Category: Comment O’ The Day

We’ve let these schools raise up a generation or two of snowflake pansies.

If you need therapy after a court rules against you, you shouldn’t be a lawyer.

Make SCOTUS great again: Boston University law students offered therapy after recent rulings.

The work week ended with monumental rulings from the Supreme Court. The hot takes coming from the media are heavy with doom-and-gloom vibes because most of them are liberals.

There is no denying the rulings on the three big cases that deal with affirmative action, religious freedom, and student debt forgiveness, will “re-shape America for generations to come,” as one CNN anchor said this morning. A Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said the rulings were made “strictly along ideological lines.” Another anchor noted that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, opined that the rulings show that it may be time for “re-shaping the Court.’

The drama. The Supreme Court is following the Constitution and the liberals are emotionally distressed. They have become so accustomed to the Court randomly making law instead of following the Constitution, like Roe v Wade back in 1973, that justices who are originalists are seen as oddities of the right. For example, Joe Biden, who has been humiliated by the rulings, especially the one on student loan bailouts, said the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution wrong. Imagine the ignorance and arrogance of Biden, who barely graduated from law school, saying the Supreme Court just didn’t understand the Constitution.

The big affirmative action case where the Court ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina “violate the Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment,” was a punch in the gut to those who think discrimination is bad if it is against black and brown students but ok against Asian and white students. That is an over-simplification but it is the core of the system that routinely denied admission to qualified Asian students so that preference could be made for black and Hispanic students. Picking winners and losers based on skin color in college admissions always results in discrimination against someone. We long ago abandoned the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. that his children would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. In other words, meritocracy is back in college admissions and that is a good thing. Students deserve admission based on merit, not skin color, and the ability to check a box on an application.

Boston University is trying to cope with the fact that we now have a Supreme Court that follows the Constitution.

“The rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)—in cases addressing the admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina—are profoundly disappointing because they take us backward, potentially creating less diverse college campuses and a less just America,” Boston University President Robert A. Brown wrote in a letter sent to the University community shortly after the decision Thursday. “These decisions are antithetical to Boston University’s values and mission.”

Brown added that the University would continue to review the decision “to better understand what it means for our admissions and academic practices and the changes we may be required to make.”

Whenever I think of affirmative action, I am reminded of a line George W. Bush often used in speeches about education – the soft bigotry of low expectations. It is insulting to black and brown students to assume that because of their skin color, they need special consideration. It assumes that all black and brown students come from poverty and few opportunities that others are afforded. Perhaps back when affirmative action first began but not now. There are more middle-class and upper-class minorities now than ever before. Affirmative action was never meant to be a forever policy. It is no longer needed as it once was.

There are ways for colleges to make their own admissions policies, something that Chief Justice Roberts notes. One associate professor at BU School of Law notes the lack of guidance in the ruling.

“It’s hard to say what this means for other colleges and universities because the majority opinion wasn’t all that clear in a lot of important ways,” says Jonathan Feingold, an associate professor of law at the BU School of Law.

“I wouldn’t take this opinion as a reason to take off the table ever considering race again,” Feingold says. “Colleges and universities may just have to do it in a more careful, defined way than what Harvard and UNC did.”

To that end, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, writing in the majority opinion, notes: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” In other words, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” he writes.

In order for Boston University law students to be able to cope with a Supreme Court that follows the Constitution, mental health resources are being made available to help them “navigate these times.” The resources are not specialized counseling for students but resources that are already available.

Two of the resources were BU Behavioral Medicine and BU Student Wellbeing. According to its website, BU Behavioral Medicine offers therapy, on-call service for mental health emergencies and mental health diagnoses, among other services.

The student government criticized the decision in 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, which gave a Christian web designer the right to deny services to same-sex couples. It also condemned Biden v. Nebraska, which ruled President Biden’s proposed student loan forgiveness plan was unconstitutional.

“These three decisions form part of a lengthy sequence of this court’s ruling which steadily erode the rights of marginalized communities and undermine the very diversity upon which our nation was built,” the SGA argued.

The group that has benefitted the most from affirmative action policies is women. On today’s college campuses, women students often outnumber men. In 2022, for example, there were almost two women attending college for every man. It was the highest recorded gender imbalance favoring women in U.S. college enrollment. To hear the left speak, affirmative action was solely about skin color. That was never true.

It is the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas now and that is a remarkable change. The correction is long overdue. The left is just going to have to learn to cope with getting back to the Constitution as it was meant to be, not as the left wanted it to be.