UVA assesses affirmative action ruling’s impact
High court shuts the door but leaves open questions
The U.S. Supreme Court ended a 45-year line of precedent and decades of conventional admissions office practices in late June when it rejected the use of race-conscious criteria in evaluating college applications.
The ruling has UVA and others pondering how big a hole that leaves in holistic approaches used to build talented and diverse incoming classes. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s 6-3 majority opinion in companion cases against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina said race can’t be a factor in college admissions, not even a small factor among many.
The ruling was as stunning in its pronouncements as in its silence on certain key points, including effectively sidelining the leading cases on affirmative action without expressly overruling them.
But make no mistake, said University of Virginia constitutional law professor Kim Forde-Mazrui, an expert in race and the law, “Affirmative action is over.”
Among the open questions, the court neither directly addressed nor ruled out the use of so-called race-neutral means that lead to more diverse student bodies. Admissions deans, for example, could give preference to students from low-income households, impoverished neighborhoods, under-resourced schools or non-college-educated parents, policies that tend to increase African American and Latino representation.
At least universities could try that for now. Forde-Mazrui said he sees those measures as the next flash points in the continuing fight over promoting diversity in education.
Nor did the decision take up legacy admissions, which some court watchers thought it might. Ending preferences for the children of alumni is another race-neutral way to increase diversity, since favoring legacies tends to perpetuate the racial makeup of the previous generation. The practice has come under increasing criticism across the political spectrum, including by the conservative legal organization that challenged Harvard and UNC, Students for Fair Admissions.
Legacy students made up 14.1 percent of UVA’s incoming class last fall, according to figures provided to Virginia Magazine last year. That cohort, the Class of 2026, now rising second-years, was the first where white students didn’t make up a majority. It was 47 percent white, 20 percent Asian, 8 percent Black, 8 percent Hispanic and 6 percent of multiple race, plus 5 percent international and 6 percent race or ethnicity unknown, according to official figures.
The University is assessing the way forward. “[W]e are still evaluating,” UVA President James E. Ryan (Law ’92) and Provost Ian Baucom said in a statement a few hours after the decision. “Our commitment to diversity … is not diminished, even if our ability to pursue that goal is constrained.”
As they had in statements during the lead-up to the Harvard and UNC ruling, Ryan and Baucom spoke of diversity broadly—“across every dimension” and “in all its forms.” Unlike the earlier statements, given the new landscape, the references to the many forms of diversity no longer included the phrase “including race.”