I won’t.
I would tell you there’s lots of things that would surprise people, but it’s less important what I believe about the environment, the death penalty, abortion, property rights. That’s not important. That’s not the focus of what I do, nor should it be. You can call me a conservative Republican, and I’m not going to argue with that, but if I were to lay out all the things that would put me in the camp of Hubert Humphrey, you might be surprised, Lulu.
I want to talk about last week’s decision. Harvard was at the center of the case. The Harvard class of 1963 had 18 Black students. Now, in the most recently admitted class, the class of 2027, more than 15 percent of the students are Black, 11 percent of the students are Latino, and nearly 30 percent are Asian American, which is, by the way, a record proportion of Asian American students for the college. Affirmative action, many would argue, has not been perfect, but those numbers also tell a story: that taking race into consideration has led to a dramatically more diverse student body, no?
Well, let me back up a little bit and talk about the growth in the Asian acceptance rates, because this is something that we’ve briefed in court.
In 2014, the year we sued Harvard, the Asian admissions rate was, I think, around 18, maybe 19 percent. During the last eight years, the admissions rates at Harvard for Asians have grown from about 18 percent now up to 30 percent. Yet if you look back from 2014, all the way back to about 1999, it was flatlined for 20 years. But then when Harvard gets sued, all of a sudden the number of Asians go up by 60 percent. How is that possible? How did that happen? Well, I think the numbers speak for themselves. [Harvard has attributed the growth to a steady increase in applications in recent years across all racial categories.]
But let me go back to your other question. Can the bar be raised for some kids, based upon their ethnicity and their race, and lowered for others, in order to create a diverse campus? The law does not permit that in any area of our public policy. There is no way to increase the percentage of Black and Latino students without decreasing the percentage of Asian American and white students.