What Big Companies Say About the Harvard Affirmative Action Case
Apple, Ge, Microsoft, and Twitter argue that ‘race-conscious admissions policy’ produces the graduates they need
This May some of America’s most successful companies offered their opinions on the federal lawsuit against Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies. A half century or so ago, a group of this kind might have come out hotly against affirmative action. Racial discrimination in hiring and the workplace was rampant before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. “There was an unwritten law that Black people couldn't work high-skilled jobs, couldn't have no top jobs operating no machine," a Black manufacturing worker in Memphis, Tenn., named Lonnie Roland recalled years later.
Now big companies—the vast majority, anyway—are among the strongest supporters of affirmative action. So it was a victory for them when on Nov. 12 the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston upheld a lower court ruling that Harvard is within its rights to consider race among other factors in selecting a student body.