A legal-affairs journalist explains the implications. Montage illustration by Niko Yaitanes/Harvard Magazine; photographs of sky and gavel by Unsplash
By Lincoln Caplan, Harvard Magazine, June 30, 2023
FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY, race-conscious admissions have been of central importance to Harvard and other selective colleges and universities. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., LL.M. ’32, in his controlling opinion in the landmark case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), cited the “Harvard Plan” as a model of that kind of affirmative action and explained why the Supreme Court considered it constitutional: “the path to leadership” must “be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity” because “the ‘nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure’ to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.” It was that foundational program that was upended by the Supreme Court’s rulings in two lawsuits decided yesterday.
Gateways to Opportunity
AS GATEWAYS to opportunity, those institutions are what Klein professor of law Randall L. Kennedy called “far-reaching training grounds for the power elite.” A decade ago, he wrote, “I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action not because I have benefited from it personally—though I have” (Kennedy is African American). “I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good. It is a continuation and intensification of an egalitarian and democratic impulse in American race relations that has been gathering momentum, albeit fitfully and with dramatic reversals, since at least the Civil War.
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