Hawaii's Kamehameha Schools is under attack

As “Chief of War” stirs popular interest in Hawaiian culture, a right-wing group launches assault on  Kamehameha Schools' admissions policy favoring native Hawaiians

Copyright © 2025 by Stephen Shender

(This blog post originally stated incorrectly that SFFA filed suit against Kamehameha Schools on Sept. 3 in U.S. District Court in Hawaii, based on a misunderstanding of a report by SCOTUS.blog. SCOTUS.blog reported on Sept. 3 that SFFA was preparing a suit. SFFA filed its suit on Oct. 20. I apologize for the error, but not for jumping the gun.)

I received a disturbing notice from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs recently: A Virginia-based outfit, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), is challenging the admissions policy of Kamehameha Schools. 

SFFA's challenge is a redo of an earlier challenge to Kamehameha Schools' admission policy—Doe v. Kamehameha Schools—that was argued and lost by its plaintiffs in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court nine years ago.

SFFA claims that “over 20,000 parents, students and others” have joined its membership “to help restore color-blind principles to our nations’ schools, colleges and universities” since its founding in 2014.

SFFA has successfully sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina over their admissions policies. SFFA is looking for families whose children have been rejected for admission to Kamehameha Schools.

SFFA says it's challenging privately funded Kamehameha Schools because Kamehameha Schools’ “preference [for applicants of native-Hawaiian ancestry] is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha.” SFFA states that Kamehameha Schools’ “focus on ancestry, rather than merit or need, is neither fair nor legal, and we are committed to ending Kamehameha’s unlawful admissions policies in court.”

Kamehameha Schools does indeed give “preference to applicants of Hawaiian ancestry to the extent permitted by law.” Applicants who can prove to have at least one kanaka maoli (pure Hawaiian) ancestor can qualify for preferential treatment. Kamehameha Schools additionally reserves twenty-five percent of “new spaces” for orphan and indigent applicants who demonstrate they can be “academically successful.”

Kamehameha Schools’ present-day admissions policy is in keeping with its history of ensuring educational opportunities for Native Hawaiians since its founding by a bequest from the will of Bernice Pauahi Bishop in 1887. Pauahi Bishop was a great-granddaughter of Hawaii’s King Kamehameha I, who unified the Hawaiian Islands and founded the Kingdom of Hawaii.

SFFA’s attempt to prevent a venerable, privately endowed and funded Hawaiian educational institution from fulfilling its mission on its own historic terms is audacious. Worse than that, it’s duplicitous.

According to the 2020 census, 21.8 percent of Hawaii’s 1.4 million residents are self-identified native Hawaiians. And according to the Hawaii Department of Education, approximately 41,577 students in Hawaii’s public schools identified as Native Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian during the 2020–2021 school year, accounting for about 23.7 percent of the total public school enrollment of 174,704 students. 

Kamehameha Schools serves approximately 6,000 students across three K-12 campuses and more than 30 pre-schools—meaning that there are about seven Native Hawaiian students enrolled in public schools for every Native Hawaiian student in Kamehameha Schools classrooms. Because that ratio is so lopsided, there’s no way Kamehameha Schools can accommodate all Native Hawaiian applicants, let alone non-Native Hawaiian students; not under its preferential admissions policy.

Meanwhile, acting allegedly on behalf of a majority of Hawaii’s population, Students for Fair Admissions and their attorneys are contesting a Kamehameha Schools admissions policy that benefits a minority of a minority of a minority of Hawaii’s general population, general student population and Native Hawaiian student population. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

Students for Fair Admissions was founded in 2014 by conservative, self-described “legal strategist” Edward Blum. Blum, who specializes in orchestrating challenges to race-conscious policies in education and voting rights, is not a lawyer. He’s a professional organizer of lawsuits against educational and other institutions. SFFA is one of several non-profit organizations Blum’s established to bring legal challenges based on one form or another of alleged preferential discrimination, most often based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Blum’s other organizations are the Project on Fair Representation and the American Alliance for Equal Rights. Blum’s non-profit groups are reportedly funded by conservative donors and legal foundations. Since they’re non-profits, they don’t have to disclose their donors.

They do have to disclose their budgets. In 2023, according to their IRS 990 forms, SFFA paid Blum $48,000 annually and Project for Fair Representation paid him $150,000—this latter when Project for Fair Representation ran a $106,841deficit. Blum is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he likely draws another salary. AEI pays its fellows between $88,000 and $144,000 annually; average annual salary at AEI is $112,674. (Nice work, if you can get it.)

Policy changes are the primary goal of Blum’s groups. In 2014, Blum’s newly constituted SFFA challenged Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions policies, arguing they discriminated against white and Asian applicants. SFFA ultimately won its case big time in the Supreme Court, whose favorable ruling in 2023 effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions.

That victory came with a multimillion-dollar exclamation point for SFFA when UNC settled with Blum’s group for $4.8 million, of which $3.9 million went to legal fees and $900,000 went to “expenses.” To date, Harvard has not settled with SFFA.

In Doe v. Kamehameha Schools he U.S. Ninth Circuit Court sitting en banc (with all its judges) upheld the school’s preferential admissions policy in a 12-4 ruling. But in the wake of the six-to-three conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s decision in the UNC and Harvard cases two years ago, SFFA ’s chances of winning a suit against Kamehameha Schools’ admission policy appear promising.

Kamehameha Schools is potentially a settlement-rich target for Blum’s SFFA and the group's attorneys. With a budget backed by a $15.2 billion endowment, including financial assets of $10.5 billion and $4.7 billion in commercial real estate, Kamehameha Schools’ operating budget for FY 23-24 was $460 million, including: $240 million to support its K-12 campuses and pre-school programs; $90 million for scholarships, outreach programs and partnerships with Hawaiian-serving organizations; $60 million for management of 365,000 acres of ancestral lands; and $70 million for support services and administration.

Financially, SFFA has been the most successful of Blum’s groups. In 2023 SFFA had revenues of $3.25 million, $1.74 million in expenses, and $1.51 million in net income. With resources like that, Students for Fair Admissions appears well fixed to finance the latest case against Kamehameha Schools all the way to a favorable Supreme Court, while potentially subjecting Kamehameha Schools to serious financial stress as it seeks to defend itself.

Forgive my cynicism for wondering if that isn’t a goal of SFFA's lawsuit, which seems bent on denying a beloved 135-year-old educational institution—devoted from its inception to uplifting native Hawaiians and their culture—the right to its own future.

Stephen Shender is the author of  Once There Was Fire, A Novel of Old Hawaii, about the life of  Kamehameha and the unification of the Hawaiian Islands.