Two separate decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court have ended long-standing college admissions practices considered racially discriminatory by many Americans and will force employers to be more generous in accommodating employees’ religious practices.
End of race-based university admissions
On June 29th, the court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that universities could no longer consider race as a factor in their admission of students.
The policy, called ‘affirmative action,’ started during the civil rights movement of the 1960s ostensibly to facilitate the end of long-standing racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans in employment and education. Under the policy, weight was given to African Americans in employment and university admissions to boost their admissions rates and further their practical integration into American society. Government entities were mandated to follow affirmative action policies and some private institutions and companies also instituted similar policies.
The policy later expanded to include some other ethnic minorities, women, and people with disabilities.
Now it’s over at universities, a sign of a paradigm shift in the country.
The Free Press reports that the cases, one against Harvard and one against the University of North Carolina, were almost a decade in the making. It all started in 2012 when a white female student in Texas, Abigail Fisher, was not accepted into the University of Texas. She then sued the school, claiming that its race-based admissions policy hurt white and Asian American applicants. A conservative activist and University of Texas alumnus, Edward Blum, underwrote the expenses for her legal case. They lost, but founded Students for Fair Admissions to continue their activism in a series of lawsuits that finally led to the two winning cases before the Supreme Court. The organisation brought two cases to court: one against Harvard University as a private school and the other against the University of North Carolina as a public school.
These were not the first attempts to end race considerations in college admissions. In 2003, the court had upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race “as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.” In that case, now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (the first woman to sit on the high court) ruled that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions,” but also suggested that “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest” in diversity in the foreseeable future.
But with universities not proposing a foreseeable end to such policies, the court’s ruling ended it for them.
In his majority opinion, Justice John Roberts noted that the universities argued that they considered race in their admissions program for laudable goals, such as “training future leaders in the public and private sector” and “promoting the robust exchange of ideas,” but ruled that those goals are “are too vague and immeasurable” for courts to determine. He wrote: “How is a court to know whether leaders have been adequately ‘train[ed]’ [or] whether the exchange of ideas is ‘robust’…?”
His opinion also found that the policies were potentially discriminatory towards other groups and lacked a “logical endpoint.”
The opinion left room for race to have a place in college admissions but on a case-by-case basis, for example in the personal essay: “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” At the same time, he warned that awarding a student for overcoming racial discrimination must be “tied to that student’s courage and determination.” He found, though, that as presented in the court case, programs at the universities in question “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the colour of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Court strengthens religious exemptions
The case Groff v. DeJoy involves a Christian postal worker who refused to work on Sundays in keeping with his religious practice.
Post offices were closed on Sundays until the U.S. Postal Service entered into an agreement with Amazon for Sunday package deliveries. The post office in Pennsylvania where the plaintiff Gerald Groff, an Evangelical Christian and mail carrier, worked began Sunday deliveries for Amazon in 2017.
Groff requested a religious exemption for Sunday work to observe the Sabbath, but his supervisor refused, only offering to try to find volunteers to cover Groff’s shifts. Groff was ultimately held accountable for missing 24 shifts and disciplined. He quit and then sued for religious discrimination.
Under a 1977 Supreme Court ruling, employers have the right to deny accommodations for the religious practices of an employee if it requires more than “de minimis” (minimal) cost to the business. The Supreme Court on Friday did not overturn that ruling but set a “clarified standard” for lower courts to use when determining when an employee’s religious accommodation imposes an “undue hardship” on the employer—in effect, putting the burden of proof for “undue hardship” on the employer. In a unanimous decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that courts “should resolve whether a hardship would be substantial in the context of an employer’s business in the commonsense manner that it would use in applying any such test.”
He added, “We think it is enough to say that an employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
The Supreme Court did not directly rule on the plaintiff’s situation but sent the case back to the lower court to be retried, applying the higher court’s clarification.
In a reversal of more recent trends, the two cases together signify a move toward a deeper application of constitutional rights, especially with respect to bans on racial and religious discrimination.
