The Supreme Court has struck down the use of racially discriminatory admissions policies at U.S. colleges.
The decision ends the use of so-called affirmative action in higher education, a longtime goal of conservatives.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that for too long 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. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion.
The new decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she said.
The case is actually two separate appeals that were heard together on Oct. 31, 2022: Students for Fair Admissions Inc. (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, court file 20-1199, and SFFA v. University of North Carolina (UNC), court file 21-707.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the UNC case, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The court’s three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The justices’ votes in the Harvard case were the same except that Jackson did not participate in that decision after she recused herself because she has close ties to Harvard. Kagan did not recuse herself even though she used to be dean of the Harvard Law School.
Considered a conservative group, SFFA calls itself “a nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents, and others, who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.”
Harvard and UNC are, respectively, the oldest private college and the oldest public college in the United States.
In the Harvard case, U.S. District Judge Allison Dale Burroughs previously found after a 15-day non-jury trial for Harvard, ruling its admission policy that was said to discriminate against Asian American applicants was not motivated by “racial animus … or intentional discrimination” and was “narrowly tailored to achieve diversity and the academic benefits that flow from diversity.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, ruling against SFFA.
