Affirmative Action Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
"In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
Pinned
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
“I find the decision to be abhorrent,” said Zachary Clifton, 18, who is white and is going to be a high school senior this year in Corbin, Ky. “I think most young people are pretty uniform in their reaction to this.” He plans to apply to Harvard and U.N.C., among other colleges.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas repeated his long-held view that the Constitution is “colorblind.” He said he was writing “to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution,” as well as “to clarify that all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution; and to emphasize the pernicious effects of all such discrimination.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Thomas also quoted an opinion he wrote in an earlier affirmative action case to argue that such policies “may harm even those who succeed academically” by stamping Black and Latino students “with a badge of inferiority” because, he wrote, all are stigmatized whether or not race actually played a role in their admission.
“Despite the extensive evidence favoring the colorblind view, as detailed above, it appears increasingly in vogue to embrace an ‘antisubordination’ view of the 14th Amendment: that the Amendment forbids only laws that hurt, but not help, Blacks,” Justice Thomas wrote. “Such a theory lacks any basis in the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.”
Michael D. Shear
White House correspondentPresident Biden will deliver remarks on the Supreme Court’s decision at 12:30 p.m., just before traveling to New York City for an MSNBC interview and two campaign fund-raisers.
In a highly unusual move, Justice Clarence Thomas read a concurring opinion from the bench. He said he felt compelled to do so because of “race-based discrimination against Asian-American students,” which he likened to discriminatory practices that Asian immigrants in the West and Black students in the South faced during the 20th century. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to tense up at times while he spoke.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor also delivered a rare oral dissent, in which she repeatedly attacked Justice Thomas’s opinion as turning a blind eye toward structural inequities in American society. “Ignoring racial inequality will not make it disappear,” she said.
Justice Sotomayor took her time to emphasize all her points of disagreement. During some of her more scathing criticisms of the court, Justice Thomas, who sits directly to her left, fidgeted with his glasses, and Chief Justice Roberts shot her periodic glances. Toward the end, she said several times that the pursuit of racial equality would go on “despite the court.”
How is the affirmative action ruling being covered on the two campuses that were central to the decision? Read articles from The Harvard Crimson and U.N.C.’s Daily Tar Heel.
Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices on the Supreme Court, said in her dissenting opinion on the Harvard case that the court turned its back on 45 years of jurisprudence aimed at promoting more inclusive and equal schools, and that “the devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated.”
“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote, adding that the decision “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts criticized the dissenting views on various grounds but said the “most troubling of all” was that, in his view, they defended “a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against Black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentChief Justice Roberts’s bottom line: “The Harvard and U.N.C. admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
Jenna Russell
New England bureau chiefLeaders of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association condemned the decision. The association’s co-presidents, Chelsea Wang and Kylan Tatum, both members of the class of 2025, predicted that it would result in the loss of almost half of Black, Latino, Indigenous and Pacific Islander students at Harvard College. They said the ruling was not a win for Asian Americans and “actively harms the most vulnerable members of our community,” including low-income Asian Americans.
The Supreme Court’s decision is likely to transform the makeup of many elite campuses. But for many high school students across the country, it will have little direct impact on their college admissions.
Just six in 10 students who graduate from high school immediately enroll in college. And only a sliver will attend one of the highly selective institutions that most rely on race-conscious admissions.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to lower the number of Black and Latino students at medical schools, law schools and other professional degree programs.
In a brief filed with the court, groups including the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association said that “states that have banned race-conscious admissions have seen the number of minority medical-school students drop by roughly 37 percent,” reducing the pipeline of doctors from those groups. Nationally, about 5.7 percent of doctors are Black and 6.8 percent identify as Hispanic.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn a footnote arguing with Justice Jackson, Chief Justice Roberts laid out statistics from the petitioner, Students for Fair Admissions, on how significant a role race has played in U.N.C. admissions: In the top academic decile, more than 80 percent of Black applicants were admitted, compared with under 70 percent of white and Asian applicants. In the second highest decile, the rates were 83 percent for Black applicants, 58 percent for white applicants and 47 percent for Asian applicants. In the third highest decile, they were 77 percent for Black applicants, 48 percent for white applicants and 34 percent for Asian applicants.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn her own footnote, Justice Jackson criticized these “back-of-the-envelope calculations,” noting that U.N.C. does not use the “academic excellence” metric that Students for Fair Admissions’s experts created for the lawsuit. But “even when the majority’s ad hoc statistical analysis is taken at face value,” she wrote, it does not show that Black students were admitted based on race alone, since not every Black student exhibiting academic excellence was admitted.
Stephanie Saul
National education reporterThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released a statement in response to the Supreme Court’s decision striking down its admissions plan. “Carolina remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences,” the university’s chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, said. “While not the outcome we hoped for, we will carefully review the Supreme Court’s decision and take any steps necessary to comply.”
Nine states already ban the use of race-conscious college admissions at their public universities, and their experience could provide a sign of the ruling’s consequences.
After Michigan banned race-conscious admissions in 2006, Black undergraduate enrollment declined at the University of Michigan, the state’s flagship school. The share of Black students fell to 4 percent in 2021, from 7 percent in 2006.
Neil Vigdor
Political reporterFormer President Donald J. Trump’s political organization cast him as a catalyst for the court’s ruling against affirmative action, saying, “He delivered on his promise to appoint constitutional justices.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn a footnote, Chief Justice Roberts exempted military academies from the ruling in light of “the potentially distinct interests” they present. There had been discussion of whether the military needed to maintain affirmative action in training its future officer corps based on a judgment that it would be bad for military discipline and cohesiveness if the leadership cadre did not reflect the diversity of the rank-and-file troops who do the bulk of fighting and dying in wars.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustices Sotomayor and Jackson both criticized the majority for making an exception for military academies. Justice Sotomayor called it arbitrary, while Justice Jackson wrote, “The court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).”
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s education rulings, predicted that the affirmative action decision could cause some state universities to move to race-neutral strategies for increasing diversity, such as the “top percent” model used in Texas.
In that state, students with the highest grade point averages at each high school are guaranteed admission to a public university, including the system’s flagship, the University of Texas at Austin.
Anemona Hartocollis
Higher education reporterIn a statement celebrating the decision, Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said: “Ending racial preferences in college admissions is an outcome that the vast majority of all races and ethnicities will celebrate. A university doesn’t have real diversity when it simply assembles students who look different but come from similar backgrounds and act, talk and think alike.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn Justice Jackson’s dissent in the U.N.C. case, she wrote: “It would be deeply unfortunate if the Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical and counterproductive outcome. To impose this result in that clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”
Read the Supreme Court Decision
The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation.
Read DocumentCharlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn her dissenting opinion in the Harvard case, Justice Sotomayor said the Supreme Court had turned its back on 45 years of jurisprudence aimed at promoting more inclusive and equal schools. “Today, this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote, adding that it “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter” and “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Sotomayor also wrote: “The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated. The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Sotomayor ended on an defiant note, writing, “Society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted,” and predicting that what she portrayed as the majority’s efforts to impede that goal would prove to be impotent. “The pursuit of racial diversity will go on,” she wrote. “Although the court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education.”
Jonathan Weisman
Political correspondentRepublican presidential candidates are beginning to weigh in, lavishing praise on the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action. “There is no place for discrimination based on race in the United States, and I am pleased that the Supreme Court has put an end to this egregious violation of civil and constitutional rights in admissions processes, which only served to perpetuate racism,” former Vice President Mike Pence said in a statement.
Stephanie Saul
National education reporterWithin minutes after the Supreme Court ruling, the N.A.A.C.P. issued a statement: “In a society still scarred by the wounds of racial disparities, the Supreme Court has displayed a willful ignorance of our reality.”
In 2016, in its last major case on affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court upheld an aspect of an idiosyncratic admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin. In the process, it reaffirmed the distinction the court had drawn in earlier cases: that numerical quotas were unlawful but that taking account of race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity was permissible.
The case was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student who said the University of Texas had denied her admission because of her race.
Here is the Supreme Court’s full ruling that race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unlawful.
Michael D. Shear
White House correspondentPresident Biden is scheduled to leave the White House early this afternoon for a quick trip to New York City, but White House officials have not ruled out the possibility that he could make remarks about the ruling before he leaves.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentAt the end of the majority opinion striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that universities could still consider applicants’ discussion of their personal race-based experiences as part of essays: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she had been on the university’s board of overseers, but still joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in that case. A footnote said Justice Jackson joined it “as it applies” to the U.N.C. case and that she “took no part in the consideration or decision” of the Harvard case.
Half of Americans disapprove of colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, while one-third approve of this practice. But a close look at recent polling on the issue shows that attitudes about affirmative action differ based on whom you ask — and how you ask about it.
The Pew survey shows a clear divide along racial and ethnic lines: A majority of white and Asian adults disapprove of racial consideration in admissions, while Black Americans largely approve and Hispanics are about evenly split.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, a policy that has long been a pillar of higher education.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent."
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