The anti-affirmative-action group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), ended its lawsuit against Yale University after the school revamped its admission policies removing race-conscious priorities.
“Yale has agreed to policies they should have done a long time ago,” Kenny Xu, an SFFA board member who is running for Congress in North Carolina, told National Review. “It is absurd that race was ever used or considered to classify, delineate, and discriminate between applicants in the first place.”
The move comes after the Supreme Court ruled in late June in favor of SFFA that race-conscious admission policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, were unconstitutional.
“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the time on behalf of the six-justice majority.
Writing for the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced the majority opinion writing that it “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” Fellow liberal justice, Kentanji Brown Jackson, argued that “with let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
On Thursday, Yale and SFFA entered into a “joint stipulation” to voluntarily dismiss the case in light of the university’s agreement to overhaul its admissions process in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.
“We are pleased that, after hearing Yale’s description of the steps we will take to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling, SFFA has decided to dismiss its case against Yale,” the school noted in an official statement.
“Yale’s priorities remain unchanged: fully complying with the law, continuing to support a diverse and inclusive community, and maintaining a world-class admissions process that considers each applicant as an individual. We are confident that we can preserve these priorities going forward.”
Among the changes Yale agreed to update include, introducing new “technological steps” to ensure demographic data related to race and ethnicity is firewalled from admission decisions and remove race as a factor in financial aid considerations.