Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the two cases involving racial preferences in college admissions, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC. The Court was deluged with amicus briefs beforehand, many of them making specious arguments about the supposed need for “diversity” in schools such as those two. One of them, submitted by the American Council on Education (ACE) and a bevy of other higher-ed groups, takes the prize for laughable constitutional interpretation.
As Robert Shibley explains here, ACE contends that not having racial preferences would violate the First-Amendment rights of minority applicants. How so? Well, if schools aren’t obsessed with race anymore, then those students will be “chilled” in their eagerness to write or speak about their “lived experiences” and so forth — the stuff that gets them the gold stars from admission committees. So colleges must therefore continue to favor applicants from certain groups lest they fall silent about their supposed oppression.
Does it occur to ACE that ending racial preferences frees applicants from non-preferred groups to talk about themselves, which previously could have ended their hopes at the discriminatory schools? The imagined “chilling” is offset by “warming” elsewhere.