Colleges Should Ignore the Biden Administration’s Post-Affirmative-Action Sniping

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | August 30, 2023 | Jonathan Butcher

[karpov]

Has the U.S. Supreme Court just ruined the college experience? If you ask President Joe Biden’s administration, the answer is yes. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona says America has reached “a new low point.”

In June, the Court’s long-awaited decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC (decided together) struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions. School officials had employed these discriminatory preferences for decades, so Cardona is correct: The Court’s decision does mark an end to higher education as we know it.

Yet, to paraphrase a song from the ’80s about the end of the world, we should all feel fine.

The use of racial preferences violated the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while also robbing students of the dignity that comes from effort and earning your own success. But that didn’t stop U.S. Department of Education bureaucrats from gathering for a day-long conference less than a month after the ruling to decry the decision—this despite the session’s claim that speakers were there to “discuss innovative strategies and resources for colleges and students to expand access to higher education.”

Instead, panelists bemoaned the SFFA ruling and tried to explain why your race and ethnicity matter more than your behavior and decisions.

Cardona said that America faces a “crisis” after the ruling. Yet surveys have found strong opposition to the use of racial preferences, which means that most Americans would not consider the abolition of the practice to be creating a “crisis.” In 2019, a Pew Research survey found that 73 percent of respondents opposed the use of race in college admissions. Earlier this year, Pew Research asked respondents again and found that opposition had only increased, with 82 percent of respondents opposing the practice.

[karpov]

"Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation and the author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth." He tweets.

[Gen.Blather]

The politics in colleges ruin the entire college experience. It’s racial, it’s green, it’s sex, it’s drugs, and all of them have one thing in common. If tomorrow we had to survive the way the pioneers did, it would all be forgotten by noon. Everything the college people are concerned about results from the fact that there is no survival stress in college life. People feel guilty that their lives are so easy. We aren’t built for the level of stress-free survival we are now blessed with. Therefore, people make stuff up to feel stressed about, who gets to use what bathroom and wear a bra.