“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.”
The above was submitted as an application essay to what was then, and is still, considered one of the world’s top institutions of higher education, Harvard University. The essay, a mere five sentences, helped get future president John F. Kennedy into Harvard and effectively ensured that the young well-to-do Kennedy had access to the ivy league institution's powerful alumni network and the “enviable distinction” associated.
Elite universities have come to represent not only the best education money can buy, but also a means to acquire social status, mobility, and capital. Historically speaking, however, these spaces were reserved for white men. This began to change in the 1960s, as laws addressing racial inequalities and exclusion took effect and workplaces and college campuses nationwide began to become somewhat more representative of the country. This practice and body of laws and policies that take into consideration aspects of a person’s identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and veteran status, when it comes to allotment of employment and educational opportunities and resources, is known as affirmative action.
In the education sphere, affirmative action's first iteration incorporated quotas to ensure that Black students were admitted into universities, but after Regents of The University of California v. Bakke outlawed this practice, universities nationwide began using a holistic approach in the admissions process, meaning they focused on numerous factors when determining if a student should be admitted into a university or not. In some instances, one of the factors they consider is race—along with other factors such as home region, school, legal status, and class—in an effort to produce a diverse environment composed of students from different backgrounds. In turn, this allows for students to be exposed to the ideologies and backgrounds of those different from them.
On October 31, 2022, this practice of considering race in college admissions was challenged, in two cases brought before the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of affirmative action. Both cases were brought forth by Students for Fair Admissions and claim that the use of affirmative action, in elite universities such as UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard respectively, are in violation of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause and 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits schools receiving federal funds from race-based discrimination. What made the Harvard case particularly notable, however, were the Asian-American plaintiffs being represented by SFFA. They argued that they were denied admission into Harvard—and similar institutions—because they, as Asian-American applicants, are held to higher academic standards than Black or Latino students, and are often given low personal rating scores due to the racial biases of admissions officers.
Since its inception in the 60s, affirmative action has been at the center of four SCOTUS cases, with the most recent one in 2016, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, being funded by Edward Blum, the founder, and mastermind behind the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Blum has a storied history of bringing cases before the Supreme Court and notably sponsored Shelby v. Holder, the landmark case that curtailed vital voting rights protections. After an unfavorable ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas, Blum actively and explicitly sought out Asian-American plaintiffs to continue the effort of undermining affirmative action and achieved his goal, the Harvard case that Blum sponsored via SFFA is the first time a minority plaintiff has challenged affirmative action.
SFFA in oral arguments argued that in place of race-conscious admissions universities should utilize socioeconomic factors to achieve their aims of creating a diverse student body. This approach, however, has been already attempted and has produced unsatisfactory results. Nine states (Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Washington) have banned Affirmative Action in public institutions. When affirmative action bans took effect in California and Michigan respectively, the University of California (UC) system (home to academic powerhouses like UCLA and UC Berkeley) and the University of Michigan began using the socioeconomic status of a student as a proxy for race and stated in documents submitted to the court in support of the continued usage of affirmative action, that the usage of socioeconomic status was ineffective in increasing student body diversity even with the aid of robust recruitment efforts.
Despite this, SFFA and opponents of affirmative action continue to argue that affirmative action is reverse discrimination and thus unfair—and that by accepting seemingly unqualified students into academically rigorous environments, universities are setting students up for failure and in doing so are robbing students who are qualified of a spot.
Such arguments present several weaknesses. For one, these arguments are rarely interested in examining the systemic factors that go into how and why the public US education system produced so-called “unqualified” students. They do not ask who created the metrics used to decide if a student is worthy of being in certain spaces to have access to knowledge or resources, nor do they seem to acknowledge the racialized way it continues to code students as deserving of opportunities by labeling them as “qualified” and “unqualified.”
In addition to this, contentious arguments about affirmative action in the public often misplace blame on historically excluded groups rather than on the demographic of students that do get preferential treatment in college admissions. Students that are classified as legacy (students whose family members previously attended the same institution, such as JFK), athletes, dean's list, and children of professors (known as ALDC), have an admittance rate of 45% into elite schools despite only comprising roughly 6% of the applicant pool. But this is rarely categorized as an issue in the mainstream. Instead, rhetoric about Black, Latino, and Indigenous students only being admitted to elite universities because of affirmative action are perpetuated. SFFA in bringing forth the Harvard case treats Asian Americans as a monolith and perpetuates the harmful model minority myth, all in an effort to stoke racial divides and weaponize racial anxieties to upend affirmative action for the benefit of white students and dare I say to reinstate white order.
There is this false notion that affirmative action only helps Black people, when in fact white women, in education and employment, have been the biggest benefactors of affirmative action. Affirmative action, if allowed to reach its full potential, is in the best interest of everyone. A more diverse and inclusive learning and working environment allows for material and ideological innovation and progress, and affirmative action creates the space for this to occur. Affirmative actions is by no means perfect and it is not the end-all solution for discrimination, but it is asinine to suggest that it is unnecessary or improper for a student to share how aspects of their identity have informed the way they engage and understand the world around them.
In my view, opponents of affirmative action such as Blum, who have spent significant amounts of money and energy in trying to destroy affirmative action, should do two things. First, they should focus their energy on asking themselves why they find the idea of a diverse learning environment, with diverse people, so dangerous. Isn’t the whole goal of education to make people critical and independent thinkers? And second, they should perhaps come to terms with the reality that despite outward appearances and proclamations, the United States is not a meritocracy. Just because one has done everything right on paper and has outstanding scores does not mean they are guaranteed or owed anything.
But that last part is just my opinion.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.