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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina's "affirmative action" admissions programs were unconstitutional, declaring that universities across the United States must stop considering race in admissions. After eight years of litigation and more than five hours of arguments, Phoenix recorded the last hearing of the case.
Author|Jiang Haozhe
From the United States
The nine justices who hold the final say in the U.S. Constitution made a historic ruling on June 29 that the "affirmative action" admissions programs of Harvard University and North Carolina State University were unconstitutional. That means public and private colleges across the country must stop considering race in admissions. The lengthy lawsuit that took eight years has come to an end, and it will profoundly affect opportunities for students of all ethnicities in American higher education. And Phoenix Deep in the United States, recording the heated arguments of the final hearing of the case, the five-hour hearing that has foreshadowed the final fate of the case:
On the last day of October 2022, on First Street in Washington, D.C., a large number of minorities who support equal rights in higher education gathered in front of the US Supreme Court, holding signs such as "Against diversity" and "Unity is strength". More than half of these minorities are Asian-faced, as well as students from top universities like Yale University. Not far away, there is a long queue in front of the Supreme People's Court, where the public is waiting to enter for a hearing open to the public.
This is the last hearing in Harvard's alleged admissions discrimination against Asian-American students, the largest case in decades in the United States higher education.
The lawsuit, which lasted eight years, was plaintiffed by Students for Fair Admissions, which took Harvard University and UNC Chapel Hill to court at North Carolina State University, accusing the former of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminatory policies toward Asian-American applicants in college admissions. The latter is accused of failing to adopt a race-neutral stance in admissions and giving special preferential treatment to African-American, Hispanic and Native American groups.
Initially, the U.S. District Court did not support the plaintiffs.
On September 30, 2019, Judge Allison Burroughs ruled in favor of Harvard, arguing that there was no evidence that Harvard's practices were illegal, although the university did need more training and oversight of admissions committees to reduce the impact of race on admissions.
On October 17, 2021, U.S. District Judge Loretta C. Biggs made the same ruling, stating that although North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill considered race, there was no evidence of discrimination against white American and Asian American students.
Dissatisfied with the judgments, the plaintiffs filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on February 25, 2021, seeking court proceedings for judicial review of the judgments in both cases. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up both cases and completed public oral arguments on October 31, 2022.
It was a debate that lasted more than five hours, more than two hundred minutes beyond the original schedule.
Sitting side by side, nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court wielding the final interpretation of the U.S. Constitution are engaged in a heated debate over "racial preferences" in college admissions. The debate focused on two key questions – whether diversity in education can be achieved without directly taking race into account; The second is when universities should stop making race-based distinctions about applicants.
| On October 7, 2022, local time, members of the Supreme Court took a group photo in the courthouse in Washington, USA.
The final outcome of the debate will not be revealed until June, but the hearing on how the world's top universities should admit students has once again made the issue of racial discrimination a hot topic in the United States and around the world.
Is it discrimination to sacrifice top Asian students to attend U.S. universities to compensate other races? Is this reasonable and legal? Will the U.S. higher education admissions system change as a result of this case in the future?
Phoenix Deep Tune presents the attitude of the justices of the US Supreme Court towards equal rights in higher education through the restoration of the debate and the discussion outside the court.
Debate 1: Are students admitted to top universities "diverse"?
In more than five hours of debate, the word "diversity" was mentioned more than 200 times by justices and lawyers, and the meaning of the word was one of the points of contention.
The United States has a long history of racial discrimination. In the context of the United States Chinese, promoting "diversity" among university students is considered "politically correct" and is a concern of almost all institutions of higher learning.
But there has never been a consensus on what "pluralism" is, and whether "pluralism" merely refers to "racial diversity."
Justice Clarence Thomas did not shy away from saying: "I have heard the word pluralism many times, but I don't know what it means." ”
Interestingly, Thomas himself is an African-American who was admitted to Yale in 1971 after opening up black students, earning his J.D. four years later. But as an African American justice who has benefited from equal rights in education, he opposes the Minority Equality Act and opposes the current anti-discrimination preferential treatment of blacks and other minorities in the United States, and is a conservative representative.
Justice Clarence Thomas
Harvard University believes that they consider the race of applicants in the admissions process, and that artificially maintaining a certain number of minority students is motivated by the desire to promote student diversity. This consideration is not only in the realm of race, but also in other areas, and it is recognized as reasonable.
This seems to mean that, according to Harvard, "diversity" is also reflected in other aspects besides balancing student race.
In response, Justice Neil Gorsuch said: "Harvard University believes that the benefits of diversity are compelling. The Court has respected the benefits of diversity and believes that we need to have diverse subjects in the class, such as the children of large donors, students with sports talents, etc. But, he then asked, what exactly is the definition of "diversity"? Is equality limited to the dimension of race? Are economy and geography also dimensions that should be considered for "diversification"?
Gorsuch is the first Supreme Court justice appointed by former U.S. President Donald Trump after taking office, and he is widely considered conservative. His inauguration meant that conservatives had regained a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Neil Gorsuch
Over the course of the debate, Gorsuch continued discussions with the plaintiffs on the criteria for diversity.
Representing the plaintiff in the Harvard case was Cameron Norris. The attorney who had represented the plaintiff's student fair admissions committee announced that he could not appear in court a week earlier for health reasons, and Norris was ordered to complete the preparation of the argument in a very short time and perform well.
In response to Justice Gorsuch's question, Norris refuted Harvard's pluralistic discourse from the level of actual results.
"For Harvard ... It's a bit ironic. In reality, Harvard doesn't have diversity at all. Race aside, only 9 percent of Harvard's freshmen are conservative, and 82 percent come from wealthier families. For every 1 student admitted to Harvard from a low-income family, 23 students from a wealthy family are admitted. [That is] there is hardly any other aspect of 'diversity' other than the number of minorities. ”
Norris argues that the race-neutral stance is not against racial diversity, but because the current college admissions method, in terms of results, does not bring true "diversity", the plaintiffs hope that there will be more effective ways to promote racial equality.
After the plaintiffs closed their arguments, the justices threw questions to Waxman, an attorney representing Harvard University.
The first to speak was Chief Justice John Glover Roberts Jr.
Roberts is the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. Prior to joining the Supreme Court, he was a judge before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he authored majority opinions in landmark cases, including National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, King v. Burwell, and Department of Commerce v. New York. He was considered conservative in his judicial philosophy , but also showed a willingness to cooperate with the liberal bloc of the Supreme Court.
Justice John Glover Roberts Jr
"For an African-American applicant, let's say his perspective is very close to that of a white applicant, and his upbringing is similar to that of a white person, and he has a good environment to grow up. And his parents graduated from Harvard, and yet, under your (Harvard's) (admissions) system, when he reports as African-American, he also benefits because of his (African) ethnicity in the application. How do you explain such a phenomenon? ”
Roberts' question implicitly questioned whether "race" should be used as an indicator to promote diversity in college admissions.
Waxman defended Harvard University when the Student Fair Admissions Commission first sued Harvard. From 1997 to 2001, Waxman served as solicitor general counsel for all litigation brought before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two of his most high-profile cases include Bumedine v. Bush and Roper v. Simmons, which deal respectively with the rights of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay and the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty.
Waxxman did not respond positively to Roberts' questions, but repeatedly cited admissions data from Harvard University in an attempt to prove that race plays a low role in determining admissions.
But apparently the justices were not convinced of the evidence he presented.
Roberts then went on to ask, "Can I say that if there are two African-American applicants, one growing up in a poorer neighborhood and the other growing up in a very affluent neighborhood, but they also benefit from the application process because of their ethnicity, does that process not really promote diversity?" ”
The second point of contention: reverse discrimination
Whether the university's admissions process constitutes "reverse discrimination" is another major battleground in this debate.
"Reverse discrimination" refers to the unreasonable discrimination or institutional arrangements that result in unreasonable discrimination or institutional arrangements for other general groups by granting specific protection to specific groups beyond the necessary limits in pursuit of substantive equality.
In the United States, because minority groups still suffer from unequal treatment in all aspects of society, minority families remain disadvantaged due to social power structures, with the consequence that minority families are often in a weaker socioeconomic status (SES) than white peer families.
In the case of Asian American discrimination at Harvard University, reverse discrimination was manifested in the fact that in order to maintain the number of students "racially diverse", the school would force the admission of a certain percentage of minority students, and these students were often at a disadvantage in academic achievement, and the school had to lower the admission standards to admit them. It also means that Asian students who are academically dominant and are also minorities are in fact having their admissions standards raised or are being reversely discriminated against.
This reverse discrimination is one of the important reasons why Fair Admissions for Students filed lawsuits against Harvard University and North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill. The plaintiffs argue that Harvard and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, discriminate against whites and Asians because the schools favor black and Hispanic students in admissions.
Representing the plaintiffs is Patrick Strawbridge, a 47-year-old partner at the law firm Consovoy McCarthy who served as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump's campaign in a mail-in fraud case in Pennsylvania and was a clerk for Justice Thomas.
During the hearing, Justice Thomas was the first to ask: "Universities use 'race' as information to report because people believe that race reflects a person's background." So what information should be reported if people are not allowed to report race? ”
Justice Thomas, born in 1948 and now 75, has been a liberal member of the Supreme Court since 1991.
Steblauch responded: "More attention should be paid to their personal experiences, such as where they were born and socioeconomic conditions, and those that really bring different perspectives to their perspectives." ”
"Then you should know that race is often highly correlated with socioeconomic conditions, and a black student is likely to grow up in a relatively disadvantaged school." This general disadvantage in socio-economic conditions stems from our inglorious history of slavery. How do you take these disadvantages into account in admissions to achieve fairness? Immediately afterwards, another justice, Sonia Sotomayor, asked rhetorically.
Sotomayor's rhetorical question also reflects her liberal stance, as she is the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice in U.S. history to be nominated by former U.S. President Barack Obama.
Two other liberal justices also sided with her.
Justice Ketangi Brown-Jackson said: "It is strange that if an applicant's gender, parenthood, veteran and disability can be included in the admission criteria, race cannot be considered. I fear that this will only create more problems to guarantee equality, not solve them. ”
Jackson is the first African-American woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, officially nominated by US President Joe Biden, and is liberal.
Justice Ketangi Brown-Jackson
Justice Elena Kagan also said she was concerned that a Supreme Court ruling against universities considering race in admissions would result in a sharp decline in minority students. Kagan was the first female dean in Harvard Law School and was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as a justice.
Justice Elena Kagan
The debate on the second part began with jurisprudence in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger. The case was a ruling in 2003, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of college admissions committees to consider applying for student race to benefit minorities and enhance diversity.
In a majority opinion in that case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued that race no longer needs to be addressed after 25 years.
Therefore, defense lawyers at Harvard University and North Carolina Chapel Hill believe that the consideration of racial equality is only a temporary measure based on the status quo of racial inequality, and its fundamental purpose remains to achieve racial equality.
But conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett immediately asked: "If in another 25 years, by 2040, it will still be difficult to create a diverse and equal student body, will this behavior still be justified?" It seems that this temporary measure (using race as an admissions factor) currently seems to be going on forever without a clear time frame (when it will end)? ”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Parker, a defense attorney at Harvard University and North Carolina at Chapel Hill, responded that it is not possible to blindly take radical measures to achieve diversity on campus, which requires a slow process, not a simple "flip the switch". "But judging by what we've achieved so far at Chapel Hill, we're slowly moving toward success."
It is worth noting that at present, liberal justices hold only three of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court, and because liberal Justice Jackson graduated from Harvard University and served on the Harvard University Management Committee, she chose to recuse herself in this case. This leaves an already vulnerable liberal camp one less person whose voices are clearly difficult to compete with the other six conservative justices, and the courtroom debate is one-sided — the Supreme Court is likely to be on the side of the plaintiffs' Fair Student Admissions Organization.
Although the final results are still a month away, the suspense in the case has now become whether the Supreme Court will rule on the case on a case-by-case basis or a more widespread ruling on American higher education.
In an interview with Time magazine, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, president of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said, "We assert before the Supreme Court that 'diversity' is fundamental to thousands of colleges and universities across our nation, and that for decades, racially conscious admissions practices have provided access to higher education for Americans who wish to pursue a college education... I have full confidence in our overall admissions policy and the life-changing opportunities it provides for all kinds of people. ”
Harvard declined to comment. In April, Sherry A. Charleston, Harvard's chief DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity) officer, said the university was defending and improving the school's ability to "evaluate students holistically and comprehensively in practice."
"I'm a historian of race in this country, and I think race is the central issue," Charleston said, "and what's at stake here is the ability of colleges and universities across the country to create that kind of diverse community, and I think a lot of people and critical research in the field have proven that it's critical not only to the educational mission of higher education, but actually to student success as well." Charleston said.
Out of court: Did Asians win? After the hearing, many international media, including the BBC, Russian Satellite News and other international media, continued to report on the case, in addition to summarizing the background of the incident and the trial records, the media also commented on the future trend of equal rights in higher education in the United States after the end of the case. The Washington Journal commented: "Harvard University has been shown to discriminate against Asian-American applicants under the guise of its blanket admissions policy. Asian-Americans deserve an apology from Harvard today, not 70 years from now. Other commentaries argue that the principle of "diversity" in hiring students at institutions of higher learning sidesteps questions of historical crimes and legal remedies for past discrimination, and that it is difficult to determine which students will be admitted without racial preference. Judging from the debates among the justices, I am afraid that the "diversity" admissions principle will hardly be sustainable. Because the court debate is likely to have a turning point on future U.S. college admissions policies, it is of particular concern to minority college students, many of whom are still concerned about college admissions and campus life. |August 30, 2018 local time, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Harvard University campus. Shi Yiqi, a Chinese Canadian college student, was born in Shanghai, then moved to Canada with her family, and finally came to the United States. He received his undergraduate degree from UCLA and is currently pursuing a master's degree at Columbia University. After learning where the debate was headed, he didn't see it as a victory for Chinese students. "If from an individual point of view, Chinese students have excellent academic performance, in theory, Chinese students will be more likely to enter prestigious schools in the future, and the way of higher education admission in the United States is very different from China, and standardized test scores account for only a small proportion." He told Phoenix Deep Tone, "The American higher education system is still centered on white culture, and the so-called equality and pluralism are only appearances, and in the final analysis, it is still necessary to protect the interests of white people." In any case, he argues, if you want to enter a prestigious school, you need to shape yourself according to the expectations of the mainstream culture dominated by whites. Diversity is meant to respect differences, but in actual school, what is reflected is only the number of people with different skin colors, and in essence, souls with different skin colors who are also influenced by white culture. "Chinese's thinking has always been to do things steadfastly, not to be ostentatious, and to speak with achievements. But this doesn't work in the United States, you have to express it, you have to be open, you have to influence others. In addition, there are people around me who deliberately say that they are sexual minorities to take advantage of the school's diversity policy and give their application an advantage. He said. He recalls that in order to cater to this culture, he emphasized his commitment to leadership and social responsibility in his application essays during his college and graduate applications, and would decide which topics to cover based on the political spectrum of the school he applied to. Jia Fangye, who is currently enrolled in Columbia University's School of Education, admits that his ability to study at Columbia University benefited in part from his racial identity. But because of this, he inevitably doubted his own abilities in the process of daily study, and even felt a little out of place on a predominantly white campus. |February 10, 2023 local time, in front of the Law's Memorial Library at Columbia University, New York, USA. In addition, there is the problem that "reverse discrimination" is difficult to identify. Chen Hua, who studied at the University of California, Irvine, said that he believes that as an international student from China, he faces a greater disadvantage when applying for prestigious majors, but because the admission process of American universities is not open to applicants and society, this perceived "disadvantage" can only stay at the personal subjective level. Regarding the case, the dust seems to have settled, but judging by the invisible standards that minorities need to face and college campus life, there is still a long way to go in American higher education equality. The founder of the Plaintassers' Fair Admissions for Students wrote after the hearing that elite universities like Harvard and the University of North Carolina are undermining the power and depth of American individualism, and that "the vast majority of Americans of all races hope that the Supreme Court justices will defend the original principle of continental civil rights law — prohibiting race as a factor in college admissions." (Jiang Haozhe)
(Excerpted from WeChat public account Phoenix Deep Survey)