This morning, the high court heard oral arguments in a Texas case on affirmative action and the use of race in college admissions, and NBC News reported that Scalia “questioned whether some minority students are harmed by the policy because it helped them gain admittance to schools where they might not be able to academically compete”.
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Those cases, brought on behalf of Asian Americans who claim they are particularly hurt by affirmative action programs, target the 1978 Supreme Court decision that first upheld race in campus admissions.
“One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas”, Scalia said.
The case, which originated in 2008, hinges on the remaining quarter of applicants, who are admitted through a “holistic” evaluation (one of the considered factors is race).
Editor’s Note: The Texas Exes takes no position on the Fisher case or the use of race in admissions.
Scalia, a conservative justice who’s served on the Supreme Court since 1986, has been a longtime critic of affirmative action and is known for using colorful, even silly, language in the courtroom.
In one study cited in the brief, the most important cause for minority attrition from science was the “relatively low preparation of black aspirants to science in these schools”.
Blum’s battle with the University of Texas goes back years. “Maybe it ought to have fewer”, he said.
“I’m just not impressed by the fact that that the University of Texas may have fewer”, he said of minority students.
Affirmative action refers to a policy of favoring people from disadvantaged groups that have suffered from discrimination. “We are hopeful that the Supreme Court, which is reviewing the case for the second time, will reach the same conclusion that other courts have reached and enable all of our students to receive the full educational benefits of diversity”. The case has been winding through the courts ever since.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who nearly surely holds the deciding vote, voiced frustration because university lawyers could not quantify in detail what role race plays in Texas in determining which students are admitted. If black students made up only about 4 percent of the freshmen class, as would have happened exclusively with the top-10 percent rule, they faced “glaring racial isolation” on campus, he said. “And even if it falls short of that, it could at least bar those institutions from considering minority students’ educational talents – or lack of them – as an admissions factor”, according to Scotusblog.com.
Both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, have upheld UT-Austin’s plan, with the appeals court having done so again previous year after the Supreme Court ordered it three terms ago to apply “strict scrutiny”, the highest constitutional standard, to the plan. In those states, schools have sought workarounds, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank with offices in Washington and NY. Fisher’s attorney, Bert Rein, argued that the university could achieve the diversity it sought by weighting more heavily socio-economics in holistic review and omitting race altogether.
“It’s just vital to allow universities to select the students that they think together will make the most educationally interesting class for all the students who are there”, Sims said.
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He’s never voted to maintain an affirmative action plan but appeared less certain than the other conservatives of the court that he had all the info needed to pass judgment on the system in UT. It’s odd that Fisher’s lawyer was expected to describe other means by which the University potentially could have discriminated against his client. Writing for the court, Kennedy said universities must show that “available, workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice”.
