Supreme Court Upholds University Of Texas’ Affirmative Action Program

While opponents of such policies consider it reverse racism (which, let’s be real, doesn’t exist), the Court declared that the college’s admission process complied with previous rulings that allow schools to be conscious of race in order to foster diverse campuses.

The 4-3 Supreme Court decision means the university’s admissions policy can remain.

The case had threatened the use of racial preferences not only at the University of Texas-Austin but across the nation, since the court’s ruling could have cast doubt on most affirmative action policies.

In a 4-3 vote, the justices upheld the judgment of the court of appeals, which ruled in favor of allowing the university to use race as a factor in its admissions process.

She said today’s ruling gives this “holistic” approach to admissions a green light as long as race is only one of various factors. High school seniors in Texas who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are granted admission to any state university, and Fisher did not make that cut.

UW-Madison officials said in a statement Thursday that their analysis of the decision found that the university’s admissions practices “are consistent with the court’s ruling”.

One of the dissenting voices on the court, Justice Samuel Alito said “this is affirmative action gone wild” and that the university “relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions”.

Scalia added at the time that most of the black scientists in this country “don’t come from schools like the University of Texas”. Fisher and her lawyers sued on the grounds that Fisher’s application denial was racially based and thus a “violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause”, according to International Business Times. However, he also said that the university must continually reevaluate its policy in accordance with the times.

The case was decided by only seven justices because of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February and the recusal of Justice Elena Kagan, who was involved in the case as solicitor general.

The case began in 2008 after Fisher was denied admission.

“Though a college must continually reassess its need for race-conscious review, here that assessment appears to have been done with care, and a reasonable determination was made that the university had not yet attained its goals”, Kennedy wrote. “We follow the law so any student that graduates in the top ten percent of their graduating class has automatic admission at Texas Tech”, Hansard said. A lower court took another look and stood by its earlier decision, and the case ended up back before the justices, who heard oral arguments December 9, 2015.

The university evaluates applicants against two scales, an Academic Index (AI) which measures grades and test scores, and a Personal Achievement Index (PAI) which evaluates extracurricular activities, socioeconomic factors, and race. She ultimately graduated from Louisiana State University but had continued to press her case with the aid of the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative legal group.