Looming Harvard case puts affirmative action at risk

The Supreme Court is set to consider next week whether to hear a challenge to Harvard’s race-conscious admissions programme. If the justices take the case – a reasonably safe bet – affirmative action in higher education, which has survived several close calls at the court, will again be in peril, writes Adam Liptak for The New York Times.

Its main vulnerability will be the contested and largely untested proposition that diversity enhances education, and that students of different backgrounds benefit from learning from one another. The court has said that idea is the sole permissible rationale for taking account of race in admissions decisions. But members of what is now a six-justice conservative bloc have mocked the notion and questioned how it could be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny.

“What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr asked at a 2015 argument over the constitutionality of an affirmative action programme at the University of Texas. The next year, the court upheld the programme by a 4-to-3 vote. (Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat was vacant after his death that February, and Justice Elena Kagan was recused.) In dissent, Justice Samuel A Alito Jr, joined by the chief justice and Justice Clarence Thomas, said that there was no way of knowing whether diversity was working.
Full report on The New York Times site