In his first term as president, Donald Trump built a conservative 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Ever since, the nation’s highest court has repeatedly issued increasingly extreme, far-right decisions on topics of abortion, race, the environment, corruption, and much more. The Supreme Court has eliminated federal protections for abortion …
Read More »The Conservative Activist Who Brought Down Affirmative Action Has a New Target
Twenty years ago, Arian Simone was a college student in Tallahassee, Florida, trying to scrape together money for a small mall-based boutique called Fabulous. “I started to notice that a lot of investors didn’t look like me,” Simone, a Black woman, tells Rolling Stone. “I made a promise to myself …
Read More »What Really Happens When You End Legacy Admissions
The morning Amherst College announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed it was ending admission preferences for legacy students, alumni group chats lit up. As one Amherst grad characterized it at the time: “I’ve received about 40 texts from aggrieved rich white people since 8 a.m.” Privately, some graduates of …
Read More »Legacy Students Four Times More Likely to Be Accepted to Top Schools, Study Finds
A new study in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action on the collegiate level has found that legacy students are four times more likely to be admitted into the nation’s top universities. A research group at Harvard conducted an analysis of a dozen elite schools — …
Read More »Harvard's Legacy Admissions Faces Investigation From Department of Education
Harvard‘s legacy admissions — also known asaffirmative action for privileged white kids—has been challenged by the U.S. Department of Education. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Harvard University’s preferential treatment for the relatives of donors and alumni during the admissions process, according to lawyers …
Read More »These Black and Asian American Affirmative Action Advocates Won't Be Divided
Last month, when the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution by considering applicants’ race in the admissions process — thereby ending affirmative action programs nationwide — Scripps News brought on two people for a heavily-moderated debate on the issue. One was …
Read More »Republicans Target Minority Scholarships After Supreme Court's Affirmative Action Ruling
It took Republicans no time at all to take the Supreme Court‘s affirmative action decision and use it to attack other educational initiatives intended to support people of color. On Thursday —the same day the Court declared race-conscious admissions policies unconstitutional — the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, dispatched a …
Read More »The Supreme Court Is Waging War on Black Women and Girls
The morning after I graduated high school, I awoke to read the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, an attack on the right to control of one’s own body that led to a year of exhaustive anti-choice legislation. On Thursday, the summer after my first year at Harvard University, I awoke to …
Read More »Group Uses Supreme Court's Own Words to Challenge Harvard's Legacy Admissions
The Supreme Court ruled last week that Harvard’s admissions process, which factored race into decisions about which candidates to accept, was unconstitutional. The college is still allowed to consider whether applicants are relatives of alumni, though, which has led a civil rights group to file a complaint in light last …
Read More »The Affirmative Action Decision Doesn't Have a Damn Thing to Do With Meritocracy
The Supreme Court’s jarring decision to strike down race from college admissions wasn’t just infuriating, but also an uncomfortable trip back to memory lane. I wasn’t too surprised by the super-conservative majority decision, but disgusted by the weaponizing of Asian-American students against Black students. Throughout my academic life, I, a …
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