District court upholds racial preferences in Naval Academy admissions

Relief on appeal seems unlikely

Richard Bennett, a federal district court judge in Maryland appointed by George W. Bush, has rejected a challenge by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) to the Naval Academy’s use of racial preferences in admissions. Judge Bennett concluded that the Naval Academy’s racial discrimination is justified by “a compelling national security interest” in having “a highly qualified and diverse officer corps.”

A search of his opinion found that the judge used the word “diversity,” or some variation of it, 212 times in a 179 page opinion. I guess he believes in it.

Is it really true that, as Judge Bennett says, “the Navy and Marine Corps’ unit cohesion and lethality” depends on a racially balanced officer corps? Will black sailors perform worse — to the point that our national security will suffer — if their officers corps contains significantly fewer blacks than the quota used by the Naval Academy yields?

These propositions seem absurd. It might well be true, as some of the evidence cited by Bennett claimed, that a service branch plagued by racial discrimination won’t perform optimally. But SFFA isn’t asking the Academy to discriminate. It’s asking for the opposite.

It might even be true that a service branch with an officer corps that isn’t “diverse” — one that had virtually no black officers, for example — could perform sub-optimally. But diversity isn’t the same thing as racial balance, and it’s racial balance that the Naval Academy’s discriminatory admissions policy seeks to impose.

If America’s national security depends on quota representation among military officers, the nation is probably doomed, in any case. The performance of our soldiers and sailors had better be contingent on the quality of those who lead them, rather than their race.

SFFA will appeal Judge Bennett’s ruling to the Fourth Circuit. Unfortunately, that court is dominated by liberals who will likely embrace any absurdity used to justify preferential treatment for blacks. This, after all, is the court that upheld the racially discriminatory (against Asian-Americans) admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School.

If there’s to be judicial relief, I believe it will have to come from the Supreme Court. Readers probably recall that, in striking down racial preferences at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, that Court left open the question of whether “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” would justify a different result for these institutions.

I hope I’m wrong, but my sense is that the Supreme Court will continue to leave that question open and decline to review the decision in favor of the Naval Academy. Overriding the policies of the leftists who run Harvard and UNC is one thing. For the Justices, overriding the judgments of the military, even our woke military, is another.

Perhaps, though, litigation against West Point and the Air Force Academy will produce a split among the circuits. In that event, Supreme Court review seems likely down the road.

Meanwhile, it’s possible that the Trump administration will bring change to the admissions policies of the service academies. For example, a new Secretary of the Navy could cause the Naval Academy to stop discriminating on the basis of race, provided he or she is willing to ruffle some bit feathers.

I’d like to see Senators raise this issue with Donald Trump’s nominees for the relevant positions.

Still, I’m not optimistic about a change in policy emanating from the new administration. Nor would it be ideal to have admissions policies at our service academies change radically every four, eight, or twelve years depending on whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican.

But maybe the service academies will reduce the extent of their racial preferences in the new administration. Come to think of it, reduction (as opposed to elimination) is the most that has come so far from the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Harvard and UNC cases — and even that has been elusive (again, so far).