After Trump’s one-two punch against affirmative action, activist calls on Congress to make it permanent | The College Fix
Edward Blum contends that despite the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, universities continue to employ covert proxies, such as geographic targeting and weighted ZIP codes, to maintain race-based admissions. He urges Republican lawmakers to codify recent federal mandates that prohibit these practices, arguing that voluntary guidance is insufficient to permanently dismantle systemic racial preferences in higher education recruitment and evaluation. Blum advocates for strict legislation requiring comprehensive transparency in admissions data, including detailed information on applicant demographics and academic metrics. By mandating annual public summaries and accessible datasets, he believes institutions can be held accountable through meaningful penalties for non-compliance. This legal framework aims to replace subjective assessments with objective, verifiable standards that eliminate hidden racial considerations from the selection process. This proposal is critical to open data advocates because it positions standardized, granular admissions datasets as essential tools for auditing institutional fairness. By transforming private decision-making processes into publicly available, anonymized records, the initiative promotes algorithmic accountability and independent research. Such transparency empowers external scrutiny to verify merit-based selection, ensuring that data-driven analysis can effectively expose and prevent discriminatory practices in educational equity.
Source: thecollegefix.comPublished on 2025-09-02