The Potential Impact of SCOTUS's University Cases

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(The Guardian) What would it mean if affirmative action went away? The Guardian’s Edwin Rios spoke to students who say race-conscious admissions policies had a decisive impact on their academic opportunities, and fear its end would undo progress for future generations: When Andrew Brennen thinks about the US supreme court deliberations over race-conscious admissions, he reflects on his parents, both attorneys, and his brother. In 2009, his father, David, became the first Black dean of the University of Kentucky’s law school since the state desegregated its colleges and universities.

“Had they not had access to higher education that they received, who knows what they would’ve been doing,” Brennen, who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019, says. “I’m thinking a lot about how different my life, my brother’s life, would be if affirmative action hadn’t been in place.”

On Monday, as the US supreme court hears oral arguments in cases against the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, the fate of race-conscious admissions is under threat. Civil rights attorneys and experts alike worry, following the high court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, that the court’s rightward tilt could spell their end.

For decades, the supreme court has consistently upheld that colleges and universities can take limited consideration of a student’s race and ethnicity as a factor when they assess which students to accept. In the 1960s, after John F Kennedy first ordered government contractors to “take affirmative action” to combat racial discrimination, colleges and universities developed policies to further diversify who enrolled.

 

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(The Guardian) Supreme court conservatives indicate opposition to affirmative action
The six-justice conservative majority on the supreme court has shown skepticism towards universities’ race-based admissions policies during oral arguments today, the Associated Press reports.

The court is hearing two cases concerning the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, in which the court’s six conservative justices could potentially ban the use of race as a factor in college admissions, a practice known as affirmative action. Such a decision would be the latest example of the court overturning longstanding precedent, after five of its nine justices earlier this year struck down Roe v Wade and allowed states to ban abortion.

The AP reports that several members of the conservative bloc are known foes of the policy, and showed no indication of changing their minds about it during ongoing oral arguments in the two cases. Here’s more from the AP’s story: During arguments in the first of two cases, the court sounded split along ideological lines on the issue of affirmative action.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s second Black justice who has a long record of opposition to affirmative action programs, noted he didn’t go to racially diverse schools. “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times and I don’t have a clue what it means,” the conservative justice said at one point. At another point he said: “Tell me what the educational benefits are?”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative, pointed to one of the court’s previous affirmative action cases and said it anticipated an end to the use of affirmative action, saying it was “dangerous, and it has to have an end point.” When, she asked, is that end point?

Justice Samuel Alito likened affirmative action to a race in which a minority applicant gets to “start five yards closer to the finish line.” But liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Hispanic justice, rejected that comparison saying what universities are doing is looking at students as a whole.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s newest justice and its first Black female, also said that race was being used at the University of North Carolina as part of a broad review of applicants along 40 different factors. “They’re looking at the full person with all of these characteristics,” she said.

Justice Elena Kagan called universities the “pipelines to leadership in our society” and suggested that without affirmative action minority enrollment will drop. “I thought part of what it meant to be an American and to believe in American pluralism is that actually our institutions, you know, are reflective of who we are as a people in all our variety,” she said.

The Supreme Court has twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 19 years, including just six years ago.