Particularly. if i were listening to this conversation, i d say, wait a second, you want to talk about what s been happening to us at harvard and in other schools. you had asian-americans openly being discriminated against because they were overrepresented in some schools because they had higher grades and, you know, there would be personality scores. i think it was the harvard case. personality numbers, so many were zeroed out to try to discriminate against asian-americans and keep their numbers down. you could have been an extraordinary student. you could have had extraordinary extracurricular activities. you could have been the model applicant for the process, but you were discriminated against by harvard. isn t that what got us here in the first place? well, harvard said, no, we re not discriminating against anybody, and these personality scores or what have you don t reflect discrimination. they reflect the views of the
Horrific treatment throughout the years, this isn t exactly a demographic group who has been embraced throughout american history. what do you say to asian-american students and asian-american parents this morning who say, okay, finally, my kids are going to get an equal chance and stop being minused, stop being zeroed out on the personality scores because of affirmative action ? so, joe, i think your comments are smart comments, and they point to how difficult and nuanced of a problem this is. because when you talk about college admissions, it is inherently a zero sum game. some students are admitted, other students are not admitted. the central question here is whether there s a legitimate interest that survives strict scrutiny in ensuring that black students are admitted, that the historic impacts of slavery and of discrimination don t continue into the modern era.
Look. let s bring in roger severino, former director of the office of civil rights in the trump administration. you have followed this case very closely, roger. i assume you are not surprised. what are the real world implications for universities now after this decision? this is fantastic news particularly for asian-americans. remember, they were the ones who were artificially kept low and being punished by harvard who gave low personality scores and less likely to be kind. all the subjective buzz words to say we have too many asians. that s what was going on. ashian americans are the big winners here. a man was instrumental in bringing this result. we ll see what harvard and unc does in response. i fear what they do is go under the table to hide continued discrimination on the basis of
That correct? that s right. there should be some significant changes in terms of the boxes being checked off on race. those boxes are now constitutionally unacceptable. what they can do is add a box in terms of personal statements. here is where the ambiguity comes in. these cases came before the court because asian students were being consistently given low personality scores. the justices were all over that during the argument including roberts saying do you think that asian-americans are not very patriotic or interesting? and the council stumbled over that. we knew what he was talking about. he was accusing them of using this nebulous category to achieve what they were told they were not supposed to do, which is the use of race, in this case to reduce the number of asians accepted. the concern that some of us have is that there are universities,