The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case Wednesday that could gut race-based affirmative action at American universities – a case it’s now hearing for the second time.
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By a 5-4 vote in the first case and a 6-3 vote in the second, the court upheld a University of MI law school program that considered the race of an applicant among several factors, and separately rejected an undergraduate admissions system that automatically gave minorities extra credit to boost their chances of acceptance. It’s the “holistic” program that Abigail Fisher-who was denied admission for the university in 2008-is challenging. Fisher claims that the school’s admissions policy violated her constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment by admitting less-qualified minority students because they fit the University’s push for a racially diverse student body.
As ProPublica reported in 2013, although some students with lower grades and test scores than Fisher were admitted that year, the vast majority were white, and more than 150 black and Latino students with roughly the same or better grades and test scores were turned away.
According to law, the state of Texas guaranties admission to the top 10 percent in high school classes regardless of their race.
If the Supreme Court prohibits using race as a factor for admissions in the Texas case, more high-scoring Indians and other Asians will be able to enter Ivy League and other elite universities purely on their merit.
June 24, 2013 – The Supreme Court doesn’t rule on the school admission policy for the University of Texas; instead it sends it back to the lower court for further review.
A decision in Fisher v. University of Texas-Austin is expected by the end of the Supreme Court’s term next summer.
Justice Elena Kagan, due to her involvement in the case while in the Obama administration, is not participating in the arguments or decision of the case.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito appeared most open to the challengers’ argument, but Scalia, another usually reliable conservative voice, did not comment at all.
African American students are seen during a protest.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that the Ten Percent Plan itself “is so obviously driven by one thing only, and that one thing is race”. Gregory Garre said on behalf of the university that minority enrollment plummeted at top public universities in California and MI after they ended the consideration of race.
Opponents of affirmative action in college admissions are hoping they can cripple the positive discrimination measure – if not outright kill it.
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But students who aren’t admitted under the so-called Top 10 plan can still get in based on their race or extracurricular activities. Those last factors are used to produce what the school calls “diversity within diversity” – a representative mix of minority students, rather than just those from segregated communities with similar backgrounds and experiences. He expressed frustration that, more than two years after the high court voted 7-1 to send the case back to a federal appeals court for stricter review of the university’s program, little had changed. On the larger question, she said to Rein at one point, “I fear something”, and asked of the proof he said the university would have to show, “Will any holistic review ever survive [court review]?” His line of questioning wasn’t sitting well with all: One of the spectators in court was Al Sharpton, who said afterward, “I did not know if I was sitting in the Supreme Court or at a Donald Trump rally”. “Frankly”, he added, “the solution to the problems with student body diversity is not to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools”.
