Supreme Court Should Just End College Affirmative Action
The justices have been splitting hairs for decades to dodge a 1964 civil rights law that plainly bans discrimination on the basis of race. They can correct that mistake now.
Just look up, justices.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAfter years of controversy, the Supreme Court is finally going to take up whether colleges and universities are routinely discriminating against Asian-American applicants and, if so, whether they may keep doing it. Even now, it is showing no great haste at remedying the possible injustice. It is probably going to hear the case next fall.
The court has ruled on many previous cases involving colleges’ affirmative-action policies. The justices typically write many pages on the practical consequences of different policies and on philosophical questions about what fairness prospective students are due. They work in the occasional pronouncement about grand questions of constitutional meaning. And they argue over very fine points about how race-conscious the admissions office can be. In 2016, for example, justices disagreed about whether the University of Texas was using race in a “narrowly tailored” way and using it to achieve sufficiently “concrete and precise” goals.