Since the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preferences in college admissions in 2023, Harvard president Alan Garber has promised repeatedly that his school “will follow the law.” If so, why are they still hiding the data? Harvard and dozens of other schools are withholding records from the Trump administration that would show whether they have actually stopped discriminating. And at least some of the courts are on the schools’ side: A federal judge ruled Friday that public universities in 17 states don’t have to turn over their records. So much for the Supreme Court—racial preferences are going to die hard.
The current chapter of the saga began three years ago, when a group of unlikely allies finally beat affirmative action in the courtroom. A group called Students for Fair Admissions, led by founder Edward Blum, partnered with Asian students and parents to form an alliance that held together for a few critical years to seek what became one of the great landmark decisions of this generation.
Blum, who had previously lost two Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action at the Supreme Court, reconsidered his strategy before his third try. His loss in Fisher v. University of Texas in 2013 convinced him that the usual arguments against racial preferences in schools—academic mismatch, civil rights, lack of merit in admissions—just weren’t compelling enough to sway the justices. His previous poster child for the cause, Abigail Fisher, was a white woman who wasn’t able to show that her rejection by the University of Texas had been caused by racial discrimination.
