Opinion of the Court
made clear—just as Justice Powell had—that the law school was limited in the means that it could pursue. The school could not “establish quotas for members of certain racial groups or put members of those groups on separate admissions tracks.” Id., at 334. Neither could it “insulate applicants who belong to certain racial or ethnic groups from the competition for admission.” Ibid. Nor still could it desire “some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin.” Id., at 329–330 (quoting Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.)).
These limits, Grutter explained, were intended to guard against two dangers that all race-based government action portends. The first is the risk that the use of race will devolve into “illegitimate … stereotyp[ing].” Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469, 493 (1989) (plurality opinion). Universities were thus not permitted to operate their admissions programs on the “belief that minority students always (or even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 333 (internal quotation marks omitted). The second risk is that race would be used not as a plus, but as a negative—to discriminate against those racial groups that were not the beneficiaries of the race-based preference. A university’s use of race, accordingly, could not occur in a manner that “unduly harm[ed] nonminority applicants.” Id., at 341.
But even with these constraints in place, Grutter expressed marked discomfort with the use of race in college admissions. The Court stressed the fundamental principle that “there are serious problems of justice connected with the idea of [racial] preference itself.” Ibid. (quoting Bakke, 438 U. S., at 298 (opinion of Powell, J.)). It observed that all “racial classifications, however compelling their goals,” were “dangerous.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 342. And it cautioned that all “race-based governmental action” should “remai[n] subject to continuing oversight to assure that it will
