Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Will End the Era of College Diversity

Universities have long used race as factor in admissions to try to engineer representative freshman classes. What happens after that’s illegal?

October 16, 2022 at 12:00 PM UTC

Corrected

October 18, 2022 at 2:03 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Harvard’s campus may soon look different.
Photographer: David Degner/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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At the end of this month, the US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in two closely watched cases on affirmative action in higher education. They’re widely expected to overturn the 1978 case that allowed racial diversity to become an organizing principle for college admissions. Like Roe v. Wade, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke is a major precedent from the 1970s that has been reaffirmed in subsequent Supreme Court decisions. But unlike the decision to overturn Roe, which returned the question of abortion to the states, repealing Bakke would make using race in university admissions illegal nationwide as a violation of the equal protection of the laws.

The ramifications will be enormous not only for universities, but for the broader culture.