this Supreme Court Affirmative action admissions policy ruled Thursday harvard and University of North CarolinaIt is unconstitutional to place importance on the race of potential students.
The ruling is a massive blow to decades-long efforts to increase minority enrollment in American colleges.
A majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts (joined by all five of his conservative justices) said affirmative action programs at Harvard and UNC “inevitably take advantage of race, involves racial stereotypes, and lacks a meaningful endpoint”.
“We have never allowed an admissions program to operate in this manner, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.
Most said the university’s policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Liberal African-American Judge Cotangi Brown Jackson called the ruling “truly a tragedy for all of us” in a dissent.
Supporters of affirmative action in higher education rally for oral argument in the cases Student Fair Admissions v. Harvard College Deans and Fellows and Student Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina on October 31, 2022 in Washington. DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Her fellow liberal, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, offered a sharp dissent, saying: “Today, this Court has blocked that process and reversed decades of precedent and significant progress. .”
Sotomayor, one of three liberals on the court, said the majority “believes that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such important benefits.”
In doing so, she argued that the Supreme Court “consolidated the superficial rule of color blindness as a constitutional principle in a society where racial segregation was pervasive and where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Thursday’s ruling concerns two separate but related cases, one against Harvard and the other against the University of North Carolina.
In the Harvard case, the vote was 6 to 2, and Jackson did not participate in the deliberations of the case. Last year, Jackson agreed to recuse herself in a Senate confirmation hearing in a case involving Harvard, where she serves on the university’s oversight board until early 2022.
In the UNC case, Jackson voted 6-3, dissenting from Sotomayor and the court’s third liberal justice, Elena Kagan.
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