Ron Kampeas, Times of Israel, June 30, 2023
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Harvard’s 20th-century antisemitic Jewish quotas were a key part of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action on Thursday, as the winning litigant and two conservative justices cited them in the landmark case.
The 6-3 decision Thursday, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, bars universities from using race as an explicit factor in considering admissions, but allows race to be cited by applicants in essays describing their life experiences.
Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative advocacy group that brought the cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, claimed that the holistic admissions approach Harvard uses — which includes seeking an “extraordinary and diverse class of undergraduate students by conducting a wide-ranging review of every aspect of each applicant’s background and experience” — had its roots in the 1920s quota system “to discriminate against Jewish applicants.”[To read the full article, click here]