June 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday ruled against affirmative action 6-3 in two cases that decided admissions systems used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.
The court said the admissions practices are not lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
At issue was use of race in admissions.
“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” the majority Supreme Court opinion said. “Both 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. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
Until Thursday’s ruling, the Supreme Court had for decades upheld race-conscious university admissions policies since they were allowed in the Grutter vs. Bollinger U.S. Supreme Court 2003 decision.
Both cases were brought by Students For Fair Admissions.
SFFA argued that Harvard “automatically awards racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics” while penalizing Whites and Asian Americans.
Harvard had argued that Supreme Court precedent established for 40 years had “established and repeatedly affirmed that race can be one of many factors considered in college admissions.”
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor authored dissents to the majority ruling.
“Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry,” Jackson said.
Sotomayor wrote that the opinion would “serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.”
“As has been the case before in the history of American democracy, ‘the arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress,” She added. “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”
