Ending Affirmative Action Won’t Stop The University System’s Racist Admissions Practices
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, ending racist affirmative action policies, is a blow to the anti-American, discriminatory ideals of the modern left and a win for equality and our Constitution. As Justice Clarence Thomas stated in his concurrence, the decision upholds the Fourteenth Amendment. “In the wake of the Civil War,” wrote Thomas, “the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment charted a way out: a colorblind Constitution that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.”
The ruling is a very positive step in the right direction. However, it, unfortunately, does not mean universities’ racial discrimination will end.
Harvard, one of the institutions involved in the Supreme Court case, already issued a statement asserting that it will continue to discriminate based on race in spite of the Court’s ruling. “The Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” reads the statement. “The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions ‘an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.’ We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.” “[D]iversity,” continues the statement, is “essential to academic excellence.”
One of America’s most famous and supposedly “premier” institutions of higher learning couldn’t be more wrong. Intelligence is the most essential component of academic excellence. That’s why it’s crucial to understand academic excellence is not Harvard’s goal. “The goal of the modern university is not education of the nation’s best and brightest,” writes Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist. “The goal is indoctrination and credentialing. The corrupt university cartel is not going to suddenly do a 180 on its obvious goals because of a pesky court decision[] telling it to stop being racist. They’re going to be even more race- and identity-obsessed going forward, but now they’ll start trying to hide it better.”
Abolishing Measures of Intelligence
One of the university system’s best mechanisms for covertly carrying out affirmative action is the elimination of GPA and ACT and SAT testing requirements in applications. Harvard and the University of North Carolina (the second institution involved in the Supreme Court case) already do not require standardized testing for admissions, and more will follow suit.
Universities claim that getting rid of measures of intelligence allows them to view applicants “holistically,” meaning that they can curate their ideal campus based on immutable qualities like race, sex, sexual orientation, and supposed “gender identity,” not merit.
Those opposed to the Court’s ruling are already encouraging institutions to throw out all quantifiers for mental acuity. “Supreme Court’s Rejection of Race-Conscious College Admissions Heightens Need for Eliminating Use of Standardized Tests in Admissions; Holistic Process Necessary to Maintain Diversity and Justice,” reads a headline from Fairtest, an organization seeking to help “women, low-income students, and underrepresented minorities” by ending universities’ “overreliance on tests.”
The Next Step Is Ideological Discrimination
For decades, universities have been inhibiting intellectual diversity by hiring almost exclusively leftists professors, mandating students participate in cultural Marxist diversity trainings, establishing critical theory departments (as if critical theory was akin to physics or history and not drenched in ideology), and overall creating a campus culture that ostracizes any idea or person deviating from the left-wing orthodoxy.
Conservative students are told by professors and students alike that their opinions are “hateful” and not worthy of classroom discussion. Ultimately, most campus conservative professors and students are bullied into silence.
The intolerance may have reached new heights with political admission discrimination. Left-wing students at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, actively encourage the administration not to admit right-leaning students lest our university educate and enable another “Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley.”
For all we know, universities are already discriminating against applicants who were part of conservative clubs in high school or wrote an admissions essay with a right-leaning message. That’s why these supposed “holistic” evaluations are so nefarious. They allow universities to deploy opaque and discriminatory admissions practices based on immutable qualities under the guise of “fairness.”
We already have numerous examples of universities overtly discriminating against incoming conservative college students who made politically charged statements and saw their admissions either threatened to be revoked or actually revoked. In 2020, Marquette University almost revoked the admission of incoming student Samantha Pfefferle because she posted several benign TikToks in support of then-President Donald Trump. “The content you are pushing out has created this environment that is contrary to a learning environment that we hope our students are engaged in,” Associate Dean of Students Erin Lazzar told Pfefferle.
Rejecting The Pursuit Of Truth
Universities are no longer interested in the pursuit of knowledge. If they were, they’d accept students based on academic achievement and quit hindering free speech. Instead, universities are vehicles for political change. In the late-20th century, institutions of higher learning were commandeered by Marxist critical theorists; these radical professors and students were able to seamlessly throw the pursuit of truth out the window in part due to the absence and eschewing of Christianity at universities across the nation.
Non-religious and eventually religious schools were given a new god, the god of social justice. Critical theorists created nonsensical fields of study, like ethnic studies, women’s studies, gender studies, queer theory, and feminist media studies — all of which hide a secular-Marxist worldview behind a veil of identitarian grievance. The activists put their ideology on the same pedestal as genuine fields of study and bullied older and wiser academics into giving their false disciplines credibility, lest they be branded as bigots.
The tactics have not changed. For decades now, universities have been cosplaying as schools, rejecting truth and annihilating intellectual diversity. They are designed to produce students with one type of political ideation so that after graduation, they go out into the rest of the world and further the cultural Marxist revolution in every sector of American society.
In other words, the problems are embedded in universities and cannot be fixed by a Supreme Court ruling.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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