Your Cart is Empty
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
On September 17th, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen delivered the annual Constitution Day Lecture in McCosh 50. The lecture, co-hosted by the James Madison Program and the Program in Law and Normative Thinking, was entitled “Our Civil Rights Revolution.” Professor Gersen discussed the history of affirmative action and the evolving meaning of civil rights.
Gersen began by outlining the two main interpretative approaches to the Fourteenth Amendment, which underpins the affirmative action decisions. The anti-subordination approach to equal protection takes race into account to remedy racial hierarchy and protect against discrimination. The anti-classification approach understands the Constitution to be functionally colorblind – to differentiate between races, under this view, is to discriminate. According to Gersen, in modern doctrine, the anti-subordination approach is generally considered to be illegitimate.
The Court can only uphold a classification on the basis of race if it passes the test of strict scrutiny. That is, it is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling interest. As Gersen put it, “The lawfulness of a racial classification will turn on an evaluation of how weighty the goal is, and how closely the means used is fitted to the end.”
In 1978, in University of California v. Bakke, a divided Court ruled that student body diversity was a compelling reason to permit classification on the basis of race. Though the Court deemed racial quotas unconstitutional, it endorsed Harvard’s race-conscious admissions model as consistent with Title Vl of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Gersen said, quoting Harvard’s amicus brief, “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin, life spent on a farm, may tip the balance in other candidates. A farm boy from Iowa can bring something to our college that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a White person cannot offer.” Affirmative action, as articulated here, became precedent for the next 45 years.
Gersen soon shifted focus to more recent developments. In 2023, the Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that affirmative action violates Title Vl. “The story of what happens after SSFA v. Harvard is still nascent, but it has been apparent that SSFA v. Harvard was a marker for the twilight of a civil rights consensus that grew out of the 1960s,” explained Gersen.
In the wake of the ruling, Gersen has seen a new vision of civil rights emerging. The Trump administration has been dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programming across the country, viewing it as discriminatory. These actions, Gersen said, illustrate a civil rights revolution.
“The most egregious discriminators and civil rights violators are institutions and individuals…that, like Harvard in the previous era, are working to create racial diversity. In this paradigm, DEI at the university is the new racial segregation.”
Gersen went on to question whether racial neutrality is indeed the end goal for affirmative action critics. She cited an example from this past spring: the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division requested that universities share admissions data since 2023, disaggregated by race.
“This raises the question of whether schools are getting a message from this that they should take care to avoid admitting too many racial minorities in order to avoid investigations for civil rights violations,” she said. “It makes me wonder if a new kind of quota system is in the course of being created in which not having a specific number of White and Asian students is kind of a proxy for unlawful conduct.”
Reflecting on what she understands to be a new civil rights order, she told the audience: “The meaning of the Civil Rights Act is in the process of being turned around, revolving from a law that we envisioned as protecting minorities or historically subjugated groups against discrimination… to a law that treats with suspicion attempts to respect minorities or historically subjugated groups.”
Marisa Hirschfield ’27 studies History and Creative Writing and is a PFS Writing Fellow and Social Media Coordinator.
Princeton recently hosted the New Jersey General Assembly for a special session in the Faculty Room of Nassau Hall, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the independent legislature’s first meeting in August 1776. At the time of that inaugural session, Nassau Hall was still unravaged by the horrors of war.
Closing the doors to such historic buildings repeats the mistake made by too many universities: conflating the institution with its administration. While the University could not function without the work of its leaders and trustees, neither could it live without the flesh, blood, and spirit of its students and faculty.
Over the past year, President Donald Trump’s administration has targeted international students in a series of restrictions, citing concerns about national security. Fear has spread among international students at Princeton, where 13% of undergraduates — and 45% of grad students — come from abroad. “This is not the safe haven that it was supposed to be,” B. ’27, a Princeton student from Latin America, told PAW.
The last two years have seen a dramatic increase in the scrutiny of free speech and academic freedom on university campuses, largely in response to the protests that followed the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. There has been important progress during this period that bolsters awareness of the importance of free speech and academic freedom principles.
However, progress on these core values will mean little if there is not a major effort to address a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty at many universities.
