Texas affirmative action plan survives Supreme Court review

The court’s three more-conservative justices dissented, and Justice Samuel Alito read portions of his 51-page dissent, more than twice as long as Kennedy’s opinion, from the bench.

The Court’s affirmance of the University’s admissions policy today does not necessarily mean the University may rely on that same policy without refinement.

“It makes me proud, it makes me feel there is an effort to support diversity in the university”, said Carter 21, of Houston, Texas zone chair of the National Society of Black Engineers.

Clarence Thomas reaffirmed in his own dissent his belief that the Constitution bars any use of race in university admissions.

With the death of Scalia in February and with Justice Elena Kagan sitting out the case because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department, just seven justices participated in the decision. The Court was clear that affirmative action in higher education could continue, as long as its goals are clear and measurable. He was criticized for suggesting at arguments in December that some black students would benefit from being at a “slower-track school”, instead of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin. The University of MI is sued by white students, including Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, who claim the undergraduate and law school affirmative action policies using race and/or gender as a factor in admissions is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The state of Texas replaced its affirmative action plan with a percentage plan that guarantees the top 10% of high-school graduates a spot in any state university in Texas.

Based on those principles, the Court ruled that Fisher, “has not shown by a preponderance of the evidence that she was denied equal treatment at the time her application was rejected”.

Fisher did not qualify for the so-called 10 percent plan, which is how about 75 percent of students are admitted.

Fischer, now 26, attended Louisiana State University and graduated in 2012.

Edward Blum, a conservative activist who engineered Fisher’s challenge, said that racial classifications and preferences are among the most polarizing policies in America today.

Justice Kennedy wrote that a university ought to be able to decide what “intangible qualities” it needs, adding, “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission”.

July 15, 2014 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upholds the use of race by the University of Texas as a factor in undergraduate admissions to promote diversity on campus. “I hope that the nation will one day move beyond affirmative action”.

Separate legal challenges have been filed to affirmative action plans at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. “The challengers have an uphill battle”. Obama went on in his speech to celebrate the Supreme Court decision, which allows colleges to factor in students’ socioeconomic background and race when making admissions decisions.

In 2014, the justices ruled 6-2 that MI voters had the right to change their state constitution in 2006 to prohibit public colleges and universities from taking account of race in admissions decisions.

They remanded the case for more consideration, but the lower courts reached the same conclusion again, landing the case back before the justices.

They defended their admissions program arguing that it looked at each applicant as a whole person and considered race as only one factor among many in evaluating a student. Because many high schools are made up overwhelmingly of Hispanic or African-American students, that assures a certain amount of diversity in the freshman class.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, anxious that the ruling will not encourage schools to seek other measures of promoting diversity in their student populations.