WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative actionadmissions policies used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina to diversify their campuses, a decision with enormous consequences not only for higher education but also the American workplace.
In one of its most closely watched cases this year, the court ruled along ideological lines that the way the schools approached race violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision drew a sharp rebuke from the court’s liberal wing, who said it rolls back “decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
The vote was 6-3 in the University of North Carolina case, which the court’s conservative wing lining up behind Roberts. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused in the Harvard case and so the vote in that case was 6-2.
Read the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision
Chief Justice John Roberts, long a skeptic of race-based policies, wrote that too many 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.” The nation’s constitutional history, he wrote, “does not tolerate that choice.”
Though the outcome was expected, the decision will have wide reverberations in a nation still wrestling with a fraught history with race. The decision appeared to leave some room for colleges to consider race in less systematic ways though it will will likely years and more litigation to test the boundaries of those limits.
What the Supreme Court said about affirmative action
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court has “time and again forcefully rejected the notion that government actors may intentionally allocate preference to those ‘who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin.'” The entire point the equal protection clause, he wrote, is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well.”
Roberts wrote that both programs lacked “sufficiently focused and measurable objectives” that warranted considering race as one factor. However, in an important caveat, Roberts left open the idea that schools could consider a candidate’s discussion of how race affected their life, such as through discrimination. But, Roberts warned, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
In a scathing dissent joined by the court’s two other liberals, Sotomayor said the decision rolled back “decades of precedent and momentous progress. “
