State and local leaders react to SCOTUS’s affirmative action decision

Published 12:00 am Saturday, July 1, 2023

Thursday morning, June 29, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.

“This landmark decision makes clear ‘the core purpose of the Equal Protection Clause: doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.’ Ivy League appeals to diversity do not justify discriminating against perspective students based on the color of their skin,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said.

NAACP National Director of Youth and College, Wisdom Cole, had a much different reaction to the court’s decision.

He said, “This is a dark day in America. Affirmative action has been a beacon of hope for generations of Black students. It stood as a powerful force against the insidious poison of racism and sexism, aiming to level the playing field and provide a fair shat at a high quality education for all. Students across the country are wide awake to the clear and present danger encroaching on their classroom. We will continue to fight, organize, mobilize, and vote against all attempts to hold us back. We will hold the line against this clear pattern of hate. We will thrive.”

The court’s conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively.

Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the court’s first Black female justice — called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all.”

The Supreme Court had twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 20 years, including as recently as 2016.

Since then, three appointees of former President Donald Trump have joined the court. At arguments in late October, all six conservative justices expressed doubts about the practice, which had been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978.

Lower courts also had upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian-American applicants.

Jim Purcell, executive director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Learning, released a statement regarding the Supreme Court’s decision.

“None of Alabama’s state-sponsored colleges and universities currently make admission decisions based upon race. There are several state initiatives that support minority enrollment in fields for which they are under represented, but the admission to the institution is not based upon race,” he said.

Athens State University does not see the decision having an effect on its enrollment practices.

“As an open enrollment institution, we don’t have factors such as race that influence an admissions decision. Programs offered by the university are separate from admissions and are open to students after they have been admitted,” Lauren Blacklidge, Athens State’s public relations manager, told the News Courier.

The Alabama State Conference of the NAACP are “very disappointed” in the decision, Alabama NAACP President Benard Simelton said in a written statement.

“We know that black students, when given the opportunity, perform as well as other students at colleges and universities across the country. It is our belief that educational institutions will develop strategies to ensure students from all ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic status have an opportunity to attend the college of their choice,” he said. “We know that race continues to play a major role in students not being admitted to college, just as it does in employment and voting rights. Until the playing field is level, we must continue to consider other factors in admission and race is one of them.”