Supreme Court Justices heard arguments in a University of Texas case on Wednesday.
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Justices heard arguments from attorneys representing the University of Texas and Abigail Fisher, a woman who says she was refused admission to the Austin school in 2008 in part because she is Caucasian. The policy in question means the university automatically accepts Texas high school students in the top 10% of their class, who constitute about 75% of the university student body, according to Talking Points Memo.
There is a lot of confusion over the Supreme Court judge’s statement he made during the court’s hearing of an affirmative action case.
“What more do they need?” she asked.
University officials contend the top 10 percent method alone does not generate a sufficient mix of students to provide campus diversity. Chief Justice John Roberts repeatedly asked when remedies to racial discrimination would no longer be needed.
“There is no way that class-based affirmative action could maintain the level of racial and ethnic diversity at selective institutions”, she said. The University of Texas said students admitted through the holistic review program at the time of her application had an academic index of 3.4, while Fisher’s was just 3.1.
It was the court’s second look at the admissions program at the University of Texas in Austin.
For the rest of its openings, the university takes a number of criteria into account, including class rank, athletics and other extracurricular activities, and ethnic origin. Her research suggests that if the Supreme Court struck down the consideration of race in admissions policies, the share of African Americans at elite universities would fall by as much as 50 percent. Wednesday’s oral argument centered on how the university uses race as a factor, with some conservative justices challenging the admissions program created to boost minority enrollment.
Now they are contemplating taking things a step further and declaring that race can not be a factor in admissions at all. “And it really doesn’t matter if your results are small – that sort of indicates that you didn’t have to do it in the first place”.
Garre rejected the idea that the holistic program was stereotyping.
Sotomayor agreed that if the court insisted upon an impractically high bar for the use of affirmative action, it would force other universities to adopt such a method of selection too.
If we were to go out of our way to be charitable, I suppose we could emphasize the fact that Scalia prefaced these comments by saying “there are those who contend”.
The court appeared split ideologically, with liberals voicing support for affirmative action programs.
“Are we going to reach the deadline?” “Is this going to be done, in your view, in 12 years?” Justice Antonin Scalia argued that affirmative action programs were hurting black students by sending them to schools that were too advanced for them. I think what experience shows… is that now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student diversity in America.
The case is closely followed, with an array of business and education interests backing affirmative action. For one, there is the question of Fisher’s standing because she has already graduated from another college, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg touched on.
“The damages we are seeking are broader than that”, Rein said. “It’s as if nothing had happened”.
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“Race is an odious classification”, said Fisher’s lawyer, Bert Rein, who described the university’s admission process as “inappropriate”.
