WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority are questioning the continued use of affirmative action in higher education in lengthy arguments Monday in which the justices are wrestling with difficult questions of race.
The justices scheduled at least an hour and forty minutes of arguments and were hearing from from six different lawyers in challenges to policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard. Those policies consider race among many factors in evaluating applications for admission.
Following the overturning of the half-century precedent of Roe v. Wade in June, the cases offer a big new test of whether the court now dominated 6-3 by conservatives will move the law to the right on another of the nation’s most contentious cultural issues.
During arguments in the first of two cases, the court sounded split along ideological lines on the issue of affirmative action.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s second Black justice who has a long record of opposition to affirmative action programs, noted he didn’t go to racially diverse schools. “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times and I don’t have a clue what it means,” the conservative justice said at one point. At another point he said: “Tell me what the educational benefits are?”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative, pointed to one of the court’s previous affirmative action cases and said it anticipated an end to the use of affirmative action, saying it was “dangerous, and it has to have an end point.” When, she asked, is that end point?
Liberal justices, meanwhile, defended affirmative action policies. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s newest justice and its first Black female, said race was being used at the University of North Carolina as part of a broad review of applicants.
“They’re looking at the full person with all of these characteristics,” she said.
Justice Elena Kagan called universities the “pipelines to leadership in our society” and suggested that without affirmative action minority enrollment will drop.
“I thought part of what it meant to be an American and to believe in American pluralism is that actually our institutions, you know, are reflective of who we are as a people in all our variety,” she said.
The Supreme Court has twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 19 years, including just six years ago.
But that was before the three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined. Jackson was chosen this year by President Joe Biden.
Lower courts upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian-American applicants.
The cases are brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end the use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
