‘Stay Mad Abby’: Black College Graduates Ridicule SCOTUS Affirmative-Action Case

“They come from lesser schools where they not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them”. Agate said, ” I think it is important that they address affirmative action.

He said little during Wednesday’s oral argument for the University of Texas case until Gregory Garre, the university’s lawyer, was wrapping up his comments. The Supreme Court, in the past, had decided that the use of race as one factor in a “holistic review” of an applicant was acceptable.

Stuart Taylor, the co-author of Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, relied on this theory during a debate on affirmative action hosted by Intelligence Squared last week. Sander, who co-authored the court brief with legal writer Stuart Taylor, is a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In fact, students do better at more selective institutions, the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce said Thursday in response to Scalia’s remarks.

Alito added that the top-10 program helped underprivileged students in a way the race-conscious admissions did not. An outside investigation by Kroll, Inc. revealed that university officials regularly overrode the “holistic review” to allow politically connected individuals, such as state legislators and members of the university’s Board of Regents, to get family members and other friends admitted. Justice Clarence Thomas, an affirmative action opponent who has said he felt stigmatized by racial preferences, was customarily silent during the arguments. “Whatever it is, I don’t think the goal of affirmative action is for everyone to have average grades”.

Scalia’s opinion that black students are somehow less capable of succeeding in a rigorous schooling environment is completely baseless and offensive.

“Setting aside the damage wreaked upon the self-confidence of these overmatched students, there is no evidence that they learn more at the university than they would have learned at other schools for which they were better prepared”.

“Secondly, how is it improving diversity in your student body?” Under that policy – which now accounts for about 75 percent of all admissions to the Austin campus – about one-third were Latino or African-American in recent years.

Scalia argued that the court’s June 2008 decision to grant terrorism suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay the right to challenge it in USA courts would make the US more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Abigail Fisher, who is white, claims that the University of Texas treated her unfairly when she missed out on a place at the university, because they were allocating places to minority students through an affirmative action policy, and through a programme to accept the top 10 per cent of all students. For the remaining three-quarters, the school has what is called the Top 10 Percent policy, which does not take race into account and guarantees admission for the state’s most well rated high school students. “We’re just arguing the same case”, Kennedy said.