When the Supreme Court announced its ruling last summer in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (the decision that effectively ended affirmative action), it seemed like the country was finally ready to move on from this unfair policy and recommit to excellence and merit.
No longer would white and Asian applicants be passed over because they didn’t meet an organization’s arbitrary criteria for diversity, nor would unqualified applicants be admitted or employed and immediately fail afterward because they lacked the prerequisite skills and experience.
As a high school English teacher, I had special reason to celebrate the decision. For years I witnessed so many students of mine with near-perfect SAT scores, hundreds of volunteer hours, and limitless creative potential all being denied admission to supposedly elite universities because they happened to have the wrong skin color. Meanwhile, I saw their good-but-not-great peers make it into those same schools and even qualify for scholarships — again, because of their race. This was the very opposite of equal opportunity, and after so many decades of fuzzy reasoning and legal fumbling, the highest court of the land weighed in and condemned it.
Sadly, affirmative action wouldn’t go away that easily. As a recent report from Renu Mukherjee at the Manhattan Institute shows, the American Bar Association (ABA) and New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) have flouted the SFFA by encouraging “law schools and law firms to ignore the Court’s holding” and “continue granting admissions preferences to
