Last August, Apple was among a group of nearly 80 companies filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of affirmative action programs being challenged at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court on Thursday specifically ruled against race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions programs.
Those programs “violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority ruling in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
Dozens of major corporations across various industries took interest in the case, including Apple, Google, General Motors, General Dynamics, Dell, and Starbucks.
Those companies and nearly 40 others joined in an amicus brief contending that diversity in higher education ultimately helps their businesses by providing a diverse pool from which they can recruit.
In concurring with the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that under the 14th Amendment, “the color of a person’s skin is irrelevant to that individual’s equal status as a citizen of this nation.”
MacDailyNews Take: Regarding affirmative action, as we wrote back on December 31, 2015:
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin?
See also: Apple backs affirmative action in U.S. Supreme Court case – August 1, 2022
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The post Apple on the losing side as Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions appeared first on MacDailyNews.
