The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider on Thursday the certiorari petition filed by Students for Fair Admissions in its lawsuit against Harvard College’s use of racial preferences that penalize Asian-American applicants in the admissions process. From the petition’s introduction:

Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) abandoned the principle of racial neutrality that Brown and Title VI vindicated. Grutter did so by improperly affording broad deference to university administrators to pursue a diversity interest that is far from compelling. To this end, Grutter endorsed racial objectives that are amorphous and unmeasurable and thus incapable of narrow tailoring. Unsurprisingly then, universities have used Grutter as a license to engage in outright racial balancing. This case shows that judicial scrutiny under Grutter is anything but strict.
But given Harvard’s flagrant violations of Title VI, it fails strict scrutiny even under Grutter. Harvard’s mistreatment of Asian-American applicants is appalling. Harvard penalizes them because, according to its admissions office, they lack leadership and confidence and are less likable and kind. This is reason enough to grant review. That Harvard engages in racial balancing and ignores race-neutral alternatives also proves that Harvard does not use race as a last resort. All of this makes intervention that much more urgent.
This case is the kind of important individual-rights dispute that this Court has not hesitated to hear. Review thus would be warranted if the defendant were any university subject to Title VI. But it isn’t just any university. It’s Harvard. Harvard has been at the center of the controversy over ethnic- and race-based admissions for nearly a century. The Court should grant certiorari.

On The Corner yesterday, Roger Clegg weighed in with his own call for the Court to grant certiorari. An excerpt:

The one misbegotten opinion by the Court ruling that there is a “compelling interest” justifying [racial] discrimination [in admissions] was in 2003, and by its own terms was expected to expire within 25 years. In the meantime, universities’ use of preferences has not faded away, but become more ingrained. Conversely, the country is becoming more multiracial and multiethnic, and individual Americans are themselves more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic, making the discrimination ever more unwieldy, ugly, and irrational. For example, Asian Americans, as in the Harvard case, are more and more likely to be among the victims now; Latinos are a larger “underrepresented group” now than African Americans; and what, by the way, is the historical justification for giving Latinos a preference over Asian Americans?