The court rejected an emergency request to temporarily bar the military academy from using race in admissions while a lower-court lawsuit proceeds.
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The justices signaled they could consider admissions at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the future, writing that their order expressed no “view on the merits of the constitutional question.”
The Supreme Court declined on Friday to temporarily block race-conscious admissions at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, clearing the way for the school to continue considering race as a factor in selecting the class that will enroll in the fall.
The court’s order rejected a request for emergency relief from Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group that has repeatedly challenged the consideration of race in higher education, as a lawsuit moves forward. It had asked the justices to act swiftly because West Point was poised to stop accepting applications on Wednesday.
In its order, the court said that the record was “underdeveloped.” Its denial “should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question,” it added, signaling that the justices could consider the issue in the future. There were no noted dissents.
The founder of Students for Fair Admissions, Edward Blum, cast the court’s decision as a setback. “It is disappointing that the young men and women who apply to West Point for the foreseeable future will have their race used as a factor to admit or reject them,” he said in a statement.
The group successfully challenged race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina during the court’s last term, effectively ending a policy that colleges across the nation had relied on for decades to increase racial diversity.
Mr. Blum appears to have tailored the challenge to focus on a group of institutions excluded from that ruling: military academies.
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Source: nytimes.com
