Edward Blum published in the Washington Examiner

Edward Blum, President of Students for Fair Admissions, published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner. You can read an exercept below.

If universities have stopped racial discrimination, why sue to block oversight?

By Edward Blum | Nicole Neily

“In 2023, the Supreme Court issued one of the clearest and most important civil rights rulings in decades in the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The court held that Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions systems violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all racial discrimination. Universities receiving federal funds may not classify applicants by race and treat them differently because of their race.

That should have settled the matter. But it didn’t.

A coalition of seventeen states, led by Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit this month seeking to block the Department of Education from collecting detailed admissions data from universities that receive federal funds. Their target is a new reporting requirement through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS.

The states frame their lawsuit as an administrative law dispute. They argue that the new federal data collection requirements — which only apply to schools with very competitive admissions outcomes — are too burdensome, too rushed, or potentially intrusive of students’ privacy.

Stripped of the legal jargon, the practical effect of the lawsuit would prevent the federal government from determining whether universities are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling. In other words, if colleges are using racial proxies in their admissions decisions, the required data would be a smoking gun…

You can read the full op-ed here.