In a 2007 Supreme Court decision involving a school district in Seattle, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Its recent acceptance of two cases, one against Harvard University and the other against the University of North Carolina, gives the court a chance to stop finally a morally indefensible practice that has become common in universities and colleges across the country: discriminating in their admissions on the basis of race.
In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions filed two lawsuits: one against Harvard, the nation’s oldest private university, the other against UNC, the nation’s oldest public university. The lawsuits claimed that the schools’ admissions policies violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment because they discriminate against Asian-American students applying for admission.
