Conservative Supreme Court justices on Monday seemed open to ending decades of precedent allowing race-conscious admission decisions at colleges and universities, repeatedly expressing doubt that the institutions would ever concede an “endpoint” in their use of race to build diverse student bodies.
After nearly five hours of oral argument, the programs at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seemed endangered. The question is how broad such a decision might be, and what it would mean for other institutions of higher education.
Overturning the court’s precedents that race can be one factor of many in making admission decisions would have “profound consequences” for “the nation that we are and the nation that we aspire to be,” Solicitor General Elizabeth. B. Prelogar told the justices during arguments in the Harvard case. She said educating a diverse group of national leaders had consequences for the military, medical and scientific communities and corporate America.
But the court’s conservatives took the two cases to revisit decades of Supreme Court decisions that tolerated a limited use of racial classifications, and seemed unsatisfied with assertions from lawyers representing the schools that the end was near for the use of race-conscious policies. Under repeated questioning, those lawyers conceded they could not provide a date-specific answer to the question: “When will it end?”
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Patrick Strawbridge, the lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought both challenges, argued that the Supreme Court had rejected racial classifications in marriage, jury selection and assignment of children to elementary schools.
By allowing it in college admissions, “Some applicants are incentivized to conceal their race,” Strawbridge said in the UNC case. “Others who were admitted on merit have their accomplishments diminished by assumptions that their race played a role in their admission. And there is no evidence that after two decades [the court’s precedent] has somehow reduced the role of race on campus.”
Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has said that race may be used as one factor universities can consider in evaluating applicants for admission. Universities say there is a continuing need for affirmative action to build diverse student bodies, which they say strengthen the overall learning environment with distinct perspectives and experiences…
Continue this story at The Washington Post
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