The United States Military Academy at West Point is currently facing a legal challenge regarding its admission policies. The American anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), has appealed to the Supreme Court to prevent West Point from using race as a factor in the application process while its lawsuit continues in the lower courts.
The SFFA was previously involved in lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina which concluded with the US Supreme Court effectively ending affirmative action.
In the current case, SFFA claims that West Point’s race-based admission policies breach the Fifth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. According to the SFFA, the military academy and the federal government are subject to the Fifth Amendment. The original lawsuit stated, “The Fifth Amendment contains an equal-protection principle that binds the federal government and is no less strict than the Equal Protection Clause that binds the States”.
The SFFA specifically maintains that West Point’s practises disregard each principle from Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard, arguing that the academy’s policies should not be exempted from the Harvard ruling. The lawsuit also asserts that two of the white applicants represented by the SFFA will face “irreparable harm” without an injunction, as West Point will purportedly “illegally discriminate against thousands of applicants for the class of 2028—including two of 26 SFFA’s members—based on their skin color.”
Earlier this month, following SFFA’s lawsuit against West Point’s so-called “benchmarks” for the racial composition of its student body, a federal judge in New York issued an opinion allowing the academy to continue using race as part of its admission criteria.
In 2023, a Supreme Court decision effectively ended race-based admissions in colleges. In the case against Harvard and UNC, the court found that the schools’ admissions processes did not meet the strict scrutiny standard. This standard requires that discrimination based on a protected class must be narrowly tailored to further a justifiable government interest. Although the need to foster a diverse educational environment is a compelling interest, the court disagreed and ruled that it was not compelling enough to justify these admission processes, thereby violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.