On Halloween day, President Rougeau sent an email to the employees, Jesuits, and students of the College of the Holy Cross with the subject header, Today’s Supreme Court Hearings on Affirmative Action. In it, he discussed his administration’s reaction to the two ongoing Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action: Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University. President Rougeau stated that in August the college had joined fifty-six other Catholic institutions of higher education to sign an amicus brief in support of affirmative action. He defended affirmative action, saying that the importance it puts on race fulfills the desire for diversity at colleges and universities. However, President Rougeau and higher education as a whole are mistaken for their faith in race-based admissions. Affirmative action is not only discriminatory, but also only provides a thin façade of the diversity that universities desire.
The discriminatory nature of affirmative action becomes clear when considering its effects Asian Americans. Asian American applicants have to score much higher on the national standardized tests than students of other ethnicities. In the Supreme Court case Student for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, evidence was presented suggesting that without the existence of a race-based admissions regime, Asian American enrollment at Harvard could increase by fifty percent. But this discrimination is not new; the United States has a long and checkered past with Asian Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration ban based on race in the United States. Following the Spanish-American War, the Philippines was conquered, with its population being described by government officials as uncivilized and unclean. During the Second World War, Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps by the FDR administration. As seen in the historical record, affirmative action is merely another instance of violations of the equal protection guaranteed to Asian Americans by the Fourteenth Amendment. This is a cost many administrators and bureaucrats are willing to make Asian Americans pay.
Many academics, including President Rougeau, who are supportive of race-based admissions argue that this program is necessary for increasing diversity at universities. To be fair to these proponents, there is much to value about diversity. It allows for greater tolerance and understanding across the nation, as citizens of varied beliefs and worldviews connect and discuss for a better tomorrow. Growing from interacting with peers who are different from oneself is a valuable experience. These dynamics lead to a competition of ideas in which the most robust stand, strengthening our nation. But diversity for diversity’s sake, especially racially-focused diversity, is severely flawed and limiting.
Centering attention on race as a measure for diversity is foolish and fruitless. Professor Roland G. Fryer Jr of the Economics Department at Harvard wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that scathingly describes the limitation of racial college admissions: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds.” He continues to explain that despite African immigrants and their children only consisting of ten percent of the Black population in the US, they make up forty-one percent of Black students in the Ivy League. This evidence shows the arbitrary nature of these racial definitions crafted by government bureaucrats decades ago. The fact that Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, and many others are grouped together as “Asians” according to the federal government is nonsensical, even ignoring the myriad of ethnic identities underneath national identities in Asia. Perhaps even more egregious, those Americans who originate or are descended from countries in the geographical regions of North Africa and the Middle East are all considered “White” by the government, despite the gulf in the histories and treatment of those immigrants and ones from the continent of Europe. True diversity, the diversity that is valuable to higher education and the formation of well-rounded citizens, cannot be derived from the artificial divisions of people into ethnic groups.
The only diversity that matters is a diversity of thought. Diversity of race, upbringing, and class are only important to the quality of a university’s education inasmuch as they influence the thought of an individual. The progressive march of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices across campuses that exist under the regime of affirmative action has not encouraged a broadening of thought that leads to a fruitful exchange of ideas. Rather, a plague of cancel culture has swept across the colleges and universities of the United States, and onto the rest of the Western world. The National Association of Scholars counted two hundred fifty-five academic cancellations. Even liberal publications have acknowledged this issue, with The Guardian reporting that sixty-one percent of English students in 2022 wanted to “ensure that all students are protected from discrimination rather than allow unlimited free speech”, a steep increase from thirty-seven percent in 2016. Academia’s obsession with race has led to a perversion of its understanding of diversity, harming itself and society as a whole.
Ultimately, affirmative action is a discriminatory race program that violates the Fourteenth Amendment and harms universities. Contrary to what is stated in the opinion of President Rougeau and the amicus brief signed by the College of the Holy Cross, affirmative action is fundamentally flawed and dangerous to the continuation of the liberal arts tradition. The arbitrariness with which it divides the student body is not only unjust but poisonous to the goals of Catholic higher education. A serious reconsideration of values and policies is necessary regarding affirmative action at Holy Cross and campuses across the nation. As Governor Ron DeSantis said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”