ICYMI:
Here is a news story I wrote based on anti-affirmative action activist Jennifer Gratz’s view of Monday’s Supreme Court decision:
By CHAD SELWESKI
chad.selweski@macombdaily.com
Monday, June 24,2013
Michigan’s top anti-affirmative action crusader called the Supreme Court’s decision Monday on the University of Texas admissions policies a modest victory that indicates the high court sees racial preference programs “on life support.”
In
contrast to legal analysts who said the court “punted” in its 7-1
ruling by sending the Texas case back to the lower federal courts, Jennifer Gratz
said the court was enforcing its standard of “strict scrutiny” of
college admissions policies that claim racial diversity of the student
body as their goal. The legal standards at issue in this case date back
to two 2003 affirmative action cases decided by the high court involving
the University of Michigan.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the
opinion released Monday that said diversity is a legitimate factor in
admissions only after a university concludes “that no workable
race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of
diversity.”
Gratz, who won the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court struck down U-M’s undergraduate
racial preferences, said the ruling in the Texas case shows that the
current makeup of the court “barely tolerates” racial factors in
admissions.
In the dual rulings of 2003, the court ruled in
Grutter vs. Bollinger that the U-M law school was correct in
establishing diversity as a compelling governmental interest, and
pursuing that goal was acceptable if no quotas or bonus points were
awarded to minorities in the admissions process.
At the same time,
in the Gratz case, they decided that the racial preferences that
blocked Gratz’s entrance as a U-M bachelor’s degree candidate were not
constitutional. At that time, Gratz said, U-M President Mary Sue Coleman
chose to praise the ruling in the law school case and ignore the high
court’s decision for undergrad students.
Three years later,
Michigan voters overwhelming approved the Michigan Civil Rights
Initiative, or MCRI, that ended all racial preferences in college
admissions and government contracting.
On Monday, Gratz said the praise
directed at the court’s ruling by the University of Texas-Austin
president was as “delusional” as the Coleman comments of a decade
earlier.
“I don’t think we can expect the court to deliver a bold
ruling on this issue when the attorneys before the court aren’t making
bold demands,” said Gratz, now a California resident, who has promoted
anti-affirmative action campaigns in numerous states. “This … decision
shows that these policies are on life support.”
Gratz, who has
formed a nonprofit foundation that fights against race-based policies,
hopes for a bold decision in October when the Supreme Court takes up a
federal appeals court decision against MCRI that was issued last
November.
In the current case, the justices said the federal
appeals court in New Orleans did not apply the highest level of judicial
scrutiny when it upheld the Texas plan, which uses race as one among
many factors in admitting about a quarter of the university’s incoming
freshmen. The school gives the bulk of the slots to outgoing Texas high
school seniors who ranked in the top 10 percent of their graduating
class, without regard to race.
The high court ordered the appeals
court to take another look at the case of Abigail Fisher, a white Texan
who was not offered a spot at the university’s flagship Austin campus in
2008.
Kennedy said that the lower courts must determine that the
use of race is necessary to achieve the educational benefits of
diversity, the Supreme Court’s standard for affirmative action in
education since 1978.
“As the court said in Grutter (vs.
Bollinger), it remains at all times the university’s obligation to
demonstrate, and the judiciary’s obligation to determine, that
admissions processes ‘ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an
individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity
the defining feature of his or her application,’” Kennedy said.
University
of Texas president Bill Powers said the school plans no immediate
changes in its admissions policies as a result of Monday’s ruling and
will continue to defend them in the courts.
“We remain committed
to assembling a student body at the University of Texas at Austin that
provides the educational benefits of diversity on campus while
respecting the rights of all students and acting within the
constitutional framework established by the court,” Powers said.
But
Edward Blum, who helped engineer Fisher’s challenge, said it is
unlikely that the Texas plan and many other college plans can long
survive.
“The Supreme Court has established exceptionally high
hurdles for the University of Texas and other universities and colleges
to overcome if they intend to continue using race preferences in their
admissions policies,” said Blum, director of The Project on Fair
Representation in Alexandria, Va.
AP contributed to this report.
