UNC At Chapel Hill Officials Go Before SCOTUS To Discuss Affirmative Action
WASHINGTON D.C. — A decade’s old law is being called into question at the highest level. Affirmative Action was created to stop discrimination based on race, gender and religion.
Some minority groups are calling out the law. Saying it helps some minorities and hurts others in respect to the college acceptance process.
On Monday, representative for UNC at Chapel Hill and Harvard went before the Supreme Court to plead their case.
The group at the heart of a lawsuit against Harvard University accuses the ivy league school of discriminating against Asian-Americans so that Black and Hispanic students could get accepted instead. Calvin Yang said he was passed over by Harvard because of his skin color.
“It goes to show there is a trend here, Asian-Americans are systematically getting discriminated because of who we are,” said Yang.
UNC at Chapel Hill is being sued for a similar reason. Edward Blum is leading the suit.
“Classifying students by race and ethnicity; treating them differently because of their race and ethnicity, it’s unfair,” said Blum.
On Monday, Harvard and UNC officials made their case for Affirmative Action and their admissions process.
“We made this case today on behalf of thousands of other colleges and universities around the country who rely on the opportunity to use a holistic admissions process that allows us to use race as one of many factors in our admissions process,” said UNC at Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz.
During Monday’s hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown expressed her concerns over getting rid of the current process.
“I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express your identity and importantly, have it valued by the university when it is considering the goal of bringing in different people,” said Brown.
No decision was made. Chancellor Guskiewicz said on Monday, he doesn’t expect a decision for 6-8 months.
