Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/182

Rh the Members of this majority pay lip service to respondents’ “commendable” and “worthy” racial diversity goals,, they make a clear value judgment today: Racial integration in higher education is not sufficiently important to them. “Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.” Dobbs, 597 U. S., at ___ (dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 6).

The majority offers no response to any of this. Instead, it attacks a straw man, arguing that the Court’s cases recognize that remedying the effects of “societal discrimination” does not constitute a compelling interest. Yet as the majority acknowledges, while Bakke rejected that interest as insufficiently compelling, it upheld a limited use of race in college admissions to promote the educational benefits that flow from diversity. 438 U. S., at 311–315. It is that narrower interest, which the Court has reaffirmed numerous times since Bakke and as recently as 2016 in Fisher II, see, that the Court overrules today.

The Court’s precedents authorizing a limited use of race in college admissions are not just workable—they have been working. Lower courts have consistently applied them without issue, as exemplified by the opinions below and SFFA’s and the Court’s inability to identify any split of authority. Today, the Court replaces this settled framework with a set of novel restraints that create troubling equal protection problems and share one common purpose: to make it impossible to use race in a holistic way in college admissions, where it is much needed.

The Court argues that Harvard’s and UNC’s programs must end because they unfairly disadvantage some racial groups. According to the Court, college admissions are a “zero-sum” game and respondents’ use of race unfairly “