Harvard, UNC say they will comply with Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision

Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) released statements Thursday saying they will comply after the Supreme Court struck down their race-based admissions processes, severely limiting affirmative action in university admissions. 

UNC emphasized it will “work with the administration to ensure that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill complies fully with today’s ruling from the nation’s highest court,” said David L. Boliek Jr., chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees. 

Although Harvard said it “will certainly comply with the Court’s decision,” the university’s statement mainly highlighted its dedication to diversity on campus. 

“We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences. That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday,” Harvard wrote. 

The university’s statement asserted diversity is “essential to academic excellence” and the student body must “prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.”

UNC also emphasized it will continue its commitment to diversity after the ruling. 

“Carolina remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences and continues to make an affordable, high-quality education accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond,” UNC Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz said. 

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More on the Supreme Court’s ruling from The Hill

• Supreme Court upends affirmative action in college admissions
• READ: Supreme Court’s affirmative action majority opinion
• Sotomayor’s biting dissent: Ruling rolls back ‘decades of precedent and momentous progress’
• Five things to know about Supreme Court’s decision to curtail college affirmative action
• Al Sharpton rips SCOTUS for ‘sticking a dagger in our back’ on affirmative action

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Edward Blum, who founded Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) and initiated the lawsuits against the two schools, said eliminating racial preferences was “long overdue.”

“Ending racial preferences in college admissions is an outcome that the vast majority of all Americans of all races will celebrate,” Blum said at a press conference Thursday afternoon.

He declined to preview future plans for any new lawsuits following the decision.

In the 6-3 decision, the conservative justices ruled admissions practices at Harvard and UNC violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

“Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. 

“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” he added.

Harvard took a swipe at the court, pointing out it won its case in the lower courts. 

“For almost a decade, Harvard has vigorously defended an admissions system that, as two federal courts ruled, fully complied with longstanding precedent,” the university stated.

Harvard did not disclose what changes it would be making to its admissions process in response to the decision, only saying “in the weeks and months ahead” the schools will be “drawing on the talent and expertise of our Harvard community, we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.”

—Zach Schonfeld contributed. Updated at 2:34 p.m.