Judges Have Long Deferred to Academe. That’s Changing.

During the Red Scare of the 1950s, college faculty members were lauded by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter as being among the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/344/183" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">“priests of our democracy.” </a>As campuses were roiled by political controversies in 1967, the <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/385/589/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Court invalidated a New York loyalty oath</a> and underscored that “[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” More recently, in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Grutter v. Bollinger</a>, a 2003 case upholding some forms of affirmative action, the Court said “universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition” and thus were owed “a constitutional dimension … of educational autonomy.” A much different attitude prevails on the Court today. When Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued that their affirmative action practices were entitled to the same deference the Court had shown in Grutter, Chief Justice John Roberts’s response was sarcastic, even mocking. In his <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">opinion last June</a> in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Roberts, writing for six justices, laid out a series of objections to the universities’ admissions practices, then twisted the knife: “The universities’ main response to these criticisms is, essentially, ‘trust us.’” <a href="https://medium.com/@stevesan/judges-have-long-deferred-to-academe-thats-changing-9e8ea278e5dd">Click Here</a>