What’s New
Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the United States Military Academy at West Point for its use of race-conscious admissions policies, challenging the one exception carved out in the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down such policies nationwide.
The Details
In his 40-page opinion that held that race-conscious admissions violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made a single exception: military academies.
“No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” Roberts wrote. “This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative nonprofit group that won the jointly decided cases against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, now seeks to build on its success with its newly filed lawsuit aiming to test the exemption made for military academies. Students for Fair Admissions contends that West Point has “no justification for race-based admissions,” arguing in the lawsuit that the military academy discriminates on the basis of race in its admissions policy and that the policy should be deemed unlawful.
West Point sets benchmarks for the racial makeup of each class and considers “any enrollment rate lower than its racial benchmarks to be a failure,” according to the lawsuit. Students for Fair Admissions further argues that West Point’s policies are “tantamount to a declaration” that the institution will never stop using race-conscious policies because the institution’s benchmarks are determined based on the racial makeup of soldiers who voluntarily enlist in the Army.
“Because skin color can be — and often is — a decisive factor for successful applicants who are chosen from those congressional nominee pools, it is equally dispositive for the other qualified nominees who are turned away,” the lawsuit says. “Put differently, because race is a ‘positive’ factor for some West Point applicants, it is necessarily a ‘negative’ factor for others.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, the U.S. Military Academy’s public-affairs office said it does not comment on “ongoing investigations” to “protect the integrity of its outcome for all parties involved.”
The Backdrop
For decades, colleges largely argued — and previous courts upheld — the “diversity” rationale for race-conscious admissions on the grounds that such policies were “narrowly tailored” and represented a “compelling state interest.” The diversity rationale has always been unique to higher education, said Kimberly West-Faulcon, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. While West-Faulcon said the court didn’t completely kill the “diversity” rationale, it was deemed insufficient by the current conservative majority in the recent pair of cases.
The specific caveat for military academies in the Supreme Court decision left some scholars puzzled about why military academies’ use of race-conscious admissions represented “potentially distinct interests,” while other colleges’ policies did not. Dissenting justices pointed this out as a contradiction in the majority’s argument.
“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in one of the dissenting opinions.
In a friend-of the-court brief filed in the case against Harvard and UNC, over 30 former military leaders wrote that race-conscious admissions were essential to the military’s efforts to diversify its ranks. “The importance of maintaining a diverse, highly qualified officer corps has been beyond legitimate dispute for decades,” the brief contended. “History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of homogeneous leadership is a recipe for internal resentment, discord, and violence. By contrast, units that are diverse across all levels are more cohesive, collaborative, and effective.”
The Stakes
In their brief, military leaders argued that the importance of diverse leadership has “risen to new heights in recent years,” citing a need for increased cultural awareness amid international and humanitarian crises that officers encounter.
“Prohibiting educational institutions from using modest, race-conscious admissions policies would impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness,” the brief stated.
Among West Point’s admitted students over the past six years, about 12 percent have been Black, nearly 10 percent have been Hispanic, and almost 9 percent Asian, according to the lawsuit.
The military leaders also asked the court in their brief to consider how race-conscious admissions enable the military to uphold national-security interests. That piece could present a potential defense for West Point and other colleges, according to West-Faulcon. While the court rejected colleges’ “diversity justified” argument that race-conscious admissions were necessary to attain their education goals, West-Faulcon said the carve-out for military academies suggests that institutions may be able to review and defend their admissions policies on the basis of other compelling interests, like national security in the case of West Point.
“The majority opinion had a lot of critical language about the diversity rationale, but left, through the footnote, that there could very well be a kind of higher-education institution that does have a compelling government purpose and is using race in a narrowly tailored way,” she said. “And it could be the military academies.” For other colleges, West-Faulcon said the footnote presents an opening for them, too, to pursue different defenses for race-conscious admissions in court, such as “remedial” defenses, which other government entities have used to justify race-conscious policies on the grounds of correcting past discrimination.
