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The Theodore Haddin Arts and Sciences Forum is an interdisciplinary forum where UAB College of Arts and Sciences faculty present their ongoing research and scholarship to an audience of faculty, staff, and student colleagues from across the College. The goal is to offer scholarship that is interdisciplinary and translatable to a broad audience, celebrating and elevating the intellectual vibrancy present in the academic atmosphere of the College of Arts and Sciences.

For the first Haddin Forum of 2025, Keshav Singh, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, will present, Is Affirmative Action Racial Discrimination? In its 2023 landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the U.S. Supreme Court held that race-based affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional. The court argued that race-based affirmative action is a form of racial discrimination, and thus violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Defending affirmative action requires refuting the court’s argument. This in turn requires disentangling affirmative action’s original goal of extending anti-discrimination law from contemporary diversity-based justifications. On their own, diversity-based justifications for affirmative action suggest that universities’ interest in having racially diverse student bodies is weighty enough to make racial discrimination permissible. Instead, proponents of affirmative action must show that it need not involve racial discrimination at all.

Singh argues that proponents of affirmative action must do so by showing how affirmative action programs can counterbalance antecedent disadvantages and thereby level the playing field. This would not involve advantaging some racial groups at the expense of others, and thus would not constitute racial discrimination. However, such programs would need to successfully track and counterbalance antecedent disadvantages, which (as the court has noted) standard racial classifications fail to do. Thus, nondiscriminatory affirmative action programs would need to consider race in much more fine-grained and intersectional ways than past programs have often done.