Jackson, J., dissenting
soundness of UNC’s holistic admissions approach existed), the Court indulges those who either do not know our Nation’s history or long to repeat it. Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances. Thus, the Court’s meddling not only arrests the noble generational project that America’s universities are attempting, it also launches, in effect, a dismally misinformed sociological experiment.
Time will reveal the results. Yet the Court’s own missteps are now both eternally memorialized and excruciatingly plain. For one thing—based, apparently, on nothing more than Justice Powell’s initial say so—it drastically discounts the primary reason that the racial-diversity objectives it excoriates are needed, consigning race-related historical happenings to the Court’s own analytical dustbin. Also, by latching onto arbitrary timelines and professing insecurity about missing metrics, the Court sidesteps unrefuted proof of the compelling benefits of holistic admissions programs that factor in race (hard to do, for there is plenty), simply proceeding as if no such evidence exists. Then, ultimately, the Court surges to vindicate equality, but Don Quixote style—pitifully perceiving itself as the sole vanguard of legal high ground when, in reality, its perspective is not constitutionally compelled and will hamper the best judgments of our world-class educational institutions about who they need to bring onto their campuses right now to benefit every American, no matter their race.[1]
- ↑ Justice Sotomayor has fully explained why the majority’s analysis is legally erroneous and how UNC’s holistic review program is entirely consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment. My goal here has been to highlight the interests at stake and to show that holistic admissions programs that factor in race are warranted, just, and universally beneficial. All told, the Court’s myopic misunderstanding of what the Constitution permits will impede what experts and evidence tell us is required (as a matter of social science) to solve for pernicious race-based inequities that are themselves rooted in the persistent denial of equal protection. “[T]he
