The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to affirmative action policies by striking down race-conscious student admissions programs.
This ruling affected students at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina and it represents a setback for efforts to increase diversity among underrepresented minority groups on college campuses.
The justices ruled in favor of a group called Students for Fair Admissions, founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, in its appeal of lower court rulings upholding programs used at the two prestigious schools to foster a diverse student population.
The conservative justices of the court, with the liberal justices in dissent, made the decision, which was 6-3 in favor of Harvard and 6-2 against the University of North Carolina. Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal justice, did not participate in the Harvard case.
The court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had legalized abortion nationwide and expanded gun rights, in two major rulings last year, also led by conservative justices.
“Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, referring to the promise of equal legal protection in the U.S. Constitution.
“At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, whether through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts stated.
In lawsuits filed in 2014, Blum’s group accused Harvard of bias against Asian American applicants and UNC of discriminating against applicants who were white and Asian American.
Understudies for Fair Confirmations claimed that the reception by UNC, a state-funded college, of a confirmations’ strategy that isn’t race nonpartisan disregards the assurance to rise to insurance of the law under the Constitution’s fourteenth Amendment.
The gathering battled Harvard, a confidential college that disregarded Title VI of a milestone government regulation called the Social Equality Demonstration of 1964, which bars segregation in light of race, variety, or public beginning under any program or action getting bureaucratic monetary help.
Affirmative action on campuses has long been supported by many higher education institutions, businesses, and military leaders not only to address racial inequality and exclusion in American society but also to ensure a talent pool that can bring a variety of perspectives to the workplace and the ranks of the United States armed forces.
As per Harvard, around 40% of U.S. schools and colleges think about race in some style.
Harvard and UNC have said they use race as just a single calculation of a large group of individualized assessments for confirmation without quantities – passable under past High Court points of reference – and that controlling its thought would cause a critical drop in the enlistment of understudies from under-addressed gatherings.
For decades, critics have attempted to overturn these policies, claiming that they are discriminatory in and of themselves.
Numerous U.S. conservatives and Republican elected officials have argued that giving benefits to one race is unlawful regardless of the inspiration or conditions. Because America has moved beyond racist policies like segregation and is becoming more diverse, some have argued that remedial preferences are no longer required.
The dispute gave the conservative majority on the Supreme Court a chance to overturn previous decisions that allowed admissions policies that considered race.
The group’s claims were rejected by lower courts, which led to appeals to the United States Supreme Court, in which the justices were asked to overturn a significant precedent that held that colleges could consider race as one factor in the admissions process because of the imperative need to produce a diverse student body.
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The Supreme Court has scrutinized affirmative action for decades, most recently in a 2016 decision involving a white student supported by Blum who filed a lawsuit against the University of Texas after being denied admission.
Since 2016, the Supreme Court has shifted to the right, with three new justices appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump and three justices who dissented in the University of Texas case.
