The impact of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death played out anew at the Supreme Court Thursday in two tie votes and a 4-3 decision in favor of affirmative action in which he nearly certainly would have sided with the dissenters.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling was widely considered a win for proponents of affirmative action.
The university’s president, Gregory Fenves, praised the decision and said race continues to matter in American life.
The justices voted in favor of the Texas program by a 4-3 vote, an outcome that was dramatically altered by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who opposed affirmative action.
UT Austin uses race as one factor in admitting one-fourth of its students each year, a practice that has enabled the university to boost admissions of African Americans and Hispanics. The court held onto the case for more than six months, which sometimes is a hint that something changed between the justices’ initial vote and the issuance of the decision. It reached the Supreme Court in 2012, but the justices sent it back to a Texas appeals court for review.
“A university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which makes for greatness, ‘” the Supreme Court decision read, citing language used in Sweatt v. Painter, a 1950 Supreme Court decision that successfully challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation in public facilities.
“As this court has said, enrolling a diverse student body ‘promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races, ‘” Kennedy wrote, quoting a decision in an earlier case.
“Thursday’sruling also implies that universities with affirmative action programs ought to know that their legality will continue to be questioned.”.
Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito described the university’s program as “affirmative action gone wild” because of the way it can benefit minorities from wealthy backgrounds.
That’s what the University of Texas tried to do.
Moses, who is associate dean for graduate education and professor of education at CU’s School of Education, added that the university’s admission process is dominated by academic factors like high school grades, courses taken and standardized test scores.
The Texas case was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was denied entry to the state’s flagship university. She said the school denied her admission based on her race. Both universities and the Supreme Court must always balance “the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity”.
Fisher has since graduated from Louisiana State University, so a ruling either way wouldn’t have affected her college career.
We like to think that won’t be the case, and that Justice Kennedy – who for the time being is a swing vote on this issue – has finally recognized that the court does neither higher education nor the Constitution any favors by continuing to nitpick the attempts of universities to ensure that their student bodies are diverse in the broadest sense possible. It’s commonly known as the Top 10 Percent program, though the ranking cutoff for this policy varies by year.
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The University of Texas at Austin’s admission policy accepts applicants in the top 10 percent of their high school class in Texas. “I hope that the nation will one day move beyond affirmative action”.
