Admissions Against Interest: Valley State University Honors College Director Brags About Race-Based Admissions

“We accept virtually all students of color.” Those words from Professor Roger Gilles, director of the Frederick Meijer Honors College, may seem a bit odd to Supreme Court justices who believe that they ended racial discrimination in admissions years ago in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023). The college is part of Grand Valley State University in Michigan and still apparently uses race as not just one factor but an overriding factor in admissions.Gilles’s April 4, 2022, email to colleagues could prove the ultimate admission against interest. As detailed by the College Fix, he explained to the faculty that “we accept virtually all students of color, except in cases in which the student’s writing is such that we’re convinced they would struggle far too much in our first-year sequences.” He even boasted that “This year, in fact, we accepted a ‘Signature Saturday’ student with a high GPA but an SAT score of 880..!” That score would put a student below the 25th percentile.Gilles also said that race was the predominant factor in aid, stating ‘[w]ith the cooperation of Jodi in Admissions and Michelle in Financial Aid, we’ve tried hard to give most of the limited number of Honors-specific scholarships we award to students of color. This has been the case going back to Dr. J.”

Dr. J is a reference to Professor Jeff Chamberlain, who was hired by the University of North Florida to perform the same function and is now an academic program manager for the University of Oregon.

The College Fix alleges that the university redacted portions of the email where the discrimination on the basis of race was discussed.

Despite Gilles appearing to defy the Supreme Court ruling in the Students for Fair Admissions case, it was clearly not enough for some. Professor Melanie Shell-Weiss wrote that “[f]rom a diversity standpoint, the needle effectively hasn’t moved.”

In 2017, Chief Justice John Roberts declared: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

In 2023, Roberts wrote in  Students for Fair Admissions that “[universities and colleges] have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

These admissions could trigger a response from the Departments of Justice and Education under Title VI, which prohibits preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.

The government loves admissions against interest, particularly in the area of college admissions where most faculty and administrators rarely publicly acknowledge race-based selections. Indeed, I expect that many colleagues will be more miffed at Gilles for saying the quiet part out loud. Most schools are being accused of publicly claiming compliance with the Court’s rulings while circumventing those rulings in new ways, including the use of essay prompts to elicit race identifications.

Gilles is, if nothing else, open and obvious in the area of race-based admissions.