Northwestern professor Anthony Chen says Asians are the center of the current U.S. Supreme Court case over affirmative action. Until now all plaintiffs in affirmative action cases have been white. Courtesy of Anthony Chen
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the fate of affirmative action in college admissions this June. In the meantime, Illinois colleges are considering how to maintain equity and diversity in admissions without it.
Anthony Chen, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University who is working on a book about the history of affirmative action in higher education, visited college archives across the country to understand how we arrived at this moment. WBEZ higher education reporter Lisa Philip spoke with Chen about his findings.
Many people are predicting we could see the end of affirmative action in college admissions with the court’s ruling this June. Tell me about the spark in the early 1960s that led to early affirmative action policies at colleges and universities.
The year that we like to say marks the start of affirmative action is 1963. That was a big year in the civil rights movement. It was the year of the March on Washington. And it was the year that the church in Birmingham was bombed and four little girls were killed.
A lot of these men who were in charge of institutions like [the universities of] Michigan or Washington or Cornell, their consciences were pricked by what they saw going on in the streets of Birmingham and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. These men took a look at their own schools, and they realized that their schools were nearly as segregated as Ole Miss or Alabama. And it worried them.
There were no discriminatory laws on the books in states like Washington or Michigan. And yet there were so few Black students on campus. So the men at these institutions decided to begin exploring new ways of thinking about academic merit in order to bring African American students on campus.
How do those…
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