The decision was immediately held as a landmark decision, with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe telling the New York Times the decision is the most important on racial diversity in education since the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that struck down segregation in public schools. The majority nevertheless recognized that the university’s program is carefully created to advance a series of legitimate educational goals – and, crucially, that supposedly race-neutral alternatives could be far worse.
Advertisement
“It’s not at all the type of affirmative action that we had in the 1960s”, she said.
The petitioner in the case Fisher v. University of Texas, Abigail Fisher, alleged that because she was white she had been put at an unfair disadvantage in terms of admission into the school, and that had she been a minority student she would have been accepted into the university. Remaining students, from Texas and elsewhere, are assessed by a variety of factors that include race and ethnicity, which is the section of the policy that Fisher challenged. I’m pleased that SCOTUS has reaffirmed its importance.
For the second time, Fisher had her day in the Supreme Court, which today issued its second opinion on the matter. Diversity is essential to carry out that mission.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas is good for higher education and good for the country”, Association of American Universities (AAU) President Mary Sue Coleman remarked. And officials from some of Arkansas’ largest schools said race isn’t a factor when they select students. “And it begins with admission to selective institutions of higher education”. For example, Hispanic students make up 19.5 percent of the student body even as Hispanics comprise almost 40 percent of the state’s population. This is precisely the kind of sensitive and modest affirmative action program the court previously endorsed.
“There’s an academic interest in diversity”, he said.
After Thursday’s decision, the answer is certainly “some” – though people will still debate in which direction that progress goes. “Today’s decision is a sad step backward for the original, colorblind principles to our civil rights laws”, added Blum, the president of the conservative Project on Fair Representation.
“It is the University’s ongoing obligation to engage in constant deliberation and continued reflection regarding its admissions policies”, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
In part to address racial imbalances, the university had a rule guaranteeing admission to students in the top 10 percent of their class.
Rhodes said since UT’s system is so unique, the ruling won’t act as a precedent in future affirmative action cases. They also said the measures must be periodically reassessed to determine if they remain valid.
Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, anxious that the ruling will not encourage schools to seek other measures of promoting diversity in their student populations.
The justices upheld a 2014 ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals that had endorsed the school’s “limited use of race in its search for holistic diversity”. In so doing, the Supreme Court temporarily avoided the question of whether race could be used as a factor in public college admissions.
“Today’s decision seems to give universities more leeway to simply use race as a way to get racial diversity and ignore economically disadvantaged students”, he said.
Advertisement
For opponents of affirmative action such as Fisher, college admissions decisions “should be based on merit and not on any other external factor”.
