FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Devon Westhill
(904) 683-6060
(Washington, D.C) This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear from the lawyers arguing on both sides of the race preferences cases SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC.
The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) and our staff helped write and then joined six amicus briefs in these cases urging the Supreme Court to take the cases and to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) which permitted the use of race in college admissions for the supposedly compelling benefits of campus racial diversity.
Our briefs argued that race preferences are unconstitutional and illegal, immoral and wrongheaded, and that the evidence shows they harm most those whom the preferences are intended to benefit. Links to four of the briefs can be found on our website at www.ceousa.org. The other two briefs—one certiorari-stage and the other merits-stage—filed by CEO senior fellow Stuart Taylor, Jr. and UCLA professor Richard Sander can be found on the Supreme Court website.
In several of the briefs, reference is made to studies that CEO produced—including one with a focus on Harvard—showing the extent to which race preferences are used in making admissions decisions. Two of the CEO studies cited in the briefs are “Campus Diversity and Student Discontent: The Cost of Race and Ethnic Preferences in College Admissions” and “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions.“
CEO founder and chairman Linda Chavez commented on the discrimination against Asian American applicants at Harvard. “CEO has documented the use of racial preferences in college admission for over 25 years, but rarely have we seen such an egregious use of preferences as Harvard employs to discriminate against a particular racial or ethnic group, namely Asian Americans. Asian Americans have faced a long and bitter history of exclusion and discrimination in the United States. For one of our most elite institutions to continue this practice in the name of promoting ‘diversity’ gives lie to the claim that affirmative action benefits society in general and minority students in particular.”
CEO president and general counsel Devon Westhill addressed the importance of these cases. “CEO has been an outspoken opponent of the use of race preferences in higher education—and other spheres of American life—since its founding in 1995. Throughout that time, CEO has endeavored to show, as Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, ‘it is a sordid business this divvying us up by race.’ Moreover, since the Grutter decision in 2003 predicting the use of race would wane, American life has become more race-centered, not less. The Supreme Court has before it a momentous opportunity in the Harvard and UNC cases to clean up the mess it created by its decades-long experiment permitting a racial spoils system in college admissions and to vindicate the American principle of equality under law. It should seize that opportunity.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that studies issues relating to race and ethnicity nationwide.
