The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today.
 | By Vanessa Mobley Op-Ed Editor |
Today, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It has been more than 40 years since the court first ruled on affirmative action and found that some racial considerations in higher education did not offend the Constitution or federal law. |
Yet affirmative action is banned in nine states (including California, Florida and Michigan), and public sentiment — as seen in a Pew Research Center survey in 2019 that found that 73 percent of Americans said colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions — is far from unanimous. |
Justin Driver, the Robert R. Slaughter professor of law at Yale University, has written a guest essay for Times Opinion that describes a middle path between the full repeal of affirmative action and its persistence on campus. In his piece, Driver writes about how Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (for whom he served as a Supreme Court clerk) wrote a majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 that upheld affirmative action. In that opinion, she wrote that the court "expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." Driver argues that the years remaining on the clock that started with Grutter could offer public and private institutions of higher learning a way to adapt to race-neutral admissions. |
In another essay last week, Linda Greenhouse, who reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008, casts the upcoming oral arguments as evidence that the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education continues to be debated. |
Renu Mukherjee, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, writes from a more personal perspective, challenging the assumption that affirmative action has advanced diversity on campus. Ms. Mukherjee argues for the efficacy of race-neutral alternatives and uses her own story as an example of the kind of diversity not currently recognized by race-conscious admissions programs. |
These guest essays offer a critical way to understand more than just the future of higher education in America; they are, like the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade, a way of seeing into the future of the Supreme Court and our country. |
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