This article first appeared on The Federalist Society The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became the first highly selective college to release data on the racial composition of the class of 2028. Significantly, this is the first opportunity the public has had to examine the impact of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to prohibit race-based affirmative action in admissions at elite universities. The MIT report shows stark demographic changes for incoming first-year students from the previous year. While the percentage of white matriculants remained largely unchanged—a drop of just one percentage point from the class of 2027—the …

Apparently, eliminating racial discrimination doesn’t mean eliminating all of it. That seems to be the takeaway from the Supreme Court’s refusal last month to grant a review of Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. It has been no secret to anyone that the Fairfax County, Virginia, board and administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School — who were sued — had colluded in changing the admissions process at the school intentionally to discriminate against high-achieving 13- and 14-year-old Asian applicants. The Wall Street Journal reported two years ago on the text messages and emails between the powers that be …

Reproduced with permission. Published July 10, 2023. Copyright 2023 Bloomberg Industry Group 800-372-1033. For further use please visit https://www.bloombergindustry.com/copyright-and-usage-guidelines-copyright The US Supreme Court has ruled that Harvard University and University of North Carolina unconstitutionally discriminated against some of its applicants and in favor of others based on race. I was very likely one of the unwitting applicants caught up in this decades-long racial spoils system at UNC. And despite the Supreme Court’s historic and long overdue ruling, the bell can’t be unrung for those like me. As a civil rights lawyer, and Black Southerner interested in our grand American experiment, …

This op-ed originally appeared in RealClearEducation In the words of President Joe Biden, the Supreme Court has “effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions.” Affirmative action is the practice, as the Court described, that took race into account when evaluating applicants, benefiting members of certain races at the expense of others. Some have praised the Court’s decision and some have denounced it, but everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Ruth Wisse, for example, explains in an op-ed that Harvard, where she is professor emerita, is now set to have a faculty discussion on affirmative action for the first time in a quarter-century. Wisse asserts …

This op-ed originally appeared in Townhall.com In her dissent from the ruling outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a blunder. She parroted a debunked claim that the chance of survival of a high-risk black newborn nearly doubles if under the care of a black physician. I suppose we shouldn’t hold that against her since she gave us fair warning that she’s not a biologist. No, she’s just a simple Supreme Court Justice after all.  Conservative commentators are raking Jackson over the coals for the error. This is understandable when, as lawyer Ted Frank suggests, “[a] …

This article was first published on Law.com Almost immediately, selective colleges around the country responded to the Supreme Court’s  affirmative action ruling with expected disdain. But if they don’t comply, they could be in for a world  of hurt.  The president of Harvard and 17 other senior university officials signed a letter admitting that “for almost a decade, Harvard has vigorously defended an admissions system” that the Supreme Court explained took race into consideration at nearly every stage of the admissions process. Harvard explained it is committed to preserving what it calls its “essential values,” such as racial diversity. In …