The Supreme Court has announced that it will hear two lawsuits related to discrimination against white and Asian applicants by Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
The first is the oldest private university in America, the second is a public one, and both of them have long and openly applied racial criteria in the selection of applicants, so the decisions of the Supreme Court in both cases promise to be very resonant.
The University of North Carolina evaluates candidates on forty different criteria, most of them highly subjective. Objective measures, such as matriculation or entrance exam scores, are by no means the only ones today, and perhaps not the most important ones. Therefore, the race of a candidate, although taken into account, is only rarely the decisive factor in the admission decision, defendants argue.
However, the subjective criteria adopted by the selection committees, for example, the purposefulness or civic activity of the candidate, positively correlate with the “correct” color of his skin. Therefore, it is almost impossible for Harvard or USC to accept a determined and civic-minded white or Asian with an average GPA and a mediocre GC and reject a black or Hispanic with an excellent GPA and an outstanding GC, but not sufficiently motivated or civic-engaged. Subjective criteria allow receivers, as they say, “walk around the buffet” to the fullest.
When we talk about an average certificate or a mediocre EG, we mean those only according to the standards of Harvard and USC. Exactly the same results in less prestigious universities would be considered simply excellent.
However, as the great African American Brown professor Glen Lowry has repeatedly pointed out, if a black student makes it into the top 20 percent of applicants, then his chance of enrolling in Harvard is higher than 50/50. chances of enrollment do not exceed five percent. Therefore, in order to be accepted into an elite university, he must demonstrate results that are much more impressive than black or “brown”, as Latino candidates are called in the admissions committees.
According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, administrators at Harvard and USC monitor in real time the racial composition of candidates who pass the selection, and if it does not pull up to the politically correct acceptable norm, then the selection standards are flexibly lowered.
In 2003, the Supreme Court found nothing offensive to the Constitution in the policy of reverse discrimination practiced by the University of Michigan’s law school, if its declared goal is “to ensure the maximum racial diversity of students.” Another question is whether the desire to racially diversify the student body justifies reverse discrimination, or if racial diversity is already declared such a desirable goal, then whether it should not be achieved in other non-discriminatory ways. Many courts are convinced that it does not, and that racial preferences in minority admissions are acceptable only when the institution seeks to atone for the historical sin of preferences given to the white majority in the past.
Newspaper headline:
SC to hear discrimination claims against white and Asian students