“The immediate question in the two lawsuits before the Supreme Court — Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students For Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — was whether the Supreme Court should overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case thatheld that race may play a limited role in college admissions. In practice, race often functions as a tiebreaker when universities are deciding among many well-qualified students.
According to Vox’s Ian Millhiser, the decision does not explicitly overrule the Court’s previous decisions permitting affirmative action, but it will almost certainly have the same effect as a total ban.
The overarching stakes in these cases, however, are much broader. The plaintiffs advocateda “colorblind” theory of the Constitution that would prohibit the government from considering race in virtually any context, including efforts to voluntarily integrate racially segregated grade schools and other institutions. Decisions such as Grutter have given the government limited authority to foster racial diversity. The Harvard and UNC decisionis likely to eliminate that authority altogether.”
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“Affirmative action has been used for more than half a century by colleges and universities, initially to encourage the participation of historically marginalized groups and mitigate the effects of decades of segregation by university systems. Since the landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakkecase in 1978, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that such programs can be used as a tool to foster diversity among a university’s student body, and that an applicant’s race or ethnic background could be deemed a plus when deciding between applicants who are similarly qualified. The Court determined that students from underrepresented racial backgrounds could “promote beneficial educational pluralism” that benefits all students — a goal compelling enough to the justices that they have continued its use. Since Bakke, the Court has upheld affirmative action in admissions despite multiple challenges, including Fisher v. University of Texas, decided as recently as 2016, in which Abigail N. Fisher, a white woman, claimed that she was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin because of preferences given to applicants of color.
Although decades of research support the conclusion that more diverse campuses benefit all students, the premise of the “colorblindness” theory is that race-conscious policies are so inherently misguided that they cannot be sustained regardless of their benefits.This theory has been around for a very long time — President Andrew Johnson, the white supremacist who spent much of his time in office frustrating Reconstruction, vetoed laws seeking to lift up enslaved people who had been freed because he claimed they would “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.”More recently, conservatives including President Ronald Reagan have made similar attacks on affirmative action — often describing such programs as “reverse discrimination.”
Now, this kind of rhetoric is being echoed by Blum (who was, notably, also involved in the Fisher case). “In a multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation like ours, the college admissions bar cannot be raised for some races and ethnic groups but lowered for others,” Blum said in a statement in January. “Our nation cannot remedy past discrimination and racial preferences with new discrimination and different racial preferences.””