WASHINGTON — Over five hours of Supreme Court arguments on Monday on the fate of affirmative action in higher education, the justices and the lawyers arguing before them mentioned diversity more than 200 times.
That was in one sense unsurprising, as educational diversity has for decades been the sole justification accepted by the Supreme Court for allowing what it has said the Constitution and a federal law would otherwise forbid: taking account of race in admissions decisions.
The court has rejected a second possible justification for racial preferences, that of providing a remedy for past discrimination.
“There’s not a remedial justification on the table here,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said on Monday. “Our precedents rule that out.”
Diversity is the last man standing. But it is a murky and contested concept, opaque by design and an anodyne way to confront the combustible topic of race. Monday’s arguments suggested that the court’s conservative majority was prepared to rule that the pursuit of diversity is no longer reason enough to allow racial preferences at the nation’s colleges and universities. There was a note of irony in this, as the court — with four women, two African Americans and a Latina — is the most diverse in history, at least as measured by those demographic characteristics. Taking account of such characteristics in admissions decisions is said to make it more likely that students will learn from one another in the classroom. There was little evidence on Monday that this phenomenon applies to justices on the bench.