To Rule Once Again on Race in College Admissions Nytimes
Editorial
Affirmative Activity Survives, Again
Over the past four decades, the Supreme Courtroom has repeatedly addressed the question of whether public universities may consider an applicant's race in admissions decisions. Its reply, with some of import caveats, has always been yes.
It was wise to reaffirm this principle on Thursday, ruling 4 to 3 in favor of an admissions procedure at the Academy of Texas at Austin that weighs race as ane of many factors in filling some spots in its start-year class. The decision was the strongest reaffirmation of the constitutionality of a race-conscious arroyo in more than a decade, and should be the defining judgment on this issue.
The court has acknowledged over and over that universities have a compelling interest in achieving the social and educational benefits that menstruation from a racially and ethnically diverse educatee trunk. Merely that precedent has remained under constant assail. The current case was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was denied admission in 2008 and argued that the university violated the Constitution's equal protection clause past discriminating against white applicants.
The University of Texas uses two dissever methods to attain greater diversity: First, information technology automatically offers roughly iii-quarters of its spots to students who graduated in the acme 10 percent of every high school in the country. (This helps increase variety because so many Texas loftier schools are either overwhelmingly white or minority.) The remaining quarter is filled using a "holistic" process that considers various factors, including an applicant'due south leadership qualities, talents, socioeconomic status and race.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, rejected Ms. Fisher's arguments and said, "Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are fundamental to its identity and educational mission."
Only Justice Kennedy cautioned that a university's goals "must be sufficiently measurable to allow judicial scrutiny of the policies adopted to attain them," and that officials must continue to monitor and change those policies if necessary.
(Only seven justices participated in the ruling. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because of her prior interest in the litigation as solicitor general; Justice Antonin Scalia, who heard oral arguments in the example in December, died in Feb.)
The courtroom considered Texas' holistic approach once before, in 2013, but declined then to rule on its constitutionality. Instead, information technology sent the case back to the federal appeals court to examine more than closely the university'due south rationale for considering race.
That type of examination is exactly what the academy did, in providing data showing that race-neutral policies were inadequate in achieving a various student body, and that the holistic approach made a significant difference. In fact, as Justice Kennedy pointed out, the university has been adjusting its utilise of race in admissions for 20 years. It adult its current approach in direct response to a 2003 Supreme Courtroom ruling upholding the same process at the University of Michigan law school.
Some justices keep to pass up whatever consideration of race in college admissions. Justice Clarence Thomas dismissed the idea that students do good from a racially various learning environment as a "faddish theory." Justice Samuel Alito spent 50 pages — more than than twice the length of the majority stance — disputing every rationale offered by the university and its supporters. "This is affirmative action gone wild," he wrote, and argued that the peak x percentage plan produced plenty diverseness on its own.
But that plan, every bit Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissent from the 2013 conclusion, is itself race conscious, since it relies on the existing and farthermost segregation of Texas high schools. The holistic approach, on the other paw, considers race as a "cistron of a gene of a gene of a factor."
Some insist simplistically that America is already a colorblind society or, even more than perversely, that ending race-conscious policies would pb the way to such a society. Fortunately, Justice Kennedy, who has long been a strong skeptic of affirmative-action programs, rejected that view. His vote in the Fisher example assures that universities volition continue to have the correct to shape their student bodies in a way that amend reflects today'due south America.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/opinion/affirmative-action-survives-again.html
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