New York Times

WASHINGTON — As student protests over racial injustice are exploding at campuses across the nation, the Supreme Court is preparing to hear a major case that could put an end to racial preferences in college admissions.

The tense atmosphere on campuses may alter the legal dynamic when the case is argued on Dec. 9. “It’s quite possible,” said Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, “that the way the court frames the discussion will be colored by the justices’ views of the campus protests.”

The justices are almost certainly paying close attention to the protests, including those at Princeton, where three of them went to college, and at Yale, where three of them went to law school. At both schools, there have been accusations that protesters, many of them black, have tried to suppress the speech of those who disagree with them. Others welcomed the protests as part of what they called a healthy debate.

The protests call for a new examination of the legacy of racism in the United States. But the Supreme Court’s precedents have rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities as a remedy for past wrongs. They permit only a single justification for race-conscious admissions plans: creating educational diversity so that students of different backgrounds can learn from each other.

The case to be argued next week was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, and who says the university’s consideration of race violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court has forbidden the use of quotas, fixed percentages and other efforts to mirror the racial composition of the general population in admissions decisions. But it has allowed schools to take account of race as one factor among many in an effort to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students.

The point of allowing race to be used as a “plus factor” is to foster “values beyond race alone, including enhanced classroom dialogue,” JusticeAnthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority when the court first considered Ms. Fisher’s case in 2013. That decision did little more than instruct an appeals court to take a more searching look at the university’s admissions plan. The appeals court endorsed the plan for a second time last year, and the case is back at the Supreme Court.

Lawyers on both sides have focused their arguments on Justice Kennedy, who holds the crucial vote in cases concerning race.

“African-American students are telling us in no uncertain terms why diversity on campus is important,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to sustain the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions plan. “They are describing their own marginalization.”

“It’s not up to Justice Kennedy or me to say what the outcome of the debate will be,” she added. “But Justice Kennedy does have the ability to influence whether the conditions are there for the debate even to happen, whether the university is permitted to create an environment in which they can have minority students of varying backgrounds on campus who can raise provocative questions that otherwise would not be raised.”

But Justice Kennedy may draw a different lesson from the recent upheavals: that campuses are in the grip of political orthodoxy, one that is impervious to the intellectual diversity that affirmative action is said to promote.

“I cannot help but think that even a subconscious link in Kennedy’s mind between blacks on campus and the suppression of speech — justified or not, and I do not think it is justified — will hurt U.T.,” said Richard O. Lempert, a law professor at the University of Michigan who filed a brief supporting the University of Texas.

Professor Dorf, who served as a law clerk to Justice Kennedy, said that promoting educational diversity, the only justification for race-conscious admissions policies permitted by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s controlling 1978 opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, has dangerously narrowed the range of available arguments.

“If you think that the student protesters are insisting on a kind of political correctness and capitulation of authorities to their demands, you might think that this just shows that affirmative action does not promote intellectual diversity in the way Justice Powell thought it would and the project is a failure,” he said.

But, he added, “pushing all of this into the framework of viewpoint diversity robs affirmative action of much of its moral force, which is as a way of addressing our troubled racial past.”

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, which has also seen protests, said much had changed since the 2013 decision.

“I view the last couple of years as the emergence of a new sensibility about race and ethnicity in America,” he said. “My hope would be that we could change the frame of discussion from this abstract, vague notion of educational benefits to a real understanding of race and ethnicity in American history.”

Mr. Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan and the lead defendant in the last major affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. He is also a prominent First Amendment scholar, and he said the recent protests sometimes presented challenges.

“We’re also highly committed to uninhibited, robust and wide-open freedom of speech and press and academic freedom,” he said, “and that includes having to deal with very offensive speech.”

Paul M. Smith, a lawyer for several Ivy League universities, said the campus demonstrations illustrated the benefits of a student body drawn from many backgrounds.

“The effort to construct and maintain a community of scholars may be more difficult when that kind of diversity is maintained, but that is precisely the point,” said Mr. Smith, who filed a brief supporting the University of Texas on behalf of most of Columbia, Princeton, Yale and other elite universities.

“Differences of experience and perspective can sometimes make communication difficult and cause friction and misunderstanding,” he said. “And yet the process of working though those issues can be as valuable educationally as what occurs in the classroom.”

Others said the protests were not a healthy byproduct of affirmative action, but a consequence of admitting some students with inferior academic qualifications.

“Students who are recruited, because of their race, to colleges where the average entering credentials are significantly higher than their own will find themselves at severe academic disadvantage,” said John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who submitted a brief on behalf of Asian students opposed to affirmative action. “Basic human nature suggests that they will then try to blame others for their academic struggles, and when they look around and find a lot of similarly situated minority students struggling as well, the narrative of institutional racism would have great appeal.”

Professor Lempert disputed Professor Eastman’s premise, saying that studies do not support that mismatch theory, which says affirmative action can make minority students worse off.

The Supreme Court has three basic choices in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, No. 14-981. It could reaffirm its earlier decisions allowing the limited consideration of race. It could issue a sweeping decision doing away with affirmative action in higher education.

Or it could take a middle position, one striking down only the idiosyncratic admissions plan used by the University of Texas at Austin. The school admits most applicants from Texas under a program that guarantees admission to top students in every high school in the state. That program generates substantial racial diversity. Given that, the Supreme Court could say, the university may not take account of race in picking other students.

In a brief filed in October, the university said the recent protests prove why the court should endorse a broad conception of diversity.

“In response to the outcry that swept the South in the wake of the tragic Charleston church shooting in June,” the brief said, “U.T. students led a movement to remove a statue of Jefferson Davis from an outdoor mall on U.T.’s campus, amidst a debate over the statue’s meaning and impact. U.T.’s student body brought many different viewpoints to that debate, and this event is just one of many constant reminders that race remains relevant in Austin, as in America, today.”