![]() ![]() ![]() Most famously, Roberts wrote in a busing case 15 years ago, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” So when Waxman likened the occasional cases where race is determinative to the times when the orchestra needs an oboe player, Roberts wryly noted, “We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players. And that majority includes the otherwise mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been firmly opposed to government-sponsored racial spoils in a variety of contexts - including the most recent collegiate affirmative action case, Fisher v. Perhaps that’s why a majority of justices were skeptical of the arguments for maintaining racial preferences, or “race-conscious admissions” as the schools’ advocates call them. That’s sadly ironic, because Powell had credited Harvard as a model admissions program without recognizing that its “holistic” approach originated as a way to restrict the number of Jewish students. Put another way, as Harvard’s lawyer Seth Waxman - who was solicitor general in the Clinton administration - conceded, 45% of Blacks and Hispanics got into Harvard due to racial preferences.Īt the same time, the litigation has shown that the number of Asian Americans at Harvard (and other elite schools) has stayed relatively constant even as their proportion of qualified applicants has exploded in recent decades. ![]() For example, at any given level of academic merit, the acceptance rate for African American applicants is many times greater than for whites and especially Asian Americans. The group sued the oldest private and public universities in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, respectively, presenting compelling evidence that these schools use racial preferences to a far greater extent than Bakke and Grutter would allow. But in two cases brought by a civil rights organization called Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court has a chance to end that practice. Well, here we are two decades later, and the trend lines aren’t looking good for an organic sunsetting of the evaluation of higher education applicants by the color of their skin. The swing vote in those cases, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, suggested that “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Bollinger, regarding Michigan’s undergraduate college). Bollinger, regarding the University of Michigan Law School) while rejecting a mechanical system that assigned race a fixed number of points (Gratz v. How Asian Americans got to the center of the Supreme Court affirmative action caseĪ quarter-century later, the court by a 5-4 majority endorsed that diversity rationale as part of a holistic race-conscious admissions program (Grutter v.How do we make the playing field a little more fair? Powell, meanwhile, voted to invalidate the racial quotas at UC-Davis’ medical school, but to allow the use of race as one of many factors to advance what he considered to be a compelling governmental interest in educational diversity. Four justices would have allowed race-based admissions decisions to remedy past prejudice, while four others would have outlawed its consideration altogether. Bakke the next 1970s precedent on the chopping block?īakke is the 1978 case in which one justice, Lewis Powell, planted the seed for the entire diversity conceit that now seems to be a bigger priority in higher education than the pursuit for truth, civil discourse and the transmission of knowledge. Kurtzman - which set a mushy test for finding an unconstitutional establishment of religion - is Regents of the University of California v. Wade and recognized the “abandonment” of Lemon v. Given that the court last term overturned Roe v. ![]() The highest-profile case on this term’s Supreme Court docket is undoubtedly the challenge to the use of racial preferences in university admissions, in which the court heard five hours of argument last week. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |