Forty-five years after allowing America’s universities to give limited consideration to race in admissions, the Supreme Court changed course on June 29. Race-based affirmative action programs in higher education, a 6-3 majority concluded, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The result in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard (consolidated with Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina) was no surprise. Affirmative action has been hanging by a thread for decades, with race-conscious admissions surviving by one-vote margins in Regents of University of California v Bakke in 1978, Grutter v Bollinger in 2003 and Fisher v University of Texas in 2016.
