When the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at colleges in 2023, the justices said the decision did not apply to military academies because they had “potentially distinct interests.”
The group behind the litigation, Students for Fair Admissions, sued shortly after to test that idea. It argued that the use of race in admissions at the academies, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy, should also be struck down.
On Monday, the group dropped its case, acknowledging a significant shift in the political landscape since it had brought its lawsuit. In some of their earliest actions in office, Trump administration officials reversed diversity initiatives, including the considering of race in admissions, at the military schools.
A week after President Trump took office, he issued an executive order that stated that no one in the armed forces “should be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color or creed.”
In announcing the end of the cases on Monday, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, Edward Blum, called the moves historic. In a statement, the group said it had reached an agreement with the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Defense Department, that ensures that future cadets will be admitted “solely on merit, not skin color or ancestry.”
The Air Force Academy declined to comment immediately. Representatives of the Department of Defense and West Point did not respond to messages.
The agreement on Monday stated that the Department of Defense had determined, after reviewing evidence, that considering race in military academy admissions “does not promote military cohesiveness,” national security or any other interest.
The settlement states that the military academies will have no goal based on race or ethnicity and will not track the race of applicants. It also says that if an applicant selects a race or ethnicity on an application, “no one with responsibility over admissions can see, access or consider” that information before a decision is made.
The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has long argued — first as a cable news host and then in his current position — that “woke” policies undermine morale in the military.
But some who have studied military history disagree with that assertion.
“Nothing in my nearly 25 years of experience in the military substantiates that argument,” said John W. Hall, a professor of military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Hall, a 1994 West Point graduate, said that the military had been an early champion of diversity initiatives, “not out of any sense of innate progressivism or certainly not wokeness.” Rather, he said, “they were necessary for the effectiveness of the military.”
He added that in exempting the service academies, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which involved race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gave “deference to generations of experience, expertise and lessons learned.”
The settlement comes as the Trump administration has made stamping out any diversity efforts from colleges a pillar of its attack on higher education. On Thursday, the administration broadened this effort when it released a White House directive requiring colleges and universities to share a broad array of information about the race, test scores and grades of applicants and enrollees. It argued that a lack of data “continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in practice.”
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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