March 25, 2021
Today, Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take up Students for Fair Admissions’ lawsuit against Harvard University. For decades, Harvard has focused on race at every stage of its admissions process—from recruitment, to assessing individual applicants, to even engaging in racial balancing by comparing the racial makeup of one class to the next.
Harvard does all of this in the name of so-called diversity. But as SLF explains, diversity of color is not the same as diversity of thought. Over the years, colleges have moved away from being the marketplace of ideas, instead scaring students into silence. One survey of 20,000 students shows that a majority of them fear sharing their real opinions on issues. Worse, colleges are actively protecting students from ideas and individuals who do not think or look like them through safe spaces and affinity groups.
“Colleges have relied on race as a factor in the admissions process for too long,” says SLF General Counsel Kimberly Hermann. “Not only do colleges violate the Constitution because they discriminate based on skin color, but these policies also conflict with the First Amendment. Colleges must be places of open inquiry, but they are instead training students to mistrust and fear each other because they focus so much on dividing students by race.”