US Supreme Court will end the era of college diversity

At the end of this month, the US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in two closely watched cases on affirmative action in higher education. They’re widely expected to overturn the 1978 case that allowed racial diversity to become an organizing principle for college admissions. Like Roe v. Wade, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke is a major precedent from the 1970s that has been reaffirmed in subsequent Supreme Court decisions. But unlike the decision to overturn Roe, which returned the question of abortion to the states, repealing Bakke would make using race in university admissions illegal nationwide as a violation of the equal protection of the laws.
The ramifications will be enormous not only for universities, but for the broader culture.
Nearly all selective colleges and universities treat race as one factor in “holistic” admissions decisions, enabling them to enroll classes that are roughly racially representative of the general national population (except for Asian-Americans, who today significantly outpace their national numbers in admissions). At Harvard, for example, the admitted class of 2026 was 15.2% African American, 12.6% Latino and 27.9% Asian American. More broadly, the powerful ideology of diversity, which has become deeply rooted across a wide range of institutions of American life, is about to undergo radical challenge and transformation from the courts.
Evidence from the Universities of California and Michigan, which have already been required by state law to drop affirmative action, indicates that repealing Bakke would cause a substantial decline in the proportion of Black and Latino students enrolled in selective universities nationwide — perhaps by half. Universities would no longer be allowed to pursue racial diversity, gender diversity, sexual orientation diversity or religious diversity. (They would still be allowed to pursue economic diversity, class diversity, viewpoint diversity and geographic diversity, because these categories aren’t protected against discrimination by the Constitution or civil rights laws.)
To understand what a monumental shift this will be, let’s back up. When affirmative action was first proposed and implemented in the 1960s, the stated goal was to remedy past discrimination that took the forms of slavery, segregation and race prejudice. In 1978, a divided Supreme Court narrowly held that, in higher education at least, remediation was no longer a permissible rationale for the great majority of schools. A single justice, Lewis Powell, wrote a concurring opinion holding that universities nevertheless had a constitutional, compelling interest in creating “diverse” student bodies.
Powell got the diversity idea from a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by Harvard University, which had begun engineering geographical diversity in its classes in the 1930s.
—Bloomberg