WaPo: “Founded to educate the enslaving elite of this Southern state, allied for generations with the cause of white supremacy, roiled by racial tensions in recent years over the fate of a Confederate monument and treatment of Black faculty members, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been thrust into an unlikely role in a legal clash that has reached the Supreme Court.
It is making what could be the last stand for affirmative action in public university admissions.
The gatekeepers of UNC-Chapel Hill consider race and ethnicity, among many factors, when they sift tens of thousands of applications a year to decide who will get in. Now a plaintiff is urging the high court to declare the race-conscious method unconstitutional. Analysts believe the conservative majority of justices will be sympathetic to the critique during oral arguments later this month.
UNC-Chapel Hill, represented by the state attorney general, is urging the court to uphold decades of precedent that allow the limited use of race to promote campus diversity.”