On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it will reconsider race-based affirmative action at one private school, Harvard, and one state school, the University of North Carolina.
High court conservatives have increasingly cast aside decades-old decisions, and their acceptance of the appeals immediately throws in doubt precedents from 1978 and 2003 that let colleges consider students’ race to enhance campus diversity and the educational experience. Lower federal courts had sided with Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
CNN
The Harvard case is about discrimination against Asian-Americans.
In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made more familiar arguments, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.
The New York Times
As recently as 2016, the justices ruled in a case involving the University of Texas that officials there could continue to consider race as a factor to ensure a diverse student body, writes the New York Times. But in 2022 the court is much more conservative than it was six years ago.
If it sides with the challengers and does away with racial preferences in higher education, American campuses could quickly look quite different. Such a ruling would, all concerned agree, reduce the number of Black and Latino students at nearly every selective college and graduate school, with more Asian American and white students gaining admission instead.
The New York Times
Vox writes the two cases that present an existential threat to affirmative action in university admissions.
These cases are the culmination of a years-long strategy by conservative activists — and by one activist in particular — to win a court decision invalidating affirmative action. The president of Students for Fair Admissions, the lead plaintiff in the Harvard and UNC cases, is not a student at all. It is Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who was also the driving force behind several other lawsuits asking the courts to expand the power and influence of white people.
Vox
