Supreme Court blocks use of affirmative action at Harvard, UNC in blow to diversity efforts

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action admissions policies used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina to diversify their campuses, a decision with enormous consequences not only for higher education but also the American workplace.

In one of its most closely watched cases this year, the court ruled along ideological lines that the way the schools approached race violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision drew a sharp rebuke from the court’s liberal wing, who said it rolls back “decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, long a skeptic of race-based policies, wrote that too many universities “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.” The nation’s constitutional history, he wrote, “does not tolerate that choice.”

The vote was 6-3 in the University of North Carolina case, which the court’s conservative wing lining up behind Roberts. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused in the Harvard case and so the vote in that case was 6-2.

Though the outcome was expected, the decision will have wide reverberations in a nation still wrestling with a fraught history with race. The decision appeared to leave some room for colleges to consider race in less systematic ways though it will will likely years and more litigation to test the boundaries of those limits.

What the Supreme Court said about affirmative action

Roberts wrote that the court has “time and again forcefully rejected the notion that government actors may intentionally allocate preference to those ‘who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin.'” The entire point the equal protection clause, he wrote, is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well.”

Roberts wrote that both programs lacked “sufficiently focused and measurable objectives” that warranted considering race as one factor. However, in an important caveat, Roberts left open the idea that schools could consider a candidate’s discussion of how race affected their life, such as through discrimination. But, Roberts warned, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

In a scathing dissent joined by the court’s two other liberals, Sotomayor said the decision rolled back “decades of precedent and momentous progress. “

The court, she wrote,” cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

What’s the potential impact of the Supreme Court decisions?

A point of contention during oral arguments last year was just how seriously universities are taking the 2003 opinion’s directive to try race-neutral policies first. The court said that the law requires schools to engage in a “serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks.” Advocates on both sides of the issue debate the impact such race-neutral policies have in states that explicitly require them.

At the same time, many universities have already stopped using race in admissions. Eight states – including Michigan and California – already ban the consideration of race in higher education. And even before the decision was handed down, some schools moved to looking at other ways to diversity their campuses, such as by considering economic factors.

Kevin Guskiewicz, UNC’s chancellor, said that the university “remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences and continues to make an affordable, high-quality education accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond. While not the outcome we hoped for, we will carefully review the Supreme Court’s decision and take any steps necessary to comply with the law.”

“Like any policy, affirmative action wasn’t perfect,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement. “But it allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged. Now it’s up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve − and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives.”

Returning to an issue raised during oral arguments last year, the court, in a footnote, appeared to exempt military academies from the decision.

How did the affirmative action case reach the Supreme Court?

Harvard, the nation’s oldest private college, and the University of North Carolina, which lays claim to being its oldest public college, public college, acknowledged considering race as one of many factors in determining admissions, an approach consistent with Supreme Court precedent. But that 2003 decision was crafted by a different Supreme Court that included swing-vote justices who often reached conclusions through compromise.

Several members of the current court’s conservative majority, including Roberts, had long signaled skepticism about affirmative action.

The admissions cases were part of a broader conservative push to reimagine the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, the amendment was intended to protect the rights of former slaves who were subjected to discriminatory state laws, particularly in the South. The wider debate – forged in the context of voting, housing, criminal justice and other areas – is whether the clause requires colorblind policies or whether, to stem discrimination, race may be considered.

Perhaps sensing a shifting landscape on the court, two lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action group founded by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, asked the justices to decide whether the 2003 precedent should be overruled. Years in the making, the litigation arrived as the nation continued to wrestle with the fallout from the decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade.