Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently blasted the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to effectively gut the law that allowed schools to consider race when making college admissions decisions. The governor stated that the ruling reverses the progress made by Affirmative Action.
“The damage caused to Black communities by slavery and Jim Crow Laws, to Hispanics and Native Americans by a legacy of discrimination and oppression has not nearly been reversed,” the governor said in a June 29 statement by press release. “For centuries, students from historically underrepresented and underserved communities were locked out of higher education — preventing upward mobility and stunting economic development for generations to come. Affirmative action admissions practices were a critical step towards creating educational environments that are representative of our diverse nation, while righting the wrongs of our past.”
As part of his statement, Pritzker pledged that the state of Illinois will “continue to uplift our students of color — promoting inclusion and expanding access through record-levels of funding for higher education institutions and our MAP Grant Program, so that every student has the opportunity to earn a degree.”
The case, which was argued in October 2022 and decided on June 29, centered on the admissions processes employed by Harvard and UNC, both of which use highly selective criteria that include consideration of race, a Supreme Court syllabus of the case said.
In penning the opinion for the conservative majority, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that the Harvard College and University of North Carolina admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He further said that the programs involved stereotypes and the negative use of race. Roberts additionally stressed the need for a logical endpoint to race-based admissions programs.
The new ruling does allow U.S. military service academies to continue to take race into consideration as a factor in making admissions decisions, and it comes after Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued during oral arguments in favor of that position.
