“In a scorching, 29-page dissent, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply criticized her conservative colleagues’ decision Thursday to reject affirmative action in college admissions decisions, overturning more than four decades of precedent.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, one of two cases decided Thursday that centered on affirmative action.
Jackson recused herself from the other, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, because of her ties to Harvard. Both cases were decided on ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices voting in the majority. But Jackson’s dissent received particular attention Thursday for its blistering paragraphs and for its sharp rebuttals from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s other Black justice.
Jackson opened her dissent by noting the “gulf-sized race-based gaps” that continue to exist in American society — ones created “in the distant past” but passed down through generations. By restricting the use of race in admissions decisions, she said, the Supreme Court was detaching itself from the country’s actual past and present experiences.
She compared the majority members of the court to ostriches sticking their necks in the sand, a reference to a common myth about what the long-necked birds do when scared.
“No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” Jackson wrote. “The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrichlike) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.”
Colleges being required to ignore race, she added, would not make the issue go away — and would in fact make race matter even more and prolong the problem of racism.
“It is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish,” Jackson wrote.
As President Biden did in remarks from the White House after the Supreme Court issued its decisions Thursday, Jackson shot down in her dissent the idea that unqualified students were being admitted to colleges ahead of qualified students on the basis of race alone. She noted that applicants to UNC, for instance, were not required to submit demographic information, and that the school considered a wide range of information submitted by applicants, from academic performance to extracurriculars to background.
“The process is holistic, through and through,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson’s dissent also presented a hypothetical scenario she first raised in October during oral arguments for the case — when conservative justices had initially indicated their openness to ending the practice of using race as a factor in admissions. In it, Jackson spoke about two potential applicants to the University of North Carolina, both of whom had family ties to the state going back to before the Civil War.
One hypothetical applicant, “John,” was White and would be part of the seventh generation in his family to attend UNC. The other, “James,” was Black and would be the first generation in his family to attend the school, given that his ancestors were enslaved and did not have the opportunity to go to college. Without affirmative action, only John’s family background would be considered and valued by the institution, Jackson argued.
“These stories are not every student’s story. But they are many students’ stories,” Jackson wrote. “To demand that colleges ignore race in today’s admissions practices — and thus disregard the fact that racial disparities may have mattered for where some applicants find themselves today — is not only an affront to the dignity of those students for whom race matters. It also condemns our society to never escape the past that explains how and why race matters to the very concept of who ‘merits’ admission.”
Thomas, a longtime opponent of affirmative action who for decades was in the minority on the issue, took the unusual step of reading from his concurring opinion immediately after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. read the majority’s decision.
In his concurring opinion, Thomas directly engaged with Jackson, the first Black woman to serve as a justice. In Jackson’s view, “almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race,” Thomas wrote. He criticized her for ignoring the experiences of other groups that have faced barriers “while articulating her black and white world (literally).”
In one lengthy footnote in Jackson’s dissent, she responded to what she called Thomas’s “prolonged attack.”
“Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”
Time would reveal the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision, Jackson concluded. Her final lament was that the conservative justices had cited the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to overturn affirmative action and “hamper” educational institutions on who to bring to their campuses to benefit every American.
“It would be deeply unfortunate if the Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical, and counterproductive outcome,” she wrote. “To impose this result in that Clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the Clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”
Robert Barnes contributed to this report.“
The administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) steered $92 million last year in leftover federal coronavirus stimulus money to a controversial highway interchange project that directly benefits a top political donor, according to state records.
The decision by the Florida Department of Transportation to use money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan for the I-95 interchange at Pioneer Trail Road near Daytona Beach fulfilled a years-long effort by Mori Hosseini, a politically connected housing developer who owns two large tracts of largely forested land abutting the planned interchange. The funding through the DeSantis administration, approved shortly after the governor’s reelection, expedited the project by more than a decade, according to state documents.
Hosseini plans to develop the land — which includes a sensitive watershed once targeted for conservation by the state — into approximately 1,300 dwelling units and 650,000 square feet of nonresidential use, including an outdoor village shopping district. He has called the Woodhaven development, which has already begun construction, his “best project yet” and promised to pull out all the stops for its success.
“With or without the interchange, we would have built Woodhaven there, but it certainly helps,” he told the Daytona Beach News Journal in March 2019.
Government documents obtained by The Washington Post through open-records requests show a steady relationship between DeSantis and Hosseini in recent years. The governor’s office occasionally received requests for DeSantis to attend events or support proposals from Hosseini, and DeSantis extended invitations to Hosseini in return for events in Tallahassee.
Hosseini helped DeSantis arrange a round of golf at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia in 2018, according to the Tampa Bay Times. A year later, Hosseini donated a golf simulator that retails for at least $27,500 to the governor’s mansion, according to records previously obtained by The Post. In the 2022 campaign cycle, companies controlled by Hosseini gave at least $361,000 to political groups that benefited the DeSantis reelection campaign, according to state campaign finance records. Hosseini’s plane has been repeatedly used by DeSantis, according to a Post analysis.
A DeSantis spokesman, Jeremy Redfern, published on Twitter on Wednesday night, before this story published, emails from a Post reporter seeking comment.
“You are trying to make an accusation to play ‘gotcha,’” he wrote in one email to The Post, after he had been asked whether the governor had spoken to Hosseini about the Pioneer Trail project or advocated for its funding.
He referred questions to Jessica Ottaviano, the communications director for the state transportation department, who also did not directly respond to questions about DeSantis’s or Hosseini’s involvement in the decision to fund the project.
She said in a statement that state transportation planners “determined and prioritized projects that had local support and were production ready to use” the federal covid funds. The Pioneer Trail project has been a priority for some local officials for decades.
“[T]his enhanced interchange project will help keep up with Florida’s growing population,” she said. “Florida currently leads the nation in net in-migration with a majority of these new residents moving to Central and Southwest Florida.”
Hosseini did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone and email.
DeSantis, who campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to “drain the swamp in Tallahassee,” reported a net worth of about $320,000 in 2021, according to public filings. He has subsequently relied more on benefits from wealthy supporters than his predecessor, current Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who was independently wealthy and flew on his own private plane.
DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president, initially criticized the American Rescue Plan in March 2021 as “Washington at its worst,” arguing that much of the money “had nothing to do with covid” and that politicians were using the bill “as a Christmas tree” on which to hang pet projects.
But since the money arrived in Florida, he has used it for favored projects unrelated to the pandemic, including using interest from the federal funds to pay for the flight of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last year. DeSantis called on the state legislature to direct about $1 billion in covid relief to transportation projects in March 2021.
State transportation leaders notified local officials about the decision to use covid relief money for the interchange during a public meeting on Nov. 30, 2022, three weeks after DeSantis’s reelection.
The $126 million interchange budget — which includes about $34 million in funding from other federal, state and local sources — covers purchasing land for right of way, along with construction costs, records show. It also includes funds to build partial access roads near the interchange onto Hosseini’s property, a feature that was not in the 2021 design plans but appeared in 2022 plans, according to public records.
Ottaviano said the state’s decision to pay for the partial roads into the Woodhaven development was made in coordination with local governments and agencies. “Future connections to Pioneer Trail were considered when we applied for the permit to ensure adequately sized ponds and designs for the existing and future drainage patterns in the area of the proposed interchange,” she said.
The new exits on Interstate 95 will allow highway travelers to more easily access Hosseini’s development rather than having to use highway exits four miles to the north and three miles to the south, according to design plans. Other developments south of the interchange are also expected to benefit from the new off-ramps.
John Tyler, the Florida transportation secretary for the central district, told local officials at a Jan. 25 meeting of local planners that federal pandemic relief money will be used for three projects in Volusia County, with most of the funds going to the Pioneer Trail interchange because it was “ready for construction.”
He credited state leaders in Tallahassee in making the pandemic relief money available.
“The 2021 legislature asked the department to identify projects for that funding that they prioritized,” Tyler told the officials at the meeting. “It was adopted in the 2022 legislature into the department work program, signed off by the governor and we are here today to continue moving forward.”
The local planning authority approved the state’s plans at the meeting over the objections of Jeff Brower, the Republican chairman of the Volusia County Council, who argued that the interchange would encourage the development of sensitive wetlands that feed into nearby Spruce Creek.
“There are areas that just shouldn’t be developed,” Brower said at the meeting, referring to the Woodhaven project. “The pollution that we’re creating to our entire state’s water system is clearly resulting from the decisions that we’re making to develop essential wetlands and watersheds.”
Former Republican governor Charlie Crist, who ran as a Democrat against DeSantis last year, also opposed the interchange, arguing during his 2022 campaign that Hosseini’s development would damage the local watershed. Hosseini sold part of his land to the government about a decade ago for conservation.
“This is a project Florida does not need and is one the community does not want — the state should not keep pushing for it,” Crist wrote in a 2022 opinion piece for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “Powerful developers want the interchange so they can more easily build on nearby land they own.”
One prominent local supporter of the project is Hosseini’s sister, Maryam Ghyabi-White, a regional transportation consultant at Ghyabi Consulting, who DeSantis reappointed in 2021 to the St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board. The water district, at the staff level, provided a permit for the project, without direct input from the board, she said.
She travels frequently to Tallahassee to push for local funding for transportation programs, working as a paid consultant on other interchange expansion plans along I-95. She said in an interview that the Florida Department of Transportation directed federal money to the Pioneer Trail interchange because “it was the only interchange in Volusia that design was ready,” not because of any intervention from DeSantis. The federal funds would have gone to a Tampa project if local officials had rejected the funds, she said.
At the Jan. 25 meeting, she spoke in favor of the project, calling her brother the “elephant in the room” and saying the project was needed to relieve traffic congestion at nearby interstate exits. She said in an interview that she does not have a business relationship with her brother and was not paid to consult on the Pioneer Trail interchange.
“It has nothing to do with family,” she said of her support for the Pioneer Trail exits on I-95. “His project has been approved. He does not need to have this interchange.”
The ethics manual of the executive office of the governor says employees “may not accept a benefit of any sort when a reasonable observer could infer that the benefit was intended to influence a pending or future decision of the employee, or to reward a past decision.” It specifically bans gifts to state employees from “parties who have pending matters awaiting decision by the state.”
However, the rules do not bar in-kind donations of private plane travel for political functions or campaign contributions. Hosseini’s purchase of a golf simulator for the cabana at the governor’s mansion was approved by a state attorney because it was given as a loan to the mansion, not to DeSantis personally, according to documents obtained by The Post.
DeSantis reappointed Hosseini to the University of Florida Board of Trustees during his first term in office. In 2019, Florida first lady Casey DeSantis took a private jet owned by Hosseini to announce a mental health initiative outside Jacksonville, Politico reported. Ron DeSantis appears to have taken a private plane owned by one of Hosseini’s companies to a February fundraiser hosted by his political action committee in Miami, according to flight-tracking data and campaign finance disclosures.
A person familiar with DeSantis’s operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private information, said the governor’s team would call Hosseini regularly because he would usually provide his plane with late notice.
“They had a long, close relationship, and his plane was nice — it was a comfortable plane,” this person said.
A review of more than 2,700 pages of documents from 2020 and 2021 — given to The Post in response to a public records request — show a working relationship between the two men, but no mention of the Pioneer Trail interchange.
They show Hosseini recommending someone for a position on the University of Florida Board of Trustees, calls on DeSantis’s schedule with the developer and the appointment of Hosseini’s wife to a different board in 2019. They also include invites from the governor’s office for Hosseini to attend events, such as receptions at the governor’s mansion and the State of the State address. Hosseini was also involved in transportation projects as part of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace finance and development authority, where he serves on the board of directors with DeSantis.
Stephan Harris, a project manager at the River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization, said construction on the interchange is expected to begin early next year, with completion in 2025.
Local opponents of the plan are still hoping to stop the project.
Several groups have challenged in state court the permit for the project given by the local water management district. They argue that the project plans fail to fully consider the secondary and cumulative impacts of the exchange.
“It is the zombie interchange that just won’t die, despite being fought back several times before,” Save Spruce Creek founder Derek LaMontagne, who has been leading local opposition to the project, said in a statement. “Spruce Creek and its nature preserve are idyllic treasures that need to be protected.”
Nate Jones and Alice Crites contributed to this report"
"In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
Pinned
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
“I find the decision to be abhorrent,” said Zachary Clifton, 18, who is white and is going to be a high school senior this year in Corbin, Ky. “I think most young people are pretty uniform in their reaction to this.” He plans to apply to Harvard and U.N.C., among other colleges.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas repeated his long-held view that the Constitution is “colorblind.” He said he was writing “to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution,” as well as “to clarify that all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution; and to emphasize the pernicious effects of all such discrimination.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Thomas also quoted an opinion he wrote in an earlier affirmative action case to argue that such policies “may harm even those who succeed academically” by stamping Black and Latino students “with a badge of inferiority” because, he wrote, all are stigmatized whether or not race actually played a role in their admission.
“Despite the extensive evidence favoring the colorblind view, as detailed above, it appears increasingly in vogue to embrace an ‘antisubordination’ view of the 14th Amendment: that the Amendment forbids only laws that hurt, but not help, Blacks,” Justice Thomas wrote. “Such a theory lacks any basis in the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.”
Michael D. Shear
White House correspondentPresident Biden will deliver remarks on the Supreme Court’s decision at 12:30 p.m., just before traveling to New York City for an MSNBC interview and two campaign fund-raisers.
In a highly unusual move, Justice Clarence Thomas read a concurring opinion from the bench. He said he felt compelled to do so because of “race-based discrimination against Asian-American students,” which he likened to discriminatory practices that Asian immigrants in the West and Black students in the South faced during the 20th century. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to tense up at times while he spoke.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor also delivered a rare oral dissent, in which she repeatedly attacked Justice Thomas’s opinion as turning a blind eye toward structural inequities in American society. “Ignoring racial inequality will not make it disappear,” she said.
Justice Sotomayor took her time to emphasize all her points of disagreement. During some of her more scathing criticisms of the court, Justice Thomas, who sits directly to her left, fidgeted with his glasses, and Chief Justice Roberts shot her periodic glances. Toward the end, she said several times that the pursuit of racial equality would go on “despite the court.”
How is the affirmative action ruling being covered on the two campuses that were central to the decision? Read articles from The Harvard Crimson and U.N.C.’s Daily Tar Heel.
Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices on the Supreme Court, said in her dissenting opinion on the Harvard case that the court turned its back on 45 years of jurisprudence aimed at promoting more inclusive and equal schools, and that “the devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated.”
“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote, adding that the decision “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts criticized the dissenting views on various grounds but said the “most troubling of all” was that, in his view, they defended “a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against Black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentChief Justice Roberts’s bottom line: “The Harvard and U.N.C. admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”
Jenna Russell
New England bureau chiefLeaders of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association condemned the decision. The association’s co-presidents, Chelsea Wang and Kylan Tatum, both members of the class of 2025, predicted that it would result in the loss of almost half of Black, Latino, Indigenous and Pacific Islander students at Harvard College. They said the ruling was not a win for Asian Americans and “actively harms the most vulnerable members of our community,” including low-income Asian Americans.
The Supreme Court’s decision is likely to transform the makeup of many elite campuses. But for many high school students across the country, it will have little direct impact on their college admissions.
Just six in 10 students who graduate from high school immediately enroll in college. And only a sliver will attend one of the highly selective institutions that most rely on race-conscious admissions.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to lower the number of Black and Latino students at medical schools, law schools and other professional degree programs.
In a brief filed with the court, groups including the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association said that “states that have banned race-conscious admissions have seen the number of minority medical-school students drop by roughly 37 percent,” reducing the pipeline of doctors from those groups. Nationally, about 5.7 percent of doctors are Black and 6.8 percent identify as Hispanic.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn a footnote arguing with Justice Jackson, Chief Justice Roberts laid out statistics from the petitioner, Students for Fair Admissions, on how significant a role race has played in U.N.C. admissions: In the top academic decile, more than 80 percent of Black applicants were admitted, compared with under 70 percent of white and Asian applicants. In the second highest decile, the rates were 83 percent for Black applicants, 58 percent for white applicants and 47 percent for Asian applicants. In the third highest decile, they were 77 percent for Black applicants, 48 percent for white applicants and 34 percent for Asian applicants.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn her own footnote, Justice Jackson criticized these “back-of-the-envelope calculations,” noting that U.N.C. does not use the “academic excellence” metric that Students for Fair Admissions’s experts created for the lawsuit. But “even when the majority’s ad hoc statistical analysis is taken at face value,” she wrote, it does not show that Black students were admitted based on race alone, since not every Black student exhibiting academic excellence was admitted.
Stephanie Saul
National education reporterThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released a statement in response to the Supreme Court’s decision striking down its admissions plan. “Carolina remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences,” the university’s chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, said. “While not the outcome we hoped for, we will carefully review the Supreme Court’s decision and take any steps necessary to comply.”
Nine states already ban the use of race-conscious college admissions at their public universities, and their experience could provide a sign of the ruling’s consequences.
After Michigan banned race-conscious admissions in 2006, Black undergraduate enrollment declined at the University of Michigan, the state’s flagship school. The share of Black students fell to 4 percent in 2021, from 7 percent in 2006.
Neil Vigdor
Political reporterFormer President Donald J. Trump’s political organization cast him as a catalyst for the court’s ruling against affirmative action, saying, “He delivered on his promise to appoint constitutional justices.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn a footnote, Chief Justice Roberts exempted military academies from the ruling in light of “the potentially distinct interests” they present. There had been discussion of whether the military needed to maintain affirmative action in training its future officer corps based on a judgment that it would be bad for military discipline and cohesiveness if the leadership cadre did not reflect the diversity of the rank-and-file troops who do the bulk of fighting and dying in wars.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustices Sotomayor and Jackson both criticized the majority for making an exception for military academies. Justice Sotomayor called it arbitrary, while Justice Jackson wrote, “The court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).”
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s education rulings, predicted that the affirmative action decision could cause some state universities to move to race-neutral strategies for increasing diversity, such as the “top percent” model used in Texas.
In that state, students with the highest grade point averages at each high school are guaranteed admission to a public university, including the system’s flagship, the University of Texas at Austin.
Anemona Hartocollis
Higher education reporterIn a statement celebrating the decision, Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said: “Ending racial preferences in college admissions is an outcome that the vast majority of all races and ethnicities will celebrate. A university doesn’t have real diversity when it simply assembles students who look different but come from similar backgrounds and act, talk and think alike.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn Justice Jackson’s dissent in the U.N.C. case, she wrote: “It would be deeply unfortunate if the Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical and counterproductive outcome. To impose this result in that clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”
The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation.
Read DocumentCharlie Savage
Washington correspondentIn her dissenting opinion in the Harvard case, Justice Sotomayor said the Supreme Court had turned its back on 45 years of jurisprudence aimed at promoting more inclusive and equal schools. “Today, this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote, adding that it “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter” and “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Sotomayor also wrote: “The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated. The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Sotomayor ended on an defiant note, writing, “Society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted,” and predicting that what she portrayed as the majority’s efforts to impede that goal would prove to be impotent. “The pursuit of racial diversity will go on,” she wrote. “Although the court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education.”
Jonathan Weisman
Political correspondentRepublican presidential candidates are beginning to weigh in, lavishing praise on the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action. “There is no place for discrimination based on race in the United States, and I am pleased that the Supreme Court has put an end to this egregious violation of civil and constitutional rights in admissions processes, which only served to perpetuate racism,” former Vice President Mike Pence said in a statement.
Stephanie Saul
National education reporterWithin minutes after the Supreme Court ruling, the N.A.A.C.P. issued a statement: “In a society still scarred by the wounds of racial disparities, the Supreme Court has displayed a willful ignorance of our reality.”
In 2016, in its last major case on affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court upheld an aspect of an idiosyncratic admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin. In the process, it reaffirmed the distinction the court had drawn in earlier cases: that numerical quotas were unlawful but that taking account of race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity was permissible.
The case was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student who said the University of Texas had denied her admission because of her race.
Here is the Supreme Court’s full ruling that race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unlawful.
Michael D. Shear
White House correspondentPresident Biden is scheduled to leave the White House early this afternoon for a quick trip to New York City, but White House officials have not ruled out the possibility that he could make remarks about the ruling before he leaves.
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentAt the end of the majority opinion striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that universities could still consider applicants’ discussion of their personal race-based experiences as part of essays: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
Charlie Savage
Washington correspondentJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she had been on the university’s board of overseers, but still joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in that case. A footnote said Justice Jackson joined it “as it applies” to the U.N.C. case and that she “took no part in the consideration or decision” of the Harvard case.
Half of Americans disapprove of colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, while one-third approve of this practice. But a close look at recent polling on the issue shows that attitudes about affirmative action differ based on whom you ask — and how you ask about it.
The Pew survey shows a clear divide along racial and ethnic lines: A majority of white and Asian adults disapprove of racial consideration in admissions, while Black Americans largely approve and Hispanics are about evenly split.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, a policy that has long been a pillar of higher education.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent."
