Global Courant
The High Council ruled on Thursday that the affirmative action admissions policy of Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.
The ruling is a huge blow to decades-old efforts to boost minority enrollment in US universities through policies that take applicants’ race into account.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, in which all five of his fellow conservative justices participated, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “inevitably use race in a negative way, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints.”
“We’ve never had admissions programs work that way, and we won’t today,” Roberts wrote.
The majority said the universities’ policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Judge Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who wrote a concurring opinion, said the schools’ affirmative action admissions policies “go against our colorblind constitution.
“Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make right,” wrote Thomas.
In her dissenting majority opinion, Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is black, called the ruling “truly a tragedy for all of us.”
Affirmative action advocates in higher education gather before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral argument in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina on October 31, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Her fellow Liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said: “Today this Court stands in the way and undoes decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
Sotomayor, who called the ruling “profoundly wrong” and “devastating”, said the majority “believes that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical advantages”.
In doing so, she argued that the Supreme Court “upholds a superficial rule of color blindness as a constitutional principle in an endemic segregated society where race has always mattered and still matters.”
Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
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Thursday’s ruling related to two separate but related cases, one for Harvard, the other for UNC.
In the Harvard case, the vote on the decision was 6-2, with Jackson not taking part in the hearing of the case. In her Senate confirmation hearings last year, Jackson agreed to withdraw from the case involving Harvard, whose Board of Overseers she served until early 2022.
In the UNC case, the vote was 6-3, with Jackson participating in the hearing of the case and disagreeing with Sotomayor and Judge Elena Kagan, the court’s third liberal.
UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a statement, “Carolina remains committed to bringing together talented students with diverse perspectives and life experiences and continues to make affordable, quality education accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond.”
“While this is not the result we hoped for, we will carefully review the Supreme Court’s decision and take all necessary steps to comply with the law,” Guskiewicz said.
Former President Donald Trump, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said in a statement: “This is a great day for America.”
“We’re going back to all merit-based – and that’s how it should be!” said Trump, who graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school like Harvard, after growing up the son of a wealthy New York real estate developer.
In a footnote to the majority opinion in the case, Roberts indicated that the decision does not apply to the US military academies.
The Biden administration had filed a legal letter arguing that race-based admissions to US colleges promote “compelling interests” in the military academies, Roberts noted.
“However, no military academy is a party to these cases, and none of the courts below have addressed the appropriateness of race-based admissions systems in that context,” he wrote. “This advisory also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially different interests that military academies may have.”
President Joe Biden is expected to speak on the Supreme Court ruling at the White House at 12:30 p.m. ET.
NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson denounced the ruling, saying in a statement, “Today the Supreme Court has caved to the personal beliefs of an extremist minority.”
“We will not allow hate-inspired powers that be to turn back the clock and undermine our hard-won victories,” Johnson said. “The tricks of America’s dark past will not be tolerated. Let me be clear – affirmative action exists because we cannot rely on colleges, universities and employers to enact admissions and hiring practices that embrace diversity, equality and inclusion. Race plays a undeniable role in shaping the identity of and quality of life for Black Americans.”
