‘Woke’ Scientists Freak Out at Thought That the Supreme Court Will End Affirmative Action

S cientists should vehemently defend race-based affirmative action in college admissions, according to an opinion piece appearing in the once-great Scientific American magazine. Having any other opinion on the case is allegedly tantamount to endorsing white supremacy and scientific racism, and apparently no one working in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics-related fields may deviate from this far-left viewpoint.

“The Supreme Court could destroy affirmative action in higher education, and STEM professionals must stand against the white supremacy and scientific racism that fuels arguments against it,” claims the piece, “Why Scientists Must Stand for Affirmative Action and against Scientific Racism.”

The authors, who have backgrounds in biology, claim, “As scientists, we need to improve the public’s understanding of systemic racism as an unjust social, political and legal power structure.” The primary author’s published scientific works relate to fish, particularly their gill chambers, including a study about a fish that “breathes out its armpit,” an expertise entirely unrelated to the law or any relevant field of science.

In the current Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), Inc. v. University of North Carolina case, the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on whether the continuing use of race as a factor in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. SFFA is challenging the race-based admissions policies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, accusing the university of discriminating against applicants on the basis of their race and violating equal-protection principles.

The case will reconsider the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling, which allowed race to be used as a factor in college admissions, with the goal of achieving student-body diversity.

“We must center Black and brown students in educational law and policy to maintain and strengthen the original tenets of affirmative action,” argues the piece, co-authored by K (no period after the initial) Amacker, a Howard University doctoral student who prefers “they/them” pronouns, and Stacy Farina, the assistant professor at Howard University who studies fish (and “scientific racism in the fields of evolutionary biology and zoology”). Farina’s Twitter profile specifies that her preferred pronouns are “she/they,” prominently features the “pansexual pride flag” in her picture, and includes the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter with a raised-fist emoji.

“Students for Fair Admissions is asking them to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, which has upheld race as part of the admissions process since 2003,” Farina and Amacker note. In the Grutter v. Bollinger case 19 years ago, a majority of the Court’s justices signed on to an opinion that explicitly “forecast” the “demise” of affirmative action in 25 years. Then justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the Court expects that “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

Farina and Amacker opine, “Clearly, we will need more than 25 years to achieve such a goal.” But if that were actually clear, there wouldn’t be any debate, much less one taking place in the highest court in the land. During oral arguments on October 31, the attorney for the University of North Carolina, whose job it was to defend affirmative action, could not even explain why O’Connor’s timetable was wrong.

“Yet white supremacy, whether systemic or interpersonal, is still deeply ingrained in society, leading to financial and social disadvantages for nonwhite students,” Farina and Amacker claim. “As scientists, we must fiercely defend affirmative action, if we wish for equity in science and in U.S. society.”

Such statements calling for ideological uniformity among scientists represent exactly the opposite of how science ought to work. Scientists should not be required to hold particular political views or to engage in culture-war battles. Science is the search for impartial truth. Scientific truth is universal everywhere and always, and two plus two always equals four, never five, no matter the ethnic background or political affiliation of the person doing the calculation.

If the entire Supreme Court case hinged on the details of fish morphology (which, again, is Farina’s primary area of expertise), then calls for a scientific consensus on the decision might make sense. But the case involves complex social issues far removed from Farina’s work on the unusual gill-ventilation attributes of the goosefish.

Trying to enforce an ideological consensus among scientists on this issue makes even less sense in light of the fact that most people — including most scientists, no doubt — disagree with Farina and Amacker on race-based affirmative action.

For decades, voters have shown overwhelming opposition to affirmative action, with 57.2 percent of voters in far-left California opposing it in 2020 and 50.6 percent of voters opposing it in 2019 in even further left Washington State. Of the nine times a state had a referendum on the question since 1996, affirmative action was rejected eight times, according to Ballotpedia, even though supporters of affirmative action have been much better funded than their opponents.

The sole exception was Colorado in 2008, and a survey of Colorado residents conducted on the one failed anti-affirmative-action ballot initiative found that roughly a quarter of voters who voted against the amendment believed they were actually opposing affirmative action, thanks to the confusing language on the ballot.

A Pew poll conducted in March 2022 found that only 7 percent of Americans thought that race should be a major factor in college admissions, 19 percent thought it should be a minor factor, and 74 percent said it shouldn’t matter at all.

Apparently, no one who shares the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Americana should become a scientist, according to woke academics such as the authors of the Scientific American opinion piece. Their disturbingly exclusionary views are just more evidence of the growing problem of ideological gatekeeping and bias within the university system.