Planning at Your Institution
With the Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions practices on June 29, we are providing insightful information to help you and your institutions respond.
If you haven’t already, please ensure you are connecting with the appropriate offices and individuals on your campus regarding the decisions. This includes planning for:
- Having an institutional position drafted;
- Policy and practice evaluation based on Court opinions;
- An inventory of all diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs on your campus;
- Decisions on institutional policies and program issues based on potential changes that may stem from the Court’s decision, including impact and compliance; and
- Plans for the fall term, including stakeholder engagement.
If the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws race-conscious admissions policies, diversity officers must be ready to show the way forward, President Paulette Granberry Russell writes in Inside Higher Ed (March 20, 2023)
Last fall, NADOHE hosted a webinar series – Challenges to Race in Higher Education Admissions: Understanding the Issues before SCOTUS and Institutional Readiness – to help diversity professionals prepare for SCOTUS’s race-conscious admissions decision.
The series, presented by Art Coleman, co-founder and managing partner of EducationCounsel LLC, and moderated by Caroline Laguerre-Brown, J.D., NADOHE board member and vice provost for diversity, equity and community engagement at the George Washington University, provided key takeaways on what institutions should do to prepare for the decision.
We encourage you to review webinar part one and especially part two of the series.
You can also revisit our existing resources pages, where President Granberry Russell and Art Coleman are quoted and have additional thoughts: Race Admissions: News You Can Use, Statement on Admissions Practices, Statement on the Future of Race-Conscious Admissions
An April webinar hosted by various University of Michigan units featured leaders and scholars who have experienced state-level affirmative action bans on how they responded and lessons learned as they lead for DEI.
Watch the webinar:
Supporting materials from the event:
- Chancellor Cantor's framing remarks
- Paulette Granberry Russell's op-ed
- College Board amicus brief
- The Oyez entry for Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard
- A brief guide to the amicus briefs for affirmative action
NADOHE President Paulette Granberry Russell met with news outlets in October 2022 to discuss the Supreme Court cases, precedent for race-conscious admissions practices, and what all this could mean for the future of diversity in higher education. President Granberry Russell has been quoted in POLITICO, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, among other outlets.
“These institutions that aren’t able to carefully consider race in admissions are falling short even as the country becomes more diverse,” she told Bloomberg’s Kelsey Butler.
We encourage those dedicated to cultivating more inclusive, anti-racist environments to explore and apply our Framework for Advancing Anti-Racism Strategy on Campus.
NADOHE is not alone in our advocacy that the Court not overturn its prior decisions that permit carefully constructed race-conscious admissions policies. NADOHE joined the amicus brief filed by the American Council on Education, along with 38 other higher education associations.