US Naval Academy to no longer consider race when evaluating candidates

The US Naval Academy has changed its policy and will no longer consider race as a factor when evaluating candidates to attend the elite military school, a practice it maintained even after the US supreme court barred civilian colleges from employing similar affirmative action policies.

The Trump administration detailed the policy change in a filing on Friday asking a court to suspend an appeal lodged by a group opposed to affirmative action against a judge’s decision last year upholding the Annapolis, Maryland-based Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions program.

Days after returning to office in January, Donald Trump signed an executive order, on 27 January, that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the military.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, two days later issued guidance barring the military from establishing “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission or career fields”.

The US Department of Justice said that in light of those directives, V Adm Yvette Davids, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, issued guidance barring the consideration of race, ethnicity or sex as a factor in its admissions process.

The justice department said that policy change could affect the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by affirmative action opponent Edward Blum, which has also been challenging race-conscious admissions practices at other military academies.

Blum’s group had been seeking to build on its June 2023 victory at the supreme court, when the court’s 6-3 conservative majority sided with it by barring policies used by colleges and universities for decades to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on US campuses.

That ruling invalidated race-conscious admissions policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But it explicitly did not address the consideration of race as a factor in admissions at military academies, which the conservative supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, said had “potentially distinct interests”.

After the ruling, Blum’s group filed three lawsuits seeking to block the carve-out for military schools. The case the group filed against the Naval Academy was the first to go to trial.

But a federal judge in Baltimore, Richard Bennett, sided with then president Joe Biden’s administration in finding that the Naval Academy’s policy was constitutional.