If the Supreme Court kills Affirmative Action this week, equality will suffer | Opinion

Affirmative action in college admissions is on the ropes, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears poised to unleash the knockout punch any day now.

In Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the high court could overrule previous cases and hold that race cannot be factored into college admissions. And it will decide if Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants.

In a companion case, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. University of North Carolina, the court will decide whether UNC’s admissions policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment..

My anticipation for the court’s rulings in two cases got me thinking about why and how affirmative action began in the first place.

When I arrived at Stanford University in the fall of 1966 as a graduate student, the civil rights movement for equal opportunity was roaring loud and clear, yet few signs of racial or ethnic consciousness were evident on campus. Black students were only about 1% of the student body. There were even fewer Latino students at the time.

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“Race was incidental in selective college admissions,” said John Thelin, a University of Kentucky higher education historian. “Their preoccupation was identifying and recruiting the brightest and the best.”

The dearth of financial aid and implicit and explicit racial bias also built barriers for students of color.

Near the end of the 1960s, however, a transformative change in university student bodies burst forth: the dawning of affirmative action. In the fall of 1968, federal government officials directed colleges and universities receiving federal funds to report their student enrollments by race and ethnicity. By then, “minorities” had made slight gains in enrollment from the mid-’60s. Yet, as government figures showed, the University of Virginia stood at 99% white; Notre Dame, 98.1%; Princeton, 96.2%; Harvard, 94.8%; Stanford, 93.5%; Sacramento State, 90%; UCLA, 89.4%; and UC Berkeley, 88%.

These figures, repeated year after year through the decades, translated into a nearly all-white, male class of professionals, from teachers to doctors.

At Stanford, students Luis Nogales, Frank Ponce, Bob Anchondo and I wrote and met with Admissions Dean Rixford Snyder in May of 1967 to argue in support of increasing the recruitment of Latinos. Snyder listened politely but gave no indication he would change an admissions system that, top administrators apparently thought, was working just fine.

Intense pressure, following the public demonstrations of 1967 and 1968 — the latter in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — pushed many college administrators to slowly start doing the “right thing” for people of color. Some administrators also feared that civic unrest, spurred by centuries of discrimination against Black people and other groups then known as minorities, would spill onto their pristine campuses.

“The whole country was really scared,” Robert Rosenzweig, a Stanford vice provost during that period, recalled in his 2010 oral history. “That certainly affected the dynamics, and I think certainly led (Stanford) to be more accommodating in policy.”

In fact, the administration was very accommodating when Stanford’s Black Student Union forcefully issued 10 demands, including stepped-up recruiting and greater financial aid and increased admissions for people of color. A week after Dr. King was killed, the university finally agreed to open its doors to more people of color.

The diversity initiative soon became known as affirmative action at Stanford and other universities. Initially, it focused on race and ethnicity, and, at times, it also incorporated gender.

In the last half-century, college affirmative action has enabled hundreds of thousands of people of color to leap out of poverty and improve their status in life. At Stanford, the list of outstanding students of color who have attended my alma mater is impressive: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, astronaut Ellen Ochoa or U.S. Senator Cory Booker, among many others.

I don’t know if some or all of these prominent names benefitted directly from affirmative action directly, but I know this. Stanford is better for having produced these outstanding alums. Our nation is better when colleges and universities reflect their communities. Halting efforts to make colleges and universities more inclusive comes at the same time America is on the road to being a multicultural nation where non-Hispanic whites will no longer be in the majority by 2050.

“Banning any consideration of race would hamper the growth of generations of students who will be unprepared for an increasingly diverse nation, “ wrote the American Civil Liberties Union in defense of affirmative action last year.

Eliminating affirmative action now would be like going backward in time.

Frank Sotomayor, a former Los Angeles Times editor, authored the book, “The Dawning of Diversity: How Chicanos Helped Change Stanford University.”