(Excerpts from the New York Times) 

• The Supreme Court is set to consider next week whether to hear a challenge to Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program. If the justices take the case — a reasonably safe bet — affirmative action in higher education, which has survived several close calls at the court, will again be in peril.
• Its main vulnerability will be the contested and largely untested proposition that diversity enhances education, and that students of different backgrounds benefit from learning from one another.
• The court has said that idea is the sole permissible rationale for taking account of race in admissions decisions. But members of what is now a six-justice conservative bloc have mocked the notion and questioned how it could be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny.
• The university’s main argument, Justice Alito wrote, “is that merely invoking ‘the educational benefits of diversity’ is sufficient and that it need not identify any metric that would allow a court to determine whether its plan is needed to serve, or is actually serving, those interests.”A new study set out to devise such a metric.