver reports on an example of such a tyrannical tendency.
