The Supreme Court’s much-anticipated affirmative action decision Thursday does not explicitly overrule the Court’s previous decisions permitting race-conscious university admissions, but it will almost certainly have the same effect as a total ban.
And that will “impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness.”
Those are not my words. That’s the view that a long list of former generals, admirals, and other senior national security officials laid out in a brief they filed when the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, was being considered. That brief urged the justices not to end affirmative action in university admissions. And they are hardly the only ones to offer such a warning.
Despite those warnings, six justices decided Thursday to effectively end race-conscious university admissions in a pair of cases considering Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs.
The Court’s decision is somewhat confusing, because it purports to simply apply past decisions that permitted some affirmative action programs, rather than explicitly overruling them. But the practical effect of the Harvard decision is that it bans the very kind of affirmative action that the Court has endorsed in the past.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court’s six Republican appointees faults the two universities for having affirmative action programs that “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race.” But there’s an obvious reason why they do not. The Court’s previous decisions permitted some limited forms of affirmative action, but they explicitly ban racial quotas and other mathematical formulas that could allow universities to determine whether they are achieving “focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race.”
The Harvard…
Read the full article here