Diversity.

When Allan Bakke applied to the School of Medicine of the University of California, Davis, his application was placed into a pool with other individuals of his race (White), and the screening criteria for his pool were different from those for other racially identifiable applicant pools. Accordingly, a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States ruled five to four in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) that he was discriminated against because the admission process was segregated by race. The justices also ruled five to four that a diverse student body is a “constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education,” and one of the judges in the majority, Lewis F. Powell Jr., declared that “the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.” The Supreme Court reversed its earlier rulings, however, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023) with its decision that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities, except for military academies, were unconstitutional.