News |

As Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, Chicago and Illinois react: ‘This decision only sets us back’

Kenwood Academy student Scarlett Rose Smith, 14, has already been planning for the day she applies to colleges, with art school in mind.

But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday that affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, she’s reconsidering the types of schools she wants to attend.

“Now I’m leaning more toward (historically Black colleges and universities), because I don’t know if my chances of getting in (at other schools) will be good or not,” said Smith, who will be a sophomore this fall.

She said her Woodlawn neighborhood high school, with a student body that’s 85% Black and where 7 in 10 go on to enroll in college, “will have a different, and more supportive approach to this,” leaving her hopeful for her future in spite of a Supreme Court decision she feels will hurt her chances at getting accepted to the university of her choice.

“The ruling is saying colleges and universities trying to be more diverse is discriminatory, and that’s ignoring the fact that race affects people’s lives and their chances of getting into school,” Smith said. “And affirmative action was supposed to remedy that by acknowledging it.”

Smith was among the millions of American high school students — members of the most racially diverse generation in U.S. history — whose collegiate pursuits will be affected by the decision.

“The ruling introduces a potential for racial inequity, particularly affecting underrepresented ethnic and cultural backgrounds,” said Ava Gonzalez, 16, a senior at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora. “Affirmative action … offers a chance for everyone, no matter their background, to exit impoverished communities and emerge to create opportunities for themselves and others.”

In Illinois, widespread rebuke over the decision came quickly from politicians and educators alike, who called the ruling a devastating setback to equity at institutions of higher education nationwide.

Eddie Phillips, provost and vice president of academic affairs for National Louis University, one of Chicago’s leading minority-serving universities, said the ruling reverses decades of progress.

“I think it sends a clear message that students of color are not seen as important resources and assets to the academic community,” Phillips said Thursday. “Higher education has been a great vehicle for creating economic mobility. This just sends a damaging message that this is not our country’s commitment.”

The Illinois Board of Higher Education sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s decision as well.

“The ruling is an attack on people of color, particularly Black people, who face discrimination through multiple facets of American society,” it said in a statement. “It is disheartening to know that there are people intent on stifling racial equity at a time when we should all be working together to break down barriers because that is the right thing to do.”

Public and private universities in the state, meanwhile, pledged to continue to find ways to promote diversity. The University of Chicago, DePaul University, and the University of Notre Dame joined many elite private universities in an amicus brief ahead of Thursday’s ruling, calling on the court to not outlaw affirmative action.

“We consider diversity to be a strength — and, indeed, foundational to our academic success,” said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker in a message to their college community. “We will continue to advance these ideals.”

But how schools will go about such pursuits — as well as implementing the Supreme Court ruling — will be tricky to navigate, particularly for schools with extremely competitive admissions processes, Phillips said.

“What has been clear is that race cannot be used as a plus-factor in admissions decisions. Instead, other characteristics — such as one’s socioeconomic status or academic history — could be used potentially as a proxy for closing equity gaps, as opposed to using race,” he said. “But in many cases, it’s hard to decouple those things.”

Finding those quantifiable reasons for race-conscious admissions was where the Harvard and UNC lawyers stumbled in their argument before the Supreme Court, said Ronald J. Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University who specializes in constitutional law.

“It’s not a surprise; in fact, if anything, it’s surprising it’s taken this long to get here,” Allen said Thursday of the ruling. “The litigation strategy … has really been quite bad. Relying on diversity was a huge mistake.”

The court’s ruling does allow for schools to consider race when it contributes to “something that’s verifiable, that actually makes a difference,” Allen said. “And that’s what the universities will attempt to do. The result of that will be huge amounts of litigation.”

Race undeniably plays a factor in college admissions, said Alvin Tillery, director of Northwestern’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy and a professor of political science.

“What the court’s given us today is really a radical break from precedent … and also a break from the reality in which college admission works,” Tillery said. “(As to) the notion that you can’t use race for Black, Latino and Indigenous and poor Asian kids as a nudge factor — guess what? Race is used for white people in college admissions.”

Athletics programs and legacy admissions favor descendants of white and affluent graduates from eras before segregation and discrimination were outlawed, Tillery said, and without affirmative action as a counter, elite schools will need to consider how such practices further inequity going forward.

“Having a legacy entitlement at Princeton is essentially a white entitlement,” he said.

There will still be ways to improve diversity in higher education, Tillery said, noting like many others the imperfect advancements made in 45 years of affirmative action.

“Has it helped diversify the elite of America? Yes. But there are other measures for promoting racial equity and integration before affirmative action,” Tillery said. “We spent hundreds of millions of dollars litigating and fighting about a tool which has had a positive impact — but not a huge impact — on these minority communities.”

Meant to correct historical inequities left in the wake of slavery, Jim Crow laws and discrimination against Latinos, Asians and Indigenous Americans, affirmative action policies first centered on employment in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. Harvard launched one of the first affirmative action plans tied to education in the U.S. in the early 1970s, but such policies have repeatedly faced legal challenges, state bans and federal court cases over the ensuing decades.

Applauding the court’s decision, Liberty Justice Center President Jacob Huebert said he believes affirmative action didn’t advance the goal of diversity.

“America was founded on principles of individualism, and the idea that each person should be treated as an individual and not judged favorably or unfavorably based on their race. And that’s the principle at the heart of this case,” Huebert said. “Not every school is going to necessarily reflect the exact racial composition of the general population.”

The legal nonprofit recently submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in support of reversing affirmative action, noting that universities often discriminate against Asians and Asian Americans by failing to recognize the diversity among those groups, Huebert said.

“There are people from many different countries and cultures, who, with their different backgrounds, would bring different things to the school,” he said. “And when you just make them all a race, it doesn’t account for that at all.”

Black college students like Dionne Lipscomb, a graduate student in the College Student Affairs program at Eastern Illinois University, called out conservatives who are celebrating the ruling while ignoring the importance of racial identity.

“Being ‘colorblind’ is just something that people say to continue to be ignorant to the facts and ignorant to people’s actual identities and actual experiences,” Lipscomb said. “We are actually out here living this, breathing this — this is our life, and because someone else is educated, they think they know more than the people who are actually living it and actually experiencing it.”

Lipscomb said implicit bias already exists in college admissions, and students who don’t belong to a minority group are not on the same playing field as students of color who lack certain resources like money and privilege.

“You can’t take into consideration the whole person without taking into consideration who they are and how this country’s history has affected them,” Lipscomb said. “As a student of color, it heavily affects me because, before affirmative action, it was tough for people who look like me and people who come from the same culture and background as I do to even get into predominantly white institutions.”

Local officials were quick to condemn the decision Thursday.

“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,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a statement. “This decision only sets us back.”

Pritzker pledged to continue work expanding access to higher education for Illinois students of color, particularly through the state’s Monetary Award Program, which offers grants to full- and part-time students based on financial need.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, called the decision “devastating.”

“Affirmative action was a means by which generations of children were allowed access to institutions, access to ideas, and access to cultures that a wicked system of discrimination had long excluded them from,” Johnson said in a statement.

Several Black lawmakers cited their own experience as students of color in calling for universities to commit to new ways to advance equity in their student admission.

Illinois State Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Chicago earlier this year, said he wasn’t shocked by the conservative court’s opinion. But what matters now is how schools will move forward, said Buckner, who attended and played football for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re creating pipelines into these universities for young people who have been disenfranchised based on the lack of resources in their communities,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to be governed by affirmative action laws to do this, right? Illinois is one of the most diverse states in the country. And all of our institutions should reflect (this).”

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul was in a federal appellate court hearing on the state’s sweeping gun ban Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling was released. He had yet to read the decision, but said the high court has been chipping away at affirmative action for decades.

Raoul noted he was one of only a handful of Black students in his law school class and brought a different perspective to the classroom despite coming from a family that was “not without means.”

“I think that perspective is important to every higher education institution in the nation, not just from an African American, but from people of different races that get treated a certain way based on their race,” Raoul said.

Former first lady Michelle Obama, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side and attended Princeton and Harvard universities before she and her husband went on to work at the University of Chicago, shared her own experience as a young Black college student in a statement.

“I sometimes wondered if people thought I got there because of affirmative action … But the fact is this: I belonged,” she said. Special consideration for admission extends far beyond race-conscious admission policies, she noted, from affluent student athletes who receive private coaching to those who attend well-resourced schools with programs devoted to test prep and college entrance exams.

“We don’t usually question if those students belong. So often, we just accept that money, power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level,” Michelle Obama said. “And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who have always had to sweat a little more to climb the same ladders, I hope and I pray that the rest of us are willing to sweat a little, too.”

Tribune reporters Jonathan Bullington, Jeremy Gorner and Dan Petrella and The Associated Press contributed.