Harvard affirmative action case: Supreme Court must defend color-blind Constitution

Supreme Court will hear oral argument Monday in two cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina that ask: May universities use race as a factor in admissions?

Carrie Campbell Severino is president of the Judicial Crisis Network.  

The court has dealt with the issue of affirmative action for decades. In the context of student admissions, its precedents have been muddled and damaging. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the justices were too divided for a majority to agree on a coherent standard, so Justice Lewis Powell’s view that a "holistic" admissions policy would be permissible if it advanced "diversity" in the student body prevailed. 

Twenty-five years later, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the court’s majority solidified Powell’s view by allowing universities to use race when it advanced "diversity."