Last June, the Supreme Court handed down a sweeping decision abolishing race-conscious admissions programs at nearly every college and university in the country, with one notable exception: military service academies.
The Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard applies to civilian schools, but the Court also said in a footnote that it was not deciding whether academies such as West Point or the Naval Academy may continue to take steps to diversify their student bodies that the decision forbade in other schools. That footnote referred to the “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present,” but didn’t clarify what the six Republican justices who joined the Harvard decision think these “distinct interests” might be.
Now, however, this undecided question is before the Supreme Court in a new shadow docket case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. United States Military Academy West Point (Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in both cases, is led by Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who is now the driving force behind many lawsuits seeking to abolish policies intended to advance racial equity).
The West Point case is distinct from the Harvard case, however, in that it presents a conflict between two competing values that the Court’s current Republican majority genuinely cares about.
On the one hand, the Republican justices are hostile to virtually any policy that takes account of race, regardless of whether that policy exists to advance white supremacy or to eradicate its legacy. The Court’s decision in Harvard compares that school’s former admissions program, which sought to diversify its campus by giving a slight preference to some applicants from underrepresented racial groups, to the Jim Crow school segregation regime struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
At the same time, the Supreme Court has historically shown a great deal of deference to the military. As the Court said in
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