On Oct. 15, the Supreme Court began to hear arguments in a case filed by advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University, in which SFFA alleges that Harvard’s current affirmative action practices discriminate against Asian and Asian American applicants. Supporters of SFFA’s case claim that Harvard’s “holistic” approach to admissions, which takes an applicant’s race and ethnicity into account, is designed to limit the number of Asian and Asian American students on campus. Opponents claim that SFFA’s case wrongly centers on affirmative action and ignores other discriminatory admissions practices such as legacy admissions and athletic scholarships. Does SFFA’s case have merit, and how could the court’s decision impact admissions policies in the future? 

Prof. Faith Smith (AAAS)

The SFAA’s lawsuit, funded by opponents of race-conscious policies in higher education and voter participation, demands that we parse the history and rhetoric of legislation governing housing, movement across borders, as well as access to institutions, and understand how we read each other’s bodies every day as we move through our institutions, deciding who is affable or humorless; assertive or shy; smart; wealthy (striving or entitled); a natural insider or “allowed inside.” Norms of whiteness shape our sense of what a distinguished arena of higher education should look like and render some preferential procedures invisible to us; the transformation of the university by white female senior faculty and administrators is often no longer seen as made possible by affirmative action policies, for instance. The rhetoric of “too many” or “not enough” that pits us against each other requires us to work together for better and more preferential admissions policies, not their removal. 

Prof. Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of  of African and Afro-American Studies and English, specializing in Anglophone Caribbean literature and African American Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prof. Leanne Day (AAPI) 

The SFFA case does not have merit both through its central evidence of the “personal rating” system as implicitly biased against Asian Americans and by virtue of the case’s architect Edward Blum, a conservative activist, who is effectively leading the charge to abolish race-conscious college admissions. The SFFA case taps into the false myths of both the model minority and that universal access to higher institutions can be based on merit alone. This repurposes the model minority stereotype, where the plaintiffs suggest that their high achievement is now being deployed to restrict access to Harvard, even as this ideology has been weaponized to justify the inability for other ethnic groups to be deemed successful. This case nefariously positions Asian Americans against other minorities. The wider effects of this case will potentially force evaluations and transparency about race-conscious admission policies, where universities may will be limited in how they evaluate applicants.

Prof. Leanne Day is a Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Asian American Pacific Islander Studies, specializing in Asian American and Pacific Islander histories through examinations of race, empire, labor, gender, class, and sexuality. 

Kelvin Fang ’21

I think it’s important to correct a common misconception regarding this case. The SFFA’s case only tangentially touches on issues of affirmative action; the actual grounds of suing Harvard University are that the SFFA believes that the prestigious Ivy League school violated statutes in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discriminating against Asians in the admissions process. While I do understand the logic behind filing the lawsuit, I believe that affirmative action is an invaluable process that helps ensure that underprivileged minorities without the same access to tools of success have an equal chance of admission to universities. However, if the SFFA’s claims are true in that Asians are weighted “lower” in the admissions process because of their ethnicity, to me, that is blatant discrimination and an outright injustice.

Kelvin Fang ’21 is majoring in European Cultural Studies and Philosophy. 

Roland Blanding ’21 

This is not a debate over the necessity of affirmative action, instead it is a debate about its purpose. On the one hand if its job is to secure spots corresponding to “mainstream” and “diversity” positions in schools, then it is doing a terrible job of it. First, this means majority groups are always going to encroach on the fairness of a policy that seeks to fight discrimination by discriminating in and of itself, and second this crunches minority groups to reach for the minutia of spots available to them. On these grounds I think that this suit is well founded. 

On another note, the true goal of affirmative action is not government imposition on the winners and losers of the race towards education, but to provide an equality of opportunity. I think that equality of opportunity ought be offered regardless of where one lies on a paper bag test, and should focus more on socioeconomic backgrounds. Class-based affirmative action more precisely benefits the targets of the initial policy without the hypocrisy of ingrained discrimination.

Roland Blanding ’21 is a Three-Semester Representative to the Student Union Allocations Board.