The US supreme court struck down race-conscious university admissions yesterday, throwing out a decades-old precedent and delivering a huge blow to the cause of greater student diversity on campuses.
In a blockbuster decision that will force many US universities to overhaul their admissions policies, the justices ruled that affirmative action programmes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) that considered an applicant's race violated the US constitution's promise of equal protection under the law.
The court noted that such affirmative action programmes "must comply with strict scrutiny, may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and must at some point end".
The six conservative justices on the nine-strong court prevailed over the three liberal justices, with the newest member and first black woman on the court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, issuing a stark dissent saying the ruling meant it would "take longer for racism to leave us".
President Joe Biden said he was considering executive action and would ask the US Department of Education to look into ways to maintain diversity among university student bodies.
The US president said "this is not a normal court" of the bench, which has swung far to the right with the appointment of three rightwing justices during Donald Trump's presidency, giving it a 6-3 conservative supermajority.
Speaking at the White House, Biden said: "Discrimination still exists in America. Today's decision does not change that. It's a simple fact."
The court found that the universities' reasons for using race as a factor as a means of improving diversity "fail to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue".
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