FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rudy Gersten (202)886-2000
Friday, June 29, 2023
Center for Equal Opportunity Applauds SCOTUS ruling on Affirmative Action
(Washington, D.C) Today, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down college admissions programs that gave preference to black and Hispanic students at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Court held that preferential treatment based on race in college admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) filed multiple amicus briefs at every stage of these cases urging the court to strike down racial preferences.
CEO argued that racial preferences are not only unfair to Asians and whites but harm the very people they were intended to benefit. CEO has conducted studies of the effects of racial preferences at some 80 schools nationwide, showing lower graduation rates for black and Hispanic students admitted with lower test scores and grades. Links to our briefs and studies can be found on our website www.ceousa.org.
Please view the just released CEO timeline project: “The Fight Against Racial Preferences in Higher Education: How a small nonprofit helped end affirmative discrimination in college admissions” at www.ceousa.org/timeline.
CEO founder and chairman Linda Chavez noted, “Preferential admissions cannot make up for academic deficits many black and Hispanic students face when they enter college. These programs often set up students to fail. They may make college administrators feel better, but if students don’t graduate or end up earning degrees that won’t lead to good paying jobs, we’ve done them no favors. We must reform elementary and secondary education to provide students of all races and economic backgrounds with the skills to compete.”
In the joint Harvard, UNC opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the 6-3 majority stated:
“[T]he Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
CEO president and general counsel Devon Westhill addressed the importance of these cases. “The Harvard and UNC cases provided the Court a great opportunity to clean up the mess it created by its decades-long experiment permitting a racial spoils system in college admissions. It has now seized the opportunity—on the 20th anniversary of its misguided Grutter opinion—to vindicate the American principle of equality under law. As a result, today we are a more perfect union, notwithstanding more work that lies ahead.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that studies issues of race and ethnicity nationwide. CEO has been an outspoken opponent of the use of race preferences in higher education since its founding in 1995. The following timeline illustrates this protracted work.
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