Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181, is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.
In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University in U.S. District Court in Boston, alleging that the university's undergraduate admission practices violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Asian Americans. In 2019, a district court judge upheld Harvard's limited use of race as a factor in admissions, citing lack of evidence of "discriminatory animus" or "conscious prejudice".
In 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling. In 2021, SFFA petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. After the appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers at the time, the cases were split, with Jackson recusing from the Harvard case while participating in the North Carolina one.
On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Harvard that, by a vote of 6–2, reversed the lower court ruling. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional. Because of the absence of U.S. military academies in the cases, the lack of relevant lower court rulings, and the potentially distinct interests that the military academies may present, the Court, limited by Article III, did not decide the fate of race-based affirmative action in military academies.
Background
The case's historical and legal background spans several decades, from the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, over the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, to the 2016 case Fisher v. University of Texas. The Supreme Court ruled in Bakke, a landmark decision, that affirmative action could be used as a determining factor in college admission policy but that the University of California, Davis School of Medicine's racial quota was discriminatory. The Court upheld Bakke in Grutter v. Bollinger, another landmark decision. Concurrently, in Gratz v. Bollinger, the Court ruled that the points system the University of Michigan used to favor underrepresented minorities was unconstitutional. The Court vacated Fisher v. University of Texas and upheld the lower court's decision to apply strict scrutiny to the University of Texas at Austin's race-conscious admissions policy in Fisher v. University of Texas. In Fisher II, strict scrutiny requires that the use of race serve a "compelling governmental interest"—like the educational benefits that stem from diversity—and be "narrowly tailored" to satisfy that interest. Institutions that receive federal funding, such as Harvard University, are subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws racial discrimination.For years before 2023, some considered affirmative action in the U.S. a wedge issue among Asian Americans. It was contended that the practice drew criticism from white and Asian Americans, but support from African Americans, and mixed support among Hispanic and Latino Americans. In polling about affirmative action, answers varied depending on how the question was asked, suggesting ambivalence. There was a divide between Democrats and Republicans.
Opposition to affirmative action emerged in the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, particularly with editor Nathan Glazer's 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy. In the Roberts Court, Chief Justice John Roberts questioned the benefits of diversity in a physics class in Fisher II. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had opposed affirmative action; the remaining three conservative justices had no track record of opposing affirmative action before the ruling, although a 1999 article Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in The Wall Street Journal signaled he would end it. Justice Sotomayor had repeatedly and proudly said she was a "product of affirmative action" and defended affirmative action in previous cases before the Court.
District Court case
Lawsuit
On November 17, 2014, SFFA, representing a group of anonymous Asian American plaintiffs Harvard University had rejected, sued the school in federal district court. The suit claimed that Asians were being discriminated against in favor of whites. SFFA was founded by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, who also founded the Project on Fair Representation, with a goal to end racial classifications in education, voting procedures, legislative redistricting, and employment. Blum participated in cases such as Bush v. Vera, Shelby County v. Holder, and Fisher v. University of Texas. SFFA's case was the first high-profile case on behalf of plaintiffs who were not white, and who had academic credentials that, according to Vox, were "much harder to criticize". SFFA's lawyers said that the initial hearing focused on discrimination against Asian American applicants, not affirmative action in general.Certain Asian American advocacy groups filed amicus briefs in support of SFFA, believing that they or their children had been discriminated against in college admissions. Other Asian American advocacy groups filed amicus briefs in support of Harvard. On May 15, 2015, a coalition of more than 60 Asian American organizations filed federal complaints against Harvard with the United States Department of Education and Department of Justice. The coalition asked for a civil rights investigation into what it called Harvard's discriminatory admission practices against Asian American applicants. The complaints at the Department of Education were dismissed in July 2015 because Students for Fair Admissions had already filed a lawsuit making similar allegations in November 2014.
But in 2017, the coalition resubmitted their complaints to the Department of Justice under the Trump administration. It opened an investigation into allegations against Harvard's policies, and that investigation was ongoing as of February 2020.
Plaintiff allegations
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs claimed that Harvard imposed a soft quota of "racial balancing" that artificially depressed the number of Asian American applicants it admitted. The plaintiffs maintained that the proportion of Asians Harvard admitted was suspiciously similar year after year despite dramatic increases in the number of Asian American applicants, as well as the size of the Asian American population.During the lawsuit, the plaintiffs gained access to Harvard's individualized admissions files from 2014 to 2019 and aggregate data from 2000 to 2019. The plaintiffs also interviewed and deposed numerous Harvard officials. From these sources, the plaintiffs alleged that Harvard admissions officers consistently rated Asian American applicants, as a group, lower than others on "positive personality traits" such as likability, courage, and kindness. The plaintiffs alleged that Asian Americans scored higher than any other racial or ethnic group on other admissions measures like test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities, but the students' personal ratings significantly hampered their admissions chances. The plaintiffs also claimed that alumni interviewers gave Asian Americans personal ratings comparable to white applicants'. Harvard's admissions staff testified that they did not believe that different racial groups have better personal qualities than others, but nevertheless, Asian applicants as a racial group received consistently weaker personal scores over the period surveyed, and Harvard's admissions office rated Asian Americans with the worst personal qualities of any racial group. African-Americans, on the other hand, consistently scored the lowest on the academic rating but highest on the personal rating, allegedly displaying more "likability, courage, and kindness" than other racial groups.
Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist testifying on the plaintiffs' behalf, concluded that Asian American applicants as a group performed stronger on measures of academic achievement and extracurricular activities but received a statistically significant penalty relative to white applicants in Harvard's "Personal Rating" and "Overall Rating" scores. As a result, the plaintiffs alleged Asian American applicants had the lowest chance of admission of all racial groups, despite scoring highest in all objective measurements. Arcidiacono testified that removing Asian applicants' personal score penalty relative to white applicants would result in a 16% increase in the number of admitted Asian Americans.
Arcidiacono suggested that the applicant's race played a significant role in admissions. According to his testimony, if an Asian American applicant with certain characteristics had a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, would have a 36% likelihood. Hispanic and Black applicants with the same characteristics would have a 77% and 95% predicted chance of admission, respectively.
Arcidiacono's report also alleged that Harvard's preferential treatment of African-American and Hispanic applicants was not due to its efforts to achieve socioeconomic diversity in its student body, since "Harvard admits more than twice as many non-disadvantaged African-American applicants than disadvantaged African-American applicants". He also argued that if Harvard removed all other factors for admissions preference—racial preferences for underrepresented minorities, penalties against Asian Americans, and legacy and athlete preferences—the number of Asian-Americans admitted would increase by 1,241, or 50%, over six years.
The plaintiffs also claimed that, in 2013, Harvard's Office of Institutional Research found a statistically significant penalty against Asian American applicants in an internal investigation, but had never made the findings public or acted on them. Plaintiffs and commentators compared the treatment of Asians to the early-20th-century Jewish quota, which used immigrant Jews' allegedly "deficient" one-dimensional personalities and lack of leadership traits to justify excluding non-legacy Jews at elite universities, including Harvard.