Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 17m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1620, English crown bans tobacco growing in England, giving the Virginia Company a monopoly in exchange for tax of one shilling per pound
Adam Liptak reports Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C. Liptak writes:
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.
Universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life, but he emphasized that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said in her scorching dissent.
The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.
Here’s what to know:
The opinions in the case — including concurring opinions from Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh and another dissenting opinion from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — total 237 pages. (Justice Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she had been on the university’s board of overseers.) Read the opinions here.
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The two cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal activist who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court. The decision, he said, is “an outcome that the vast majority of all races and ethnicities will celebrate.”
In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The case against Harvard has an additional element, accusing the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions. The universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard’s favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.
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.
In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld an admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin, holding that officials there could continue to consider race as a factor in ensuring a diverse student body. Read about that case here.
See Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, No. 20–1199, slip op (2023).
The ruling was generally expected; the practical question is how universities will assure diversity in compliance with this ruling.