On June 29, the Supreme Court released its much-anticipated decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, ruling that both Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race in their admissions process is unconstitutional.
This landmark decision, which effectively eliminates the practice of affirmative action in university admissions, is another major win for constitutionalism from the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." He concluded, "the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
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Unfortunately, discriminating on the basis of race is exactly what universities in this country have been doing for decades, all under the cover of law. This state-sanctioned discrimination threw merit out the window, and instead made race a chief priority for admissions — all at the expense of White and Asian Americans because of the color of their skin.
For example, one study shows that Asian American students must score 140 points higher than White students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than Black students on the SAT just to have an equal shot at admission to Harvard University.
Perhaps even more shockingly, evidence presented at trial showed that Harvard had discriminated against Asian American applicants by systematically assigning them poor scores on the "personality rating" part of their admissions evaluation by describing them as industrious and intelligent but unexceptional and indistinguishable.
While Asian Americans have been the primary focus of many studies, another recent study by Georgetown University suggests that if elite colleges were to admit students solely on the merit of their test scores, every single minority group’s share of the student body would decline — except for Whites, who would go up by nearly 10%.
Americans of all stripes should abhor this sort of outright racial discrimination from our public institutions. Our nation — while imperfect — has undergone noble yet arduous struggles to rid ourselves of discrimination based on the color of one’s skin.
Race-based affirmative action not only pulls down certain groups, but it also reinforces the harmful notion that minority students are less qualified to be successful than their peers and cannot achieve excellence on their own merits without built-in institutional advantages.
This shift away from merit comes with major consequences, too. While I was serving as the director of Pediatric Neurosurgery during my time in medicine at Johns Hopkins, I quickly realized that nobody with a loved one on the operating table cared about whether the surgeon was Black, White, or any other color of the rainbow.
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All they cared about was whether or not this was the best person for the job.
When you are in surgery, it is not about who can check the most boxes — it’s about who can get the job done in the best way possible. In this sense, putting aside merit and emphasizing external qualities like race can put actual lives in jeopardy, and harm the progress of entire industries at large.
This decision to overturn affirmative action and outlaw race-based discrimination is a major victory from a constitutional and legal perspective, affirming the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the prohibitions on racial discrimination in the Civil Rights Act.
But more fundamentally, this is a moral win for the idea of America itself. Our nation was founded upon the creed that "all men are created equal." Our constitution guarantees us equal rights as Americans — not as Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, or any other racial group, but as citizens of our shared republic.
That decision — enabled by President Donald Trump’s historic and courageous appointments to the Supreme Court — is a major victory for our nation’s founding promise of equal rights, and all Americans should celebrate this decision for upholding the fundamental American truth that "all men are created equal."
