10 months ago
36
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday on two landmark cases challenging affirmative action in higher education, ending decades of expanded access to college education for students of color and overturning decades of precedent. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion for the court held that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions policies violate the equal protection clause. The UNC case was decided 6-3 and the Harvard case 6-2, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recusing herself.
Roberts seemingly ends the possibility of any meaningful racial considerations in admissions in his opinion, writing that the schools’ 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, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.”
“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin,” Roberts wrote. “This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” This nation’s constitutional history on race is a problematic thing for Roberts to invoke in overthrowing this precedent.
