Why Can Military Academies Still Use Racial Preference for Admission?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns racial preferences at America’s military service academies. According to an article by Wilson Beaver and Wyatt Eichholz in The Daily Signal, racial preferences were injected into university admissions in a 2003 Supreme Court ruling. Those preferences were withdrawn last week in the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. However, the ruling was not extended to the service academies. 

Chief Justice John Roberts noted that there may be “potentially distinct interest that military academies may present” in the matter of race-based admissions. I cannot think of a worst place to have race-based admissions. We want the best possible candidates to attend our military academies – not people there to fill quotas.

Beaver and Eichholz quoted a statement by former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Robert Fogleman and retired Army Brig. Gen. Claude McQuarrie. They argued that in the pursuit of “class composition goals” by service academies, “our warfighters are denied the ‘best-qualified’ officers.” They explained that racial biases also “demean high-performing minorities” and deprive them of the “presumption of competence.” Because racial preferences are an explicit policy goal, “[t]heir peers and subordinates don’t know whether a promotion was earned or the result of preferences.”

Beaver and Eichholz also quoted Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, former national security adviser and military historian. He summarized the arguments when he spoke of how leaders must not allow “reified postmodernist theories to erode the sacred trust between warriors or diminish the meritocracy and objective realities that are essential to preserving the warrior ethos as the foundation of combat effectiveness.”

In addition, The Heritage Foundation documented that “the ‘postmodernist theories’ are pervasive in today’s military, largely driven by political forces from the top.” We may have been done with our “postmodernist” military if one of the service academies had been a party in the lawsuit that ended racial preferences in university systems. This means that our institutions of higher education are now free from racial preference, but our military academies are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race.