In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Harvard College and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which prohibits race-based discrimination by the government. Harvard’s nine-year effort to defend its policies came to a close, and the ruling effectively ended race-conscious affirmative action in the admissions programs of public and private universities.
Former Harvard University President Larry Bacow wrote in a letter responding to the ruling: “To prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect and have lived, multiple facets of human experience. No part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant. Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed, a place where many will have the chance to live dreams their parents or grandparents could not have dreamed.”