ON THURSDAY, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, struck down affirmative action programs at colleges.
The six conservative judges, against the advice of three liberals, ruled that on-campus admissions procedures based on applicants’ skin colour or ethnicity are unconstitutional. “Many universities have erroneously taken the position that the basis of a person’s identity is not his test, the skills he has acquired or the lessons he has learned, but the colour of his skin. Our constitutional history will not tolerate this,” Magistrate John Roberts wrote on behalf of the majority.
The complaining party, the student collective ‘Students for Fair Admissions’, considered it unlawful for institutions, such as Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), to include the skin colour of prospective students in the admissions procedure.
In 1964, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246. In doing so, he required all institutions receiving federal government funding to onboard more non-whites through affirmative action, which resulted, among other things, in racial quotas.
The Supreme Court has ruled against quotas several times since 1978 but has always allowed universities to take racial criteria into account, among other things. Until now, the Court has considered the push for more diversity on campuses to be “legitimate,” even if it meant violating the principle of equality among all American citizens.
The Court is “rolling back decades of immense progress,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote on behalf of the progressives. It “establishes an artificial rule of indifference to skin colour as a constitutional principle in a profoundly segregated society, where race has always mattered and will continue to matter,” she continued.
