WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court today issued its long-awaited ruling on affirmative action — but didn’t offer a definitive opinion on whether colleges may consider the use of race in admissions.
Ruling 7-1, the court found that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit erred in not applying “strict scrutiny” to the policies of the University of Texas at Austin. The case is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which Abigail Fisher, a white woman rejected for admission by the university, said that her rights were violated by UT-Austin’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. Fisher’s lawyers argued that the University of Texas need not consider race because it has found another way to assure diversity in the student body.
The decision said that “good faith” by the university would not be enough to justify the consideration of race. But the decision — by Justice Anthony Kennedy — does not offer an opinion on whether the University of Texas can produce sufficient evidence. Rather, it faults the appeals court for not reviewing that question using the high bar of “strict scrutiny” for the consideration of race.
The Supreme Court did not — as some thought it might — reverse past decisions that allowed colleges to consider race. In fact, the conclusion of the decision states that colleges must meet the requirements previously given by the court to justify the use of race. Quoting from the landmark 1978 Bakke decision, today’s ruling says: “In order for judicial review to be meaningful, a university must make a showing that its plan is narrowly tailored to achieve the only interest that this Court has approved in this context: the benefits of a student body diversity that ‘encompasses a . . . broa[d] array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element.'”
It is likely that today’s ruling could mean that — after another round at the Fifth Circuit — the case could return to the Supreme Court.
Moments after the decision was handed down, Michael Olivas, an expert on higher education law (and a defender of affirmative action) e-mailed: “Affirmative action lives on by a thread, and demography will start to assert itself.” Olivas is director of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston and author of Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts (Johns Hopkins University Press).
The Record So Far
This website, maintained by the University of Texas at Austin, includes briefs and prior rulings in the case ofFisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which Abigail Fisher, a white woman rejected for admission by the university, said that her rights were violated by UT-Austin’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
Fisher’s argument was that past Supreme Court decisions have allowed colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity only if diversity could not be achieved in race-neutral ways, so the University of Texas had no legal need to consider race. The university in turn said that the percent plan provided it with only a limited level of diversity and that it had the right to take additional measures to assure a greater level of diversity. Most major college associations backed the University of Texas, as did many civil rights organizations. Asian-American groups split on the case. – Inside Higher Ed. Read the full article here.
The controversial issue of affirmative action will be decided this month by the US Supreme Court and will set a precedent in how colleges and universities accept students. It is not expected to have significant impact on the current admissions policies of Utah’s colleges and universities, however.
The case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which has been on a legal track toward the top court since 2008, centers on a woman who claims she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin despite being equally or more qualified than minority students who were admitted under the university’s policy of considering family circumstance and race in its application process.
University officials claim Abigail Fisher, a white student from the Houston area with a 3.59 grade-point average, the plaintiff in the case, was not qualified to attend the school and said her race was not the reason she was not accepted into the school. Officials at the school also argued that schools have the right to assemble a diverse student body, a position upheld by the court in a 2003 case (Grutter v. Bollinger) focused on affirmative action admissions decisions at the University of Michigan.
Prior to reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, a district court in 2009 ruled in favor of the University of Texas at Austin. The case was then appealed to a three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of the university.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself from hearing the case. Five of the remaining eight judges would need to rule against the university’s policy, as a tie would uphold the lower courts’ decisions. A decision is expected by the end of June, possibly as early as Monday.
A ruling in favor of Fisher would give legal precedent to individuals challenging affirmative action admission policies, which are sometimes cited as perpetuating racial divisions, and the dispute has been among the key cases the court is ruling on this month.
Utah’s standards
Pamela Silberman, spokeswoman for the Utah System of Higher Education, said the court’s decision, while impactful nationally and precedent-setting, will have little immediate impact either way on Utah’s public colleges and universities. It could certainly impact Utah students seeking education out of state, particularly in hard-to-get-into programs making use of affirmative action policies.
Of the eight schools in the Utah public system, five are open enrollment, meaning all applicants are accepted based on a basic entrance requirement. The remaining three schools — the University of Utah, Utah State University and Southern Utah University — determine enrollment by a minimum index score combining high school grade-point averages and ACT or SAT exam scores.
“There’s really not any sort of consideration of race or ethnicity or other demographic standards there,” Silberman said. “It’s going to have almost no impact in the state of Utah because there hasn’t been a strong history of those kinds of policies anyway.”
Because Utah’s schools determine admission based on academic criteria, it is not likely that a decision against the University of Texas would lead to Utah students challenging their denied admission applications, she said.
“I think that if the criteria for entrance are really clear, then you’re going to avoid that,” Silberman said. “We want all students to be prepared so they can meet those criteria, and I think that’s the focus we have.”
The U. recently transitioned to a holistic application process, which considers extracurricular factors like creative endeavors and community service in addition to GPA and test scores.
Octavio Villalpando, associate vice president for equity and diversity at the U., said the policy is still being fine-tuned, but because it does not give special consideration to race or demographics, he does not foresee it running into conflict with the court’s decision on Fisher.
Villalpando said U. officials have studied the effects of anti-affirmative action laws in other states to avoid conflict.
“We don’t anticipate any significant changes here at the campus,” he said. “Looking across the country in states where a version of this law passed, the flagship campuses didn’t have to change much of their admissions process.”
Of the 33,291 students enrolled at the University of Utah in the fall of 2012, about 70 percent were white, 7 percent were Hispanic and 4 percent were Asian, according to data from the Utah System of Higher Education. Statewide, 14 percent of public college and university students in Utah were minority students in 2012.
Villalpando said the University of Utah, as well as other institutions in the Utah System of Higher Education, have focused on collaborating with K-12 education to prepare students for college, rather than implementing admissions policies to address perceived racial imbalances.
He also said the relatively recent diversification of Utah’s student body has allowed educators to observe the best practices of areas in the country with larger minority populations.
“I think the fact that Utah is just now beginning to see this large demographic change is really helping higher ed in many ways,” Villalpando said. “It’s allowing us to learn from other strategies states have adopted.”
Political action
But the controversy surrounding affirmative action is not unknown to the state. In 2010, Utah lawmakers considered a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting affirmative action in state agencies and higher education.
The pre-emptive resolution, sponsored by Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfied, stated that public entities could not “grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”
The resolution received a favorable recommendation during its House committee hearing but was moved by the House Rules Committee, where it languished until the session expired without coming up for a vote.
David Jones, education division chief for the Utah Attorney General’s Office, said affirmative action is not a pervasive issue in Utah’s courts. Historically, the number of cases on the issue has been minimal, Jones said, and he does not expect the Supreme Court’s decision on Fisher v. University of Texas to change that.
He also agreed with Silberman and Villalpando’s assessment that the index score admission process of Utah’s schools would be largely unaffected by the outcome of the case.
“The ACT scores and the grade-point averages aren’t going to be affected by the Supreme Court decision,” Jones said. – Salt Lake City, Deseret News
The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments Wednesday on a case that could affect how universities across the United States consider race in their admissions.
The case, one of the most high-profile of the court’s agenda this year, pits Abigail Fisher, a white woman, against the University of Texas at Austin, which denied her admission.
Fisher accuses the university of discriminating against her because of her skin color, violating her constitutional rights.
“I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong,” she proclaimed in an interview posted on YouTube.
Fisher was not among the top 10 percent of Texas high school graduates — who are all guaranteed spots at the state university and who make up the majority of students there.
But she argues she was denied admission in favor of other applicants with lower test scores and grades, who were accepted on the basis of racial preference for under-represented minorities.
The plaintiff claimed in her court filing she “suffered an injury that falls squarely within the language and spirit of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.”
She believes that the university’s admission program “favors two groups, African-Americans and Hispanics, in one of the most ethnically diverse states in the United States.”
Fisher, who ultimately earned her financial analysis degree in neighboring Louisiana, is appealing her case to the nation’s highest court after failing in the lower courts.
The Supreme Court last took up this controversial issue in 2003, reaffirming a 1978 decision that affirmative action’s race-based quotas did not violate the constitution.
The policy, aimed at correcting historic imbalances in education by favoring US minorities in public university admissions and other circumstances, has come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of a growing minority population.
Now — more than 60 years after the high court forced the University of Texas to enroll the first African-American ever in its law school — the school is urging the court to reconfirm that “racial diversity is a legitimate goal” in higher education, according to law professor David Cole.
The university is backed by more than 70 motions from universities, human rights groups and businesses — as well as by the US government — all attesting the court’s decision will have a far-reaching impact.
“There’s a lot at stake and plenty of reasons to be concerned,” stressed Alan Morrison of The George Washington University Law School. He called the affirmative action decision “crucial,” saying it would be felt at all US universities, both public and private.
But it is not clear the court will rule as it did nearly a decade ago.
Since the last ruling on affirmative action, the makeup of the high court has changed, turning it into “the most conservative in a lifetime,” noted Georgetown Law professor Louis Seidman.
What’s more, Elena Kagan, generally considered one of the court’s more liberal judges, has recused herself, after having come down in favor of affirmative action while serving in her previous post as Solicitor General under Obama.
The Supreme Court will give its decision in 2013, after the presidential election. President Obama’s challenger, Republican Mitt Romney, has said he is opposed to the quotas in public institutions.-AFP
Nine years after the Supreme Court said colleges and universities can use race in their quest for diverse student bodies, the justices have put this divisive social issue back on their agenda in the middle of a presidential election campaign.
Nine years is a blink of the eye on a court where justices can look back two centuries for legal precedents. But with an ascendant conservative majority, the high court in arguments Wednesday will weigh whether to limit or even rule out taking race into account in college admissions.
The justices will be looking at the University of Texas program that is used to help fill the last quarter or so of its incoming freshman classes. Race is one of many factors considered by admissions officers. The rest of the roughly 7,100 freshman spots automatically go to Texans who graduated in the top 8 percent of their high school classes.
A white Texan, Abigail Fisher, sued the university after she was denied a spot in 2008.
The simplest explanation for why affirmative action is back on the court’s calendar so soon after its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger is that the author of that opinion, Sandra Day O’Connor, has retired. Her successor, Justice Samuel Alito, has been highly skeptical of any use of racial preference.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, a dissenter in the 2003 decision, probably holds the deciding vote, and he, too, has never voted in favor of racial preference.
As a result, said Supreme Court lawyer Thomas Goldstein, “No matter what the court does, it is quite likely that the UT program is going to be in big trouble.”
The challenge to the Texas plan has gained traction in part because the university has produced significant diversity by automatically offering about three-quarters of its spots to graduates in the top 10 percent of their Texas high schools, under a 1990s state law signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush. The admissions program has been changed so that now only the top 8 percent gain automatic admission.
More than eight in ten African-American and Latino students who enrolled at the flagship campus in Austin last year were automatically admitted, according to university statistics. Both sides acknowledge that the use of race is present.
In all, black and Hispanic students made up more than a quarter of the incoming freshmen class. White students constituted less than half the entering class when students with Asian backgrounds and other minorites were added in.
“For decades, the defense of racial preferences was, `We’d love to find a way to get diversity without using race, but it’s just not possible. There’s just no other way.’ And Texas found another way,” said Richard Kahlenburg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and prominent advocate of class-based affirmative action.
The university says the extra measure of diversity it gets from the slots outside automatic admission is crucial because too many of its classrooms have only token minority representation, at best. At the same time, Texas argues that race is one of many factors considered and that it “is impossible to tell whether an applicant’s race was a tipping factor.”
The Obama administration, 57 of the Fortune 100 companies and large numbers of public and private colleges that could be affected by the outcome are backing the Texas program. Among the benefits of affirmative action, the administration argues, is that it creates a pipeline for a diverse officer corps that it called “essential to the military’s operational readiness.” In 2003, the court cited the importance of a similar message from military leaders.
But lawyers for Fisher, of Sugar Land, Texas, said the race-blind method under which the university automatically admits most of its students has been successful. They say Fisher, who has since graduated from Louisiana State University, was excluded because of her race, and they point to a handful of African-American and Latino students who were admitted with lower scores than hers.
“If any state action should respect racial equality, it is university admission,” Fisher’s lawyers said in their written submission to the court.
The university says that a fuller picture of the process shows that white students with lower scores also were admitted, while many more minority students with higher scores than Fisher also were not offered admission.
The case also raises several contentious side issues, including whether affirmative-action programs hurt the very people they are supposed to be helping. A new book by law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor argues that “large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively, even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.”
Their book, “Mismatch,” says these students are set up to fail, getting lower grades and dropping out more often than white students with similar backgrounds.
Taylor and Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, point to statistics in California to support their argument. After voters changed the state constitution to outlaw racial preferences, UCLA saw significant declines in enrollment by black and Hispanic students.
But the number of African-American and Latino graduates was unchanged for the five classes after the ban when compared to the five years before the change in state law, they said.
The dozens of legal briefs in the Texas case also highlight a debate over whether racial preference programs actually limit the number of students from Asian backgrounds, who are disproportionately represented in student bodies relative to their share of the population.
The university says Asian-American enrollment has increased under the policy that is being challenged. The numbers would be even higher if Texas stopped factoring in race, Fisher and others say. – AP
AUSTIN, Texas — Walking across the South Mall, or scanning the football stadium’s 100,000 seats on game day, University of Texas admissions Director Kedra Ishop sees how much has changed since the 1990s, when she was a black student at what was an inordinately white school.
This giant flagship campus — once so slow to integrate — is now awash in color, among the most diverse in the country. The student body, like Texas, is majority-minority.
At the dining hall, minority students no longer cluster together. Actually, it’s more a high-end food court now, and many tables are racial mosaics — white, black, Latino, Asian.
So is this the “critical mass” of minority students that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly endorsed in 2003 as an educational goal important enough to allow colleges to factor the race of applicants into admissions decisions?
That question will be front and center Wednesday when a more conservative Supreme Court revisits affirmative action for the first time since that landmark case nine years ago involving the University of Michigan.
Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas because of race preference
This time, it’s Texas defending the use of race in admissions, fighting a discrimination lawsuit from Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant. As it happens, the court’s decision will affect relatively few students at Texas, which admits most students through a system that doesn’t factor in race.
But a broad ruling rolling back affirmative action could be an earthquake at other campuses across the country that make more use of race, potentially changing the educational trajectories of millions of students.
For all the wrenching debates about opportunity and fairness the affirmative action debate evokes, the outcome will likely come down to how the current justices fill out the answer to questions they began to answer in 2003: What is critical mass, and how far can a university go to achieve it?
Generally, it’s the point where there’s enough diversity on campus to provide a rich educational environment. But beyond that, it’s a concept critics call maddeningly vague and supporters necessarily so. Is it enough for the student body to be diverse overall, or must all groups be well represented? What if there’s diversity in the student body, but not in most individual classrooms?
Texas will swallow its pride and argue that for all its progress, it’s still short of critical mass. Under state law, most UT students are admitted automatically based on their high school GPA, with race playing no role. But for the smaller remainder of its class where it enjoys more leeway, Texas argues it should be able to use race as a factor.
The reason: Some groups, especially blacks, remain underrepresented compared to Texas’ population. And minority students clump together academically, leaving most classes with no more than a single black or Latino voice.
But the university won’t give a target number, something the court would likely call an unconstitutional quota.
“There’s never been a discussion of ‘this is the target, this is what it looks like, this is where we’re trying to go,'” Ishop said. “We know what it doesn’t look like. And we know without the ability to examine students in their completeness that we can get back there very quickly.”
Such arguments sound mushy to UT’s opponents, who call the school’s goals for critical mass a quota in disguise. They say the university has gone too far using race in admissions, abusing the discretion the court granted colleges to define critical mass for themselves.
“It is a squishy concept that’s being manipulated,” said Terence Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which argued against affirmative action in the Michigan case and has filed a brief against Texas in the current one. “It’s just sort of diversity for its own sake,” he added, “with no end and no limit.”
History’s role
History isn’t central to the legal issues in the affirmative action debate, but it’s an issue at UT-Austin. The football team didn’t integrate until 1970, and even as minority enrollment expanded, UT little resembled increasingly diverse Texas, leaving minority students feeling isolated.
“It was very seldom three or more were gathered,” said Machree Gibson, who arrived on campus in 1978, earned two degrees and later became the first black female president of the Texas Exes, the university’s powerful alumni group. “We used to joke, ‘Three in a room, we’re a gang.'”
Today, even a short drive through campus leaves Gibson amazed how things have changed.
But UT still doesn’t look like Texas. Of its 52,000 students, 5 percent are black (compared to 12 percent of the state population). Latinos make up 18 percent at UT (38 percent statewide) and Asians 15 percent (4 percent statewide).
Greek life and off-campus housing for upperclassmen remain mostly segregated — the West Campus neighborhood is mostly white, Riverside more black and Latino, and the Far West neighborhood Asian, limiting interactions. Academically, many departments have few non-white faces. Senior Kristin Thompson says she’s one of just two black female civil engineers in her class, despite aggressive recruiting. She’s found her community outside class, but her academic experience has been lonely.
“At UT we talk about what starts here changes the world, but I think we’re doing a disservice to students by not preparing them for a world that doesn’t have these demographics,” she said.
In the Michigan case nine years ago, psychologists, educators and, most influentially, the military flooded the court with briefs arguing a diverse learning environment helped prepare students —- whites and minorities —- for jobs and citizenship. Many also argued it takes a critical mass of minorities
How many? There was no magic number. But enough for minorities not to feel isolated in the classroom, and non-minorities to realize minorities’ views weren’t one-size-fits-all.
Those arguments persuaded Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s key swing vote. In her majority opinion in the 5-4 case, she gave Michigan and other universities leeway to define critical mass in terms of their own educational goals, and to use race as a plus-factor in admissions to get there (O’Connor has since been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, a strong affirmative action skeptic).
In Texas, a 1996 federal appeals court ruling had prohibited UT from using race in admissions, and black enrollment had plummeted. A year later, the Texas Legislature passed a “Top 10 percent” law, guaranteeing UT admission to any student at the top of his or her Texas high school.
The law was race-neutral, but it boosted the number of minorities — by some measures, close to current figures. To UT’s opponents, that proves UT can reach ample diversity — even “critical mass” — without resorting to racial preferences.
But UT says the diversity produced by the 10 percent law was stilted. Ninety percent of smaller classes had one or zero blacks, and 43 percent no more than one Latino. A student survey found minorities felt isolated, and a majority of all students felt there weren’t enough minorities for “the full benefits of diversity to occur.”
The university wanted leeway to recruit more minorities with different interests, to ensure fields such as geosciences, architecture and Thompson’s civil engineering had a critical mass, not just the campus overall.
So for the relatively small portion of its class — currently about one-quarter — not admitted automatically by their high school performance, UT designed a system to mimic what the court had allowed in the Michigan case. In that second system UT emphasizes race is a small factor, among many “special circumstances” that may be considered. It’s also not automatic, and could benefit any applicant, even a white one in some cases.
Both sides acknowledge the effect of race in UT’s system is modest (Fisher contends race is decisive for just 33 additional minority enrollees per year). To UT, that shows race is used along the limited lines the court has allowed. To Fisher, it shows that UT doesn’t need to use race at all.
On campus, critical mass evokes a range of responses. Jesse Hernandez, a senior who attended a virtually all-Latino high school in the Rio Grande Valley, says its benefits include generating a vibrant multicultural social life. Latino cultural groups, and fraternities and sororities, help minorities find a community at a huge school, but also benefit the broader student body by sharing their culture on campus.
Thompson, the civil engineering student, says she’ll recognize critical mass “when there are less racial incidents on campus, when students feel like they can go anywhere on campus and feel welcome, can go anywhere and speak their mind and not feel like they’re going to be chastised for it, ridiculed for it, looked at crazy,” she said. She loves UT, but says it’s not there yet.
“To me that’s the end goal: a welcoming campus, not a quantity of students.”
Senior Jordan Grenadier’s experience has been different.
“I don’t ever feel like I walk on campus or walk into a classroom and only see one particular type of people,” said Grenadier, who leads the campus chapter of the group Young Conservatives of Texas. On West Mall, where student groups set up tables, “it’s so diverse whenever you walk down there, it’s almost hard to imagine the university saying ‘that’s not good enough.'”
The question isn’t “whether or not (diversity) is important,” she said. “It’s, ‘Is it justified? Can someone who is qualified to attend the university not get accepted because someone who is maybe not as qualified gets in because of racial preferences?'”
UT-Austin’s president, Bill Powers, who agrees critical mass is the “central question” in the case, says UT isn’t just saying “we’ll know it when we see it.” He says “analytics,” such as classroom diversity surveys, will show UT if it’s successfully preparing students to live and work in a diverse world.
“Right now, African-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented,” Powers said in an interview in his library-like office on campus. “We’ll reach a critical mass when you can (see it) both in the campus atmosphere and the milieu in individual classes. Not 100 percent, but where a sufficient number of individual classes bring this cross-cultural environment.”
“It really is going to hinge on what lens the court looks at the campus through,” said Gerald Torres, who says diversity is key to meaningful conversations about environmental justice in his law school courses. “Is it the lens of the classroom or is it the lens of the campus? If it’s the lens of the campus, then (the court) is likely to say the percentage increase of students of color under the 10 percent plan is sufficient. If they look at the classroom, I think they’ll say it’s not.”
Attorneys for Fisher, who sued Texas after she was denied admission to UT-Austin in 2008, contend that by even referencing the state’s demographics in its critical mass goals, UT is acknowledging a quota. They also argue the Supreme Court never intended to make diversity in every classroom the benchmark for critical mass.
“As long as you have a critical mass in the school as a whole, you’re going to bump into people in the dorms, in the all-night bull sessions,” Pell said. “That’s what’s going to give you the benefits of diversity. Now Texas says that’s not good enough, you have to have diversity in every corner of the university, in every classroom, every major.” – Associated Press
With the U.S. Supreme Court about to hear arguments in the Fisher v. University of Texas case that could decide the fate of affirmative action in admissions, a research war has broken out. Defenders and critics of the consideration of race are releasing new studies (some of which were submitted in briefs to the court) on the impact of affirmative action.
Several studies presented Friday at the Brookings Institution suggested that eliminating the consideration of race would not have as dramatic an effect on minority students as some believe, and that the beneficiaries of affirmative action may in fact achieve less academic success than they would otherwise. The studies were criticized by some present for being one-sided.
Yield Rates After a Ban
One of the studies explored the impact on the yield rate — the proportion of admitted students who enroll — of black, Latino and Native American students to the University of California after the state barred the consideration of race in admissions. Minority enrollments fell after voters adopted the ban, in part because greater proportions of white and Asian applicants, on average, have the academic and other credentials required for admission.
But the paper focused on a subset of minority students: those who gained admission after the ban on affirmative action. Many observers at the time predicted that these students would be less likely to enroll, as they would perceive the system to be hostile, and news articles quoted minority students to this effect.
But a paper by Kate Antonovics, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, and Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that the ban on affirmative action didn’t produce “chilling effects,” but actually produced “warming effects” on the likelihood of minority students’ accepting offers of admission.
The paper examined the yield rates by students in the three years after Proposition 209 (the ban) took effect. Across the system, the yield rate increased by about 10 percent. The increase was the greatest at Berkeley and UCLA. At Berkeley, the pre-Proposition 209 yield rate for underrepresented minority groups was 37.9 percent, and that increased by 5.7 percentage points after affirmative action considerations were barred from the admissions process. At UCLA, a 38.8 percent yield rate increased by 3.9 percentage points.
Antonovics, who presented the paper, said that the findings were important. She said that critics of affirmative action might expect (and accept) that the end of the consideration of race would lead to an overall decline in minority enrollment rates, but that there would be “a layer of concern” if some of that drop could be attributed to students who met race-neutral admissions standards opting not to enroll. She said that she and Sander expected to find this “chilling effect,” and were surprised to find “no evidence for it” and instead see evidence showing the opposite impact.
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‘Mismatch’ Theory
The fear Antonovics expressed is that minority students might not be enrolling at highly competitive institutions at which they would be a good academic match. Another kind of “mismatch” has also been the focus of much research on affirmative action in recent years — and that idea (hotly debated) is that minority students who are admitted to better institutions because of affirmative action may end up with lower academic achievement as a result. (Sander, who helped organize the Brookings program, has been a leading proponent of the idea.)
On Friday, Doug Williams, chair of economics at the University of the South, presented a paper arguing that law schools provide solid evidence for the existence of mismatch. He said that because of the requirement that lawyers pass a bar exam, there is an independent measure of successful learning in law school. Because some minority students with similar academic credentials (judged by undergraduate grads and LSAT scores) enroll at more or less competitive law schools, he said it is possible to see whether there is a mismatch.
There has long been a gap between black and white law graduates on bar passage rates, he noted. Currently, about 97 percent of white law school graduates pass the bar, with 92 percent passing on the first try. For black law graduates, the figures are 78 and 61 percent, respectively. But Williams said that these gaps are partly explained by the differing academic credentials of black and white law students, and so by themselves don’t back mismatch theory.
But in comparing minority law graduates of comparable academic preparation who enroll in more or less competitive law schools, Williams said that those (from among those with comparable academic credentials) who enroll in the bottom two tiers of law schools pass the bar at a rate that is 14 percentage points higher than that of those who enroll at the top law schools. And he said that suggested a statistically significant mismatch.
Williams said that he would like more detailed information about law students — including the law schools that they apply to and are admitted to — but based on the information he does have, he said that he had “strong evidence” to back mismatch.
Sander said that panelists at the program were “ideologically diverse” and that there was no attempt to include only scholars of one point of view.
The debate will likely continue Thursday when a coalition of social science groups — the American Educational Research Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Statistical Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the Law and Society Association and the Linguistic Society of America — hold a briefing on research those organizations cited in their brief to the Supreme Court encouraging the justices to uphold the legality of the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions.
WASHINGTON — Last month the Obama administration threw its support behind the University of Texas’ use of race as a standard in its admissions policies, asking the Supreme Court not to interfere with the consideration of racial preferences in college admissions.
Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the Univerity of Texas in 2008 on the basis that she was white, has filed suit before the US Supreme Court in a bid to overturn affirmative action at the university level. In her submission before the court, she argues that the university has imposed a racial quota system that excluded her for the sake of admitting students of lesser ability. As a result, her civil and constitutional rights were violated.
Arguments in the case will start on October 10, not long before the US presidential election and are bound to attract national attention in America, as well as all other countries where affirmative action and racial quotas are being applied, such as South Africa.
According to a recent article in Forbes magazine, dozens of groups have weighed in as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments over the constitutionality of affirmative action.
Everyone from professors (one group calls itself the “Empirical Scholars,” another, the “Texas Association of Scholars”) to think tanks (the Cato Institute) to advocacy organizations (the NAACP) to universities (Brown University) to student groups (the National Black Law Students Association) to various state and local governments (California) and public officials (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) have submitted amicus briefs trying to influence the Court in what is likely to become one of the most controversial decisions of its upcoming term.
The present case seeks to overturn a previous ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which again opened the door wide for anti-white racial preference policies in America. In that case, Big Business also supported the argument for affirmative action. In a filing to the Court at the time, 65 corporations with more than a trillion dollars in annual revenues – including Intel, Merck, Boeing, and Coca-Cola – had underligned the importance of affirmative action in their “continued success in the global marketplace.”
The Court took notice of their concerns. The 5-4 majority upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy emphasized these efforts to establish a diverse workforce to meet the challenges of a global economy in Grutter v. Bollinger, the key ruling stemming from the pair of lawsuits.
“What is more,” former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Grutter at the time, “high-ranking officers and civilian leaders of the United States military” also looked for a “racially diverse officer corps.” O’Connor’s opinion elaborated on the military’s use of affirmative action to ensure “an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse.” As several retired military leaders with decades of experience had urged the Court, she applied this line of reasoning from the military setting to the nation’s public universities.
Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas because of race preference
For Fisher v. University of Texas, the US Justice Department, in a court brief co-signed by several other government agencies, told the high court that a diverse college population was in the university’s — and the government’s — best interests. “The armed services and numerous federal agencies have concluded that well-qualified and diverse graduates are crucial to the fulfillment of their missions,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli said.
The court brief was cosigned by lawyers from the departments of Defense, Education, Commerce, Labor and Health and Human Services.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the University of Texas’ admission program will be its first ruling on affirmative action in higher education since 2003.
However, the same groups in the military and corporate America that supported race preference in 2003 have largely repeated their arguments in a new round of amicus briefs filed in response to Fisher.
“Fulfillment of the national security interest in officer corps diversity must not be imperiled by a sweeping ruling against race-conscious admissions,” argued the brief filed on behalf of General Anthony C. Zinni, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, General Wesley K. Clark, and dozens of other high-ranking former officials from all branches of the US armed forces.
Likewise, dozens of the nation’s largest companies – including Pfizer, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart to name a few – also echoed the arguments put forth nine years earlier by a similar list of corporations.
Texas admits most of its students because they rank among the top 10 percent in their high school classes. Fisher’s grades did not put her in that category. For other students, Texas officials say that race is considered among many factors, including academic record, personal essays, leadership potential, extracurricular activities, and honors and awards. The school says race is not used to set quotas, which the high court has previously rejected.
“Race is not considered on its own, and it is never determinative of an applicant’s admission by itself,” Verrilli said. “Rather, race is one of a number of contextual factors that provide a more complete understanding of the applicant’s record and experiences. That is a far cry from impermissible racial balancing.”
The Texas policy has been upheld by federal appeals courts, which said it was allowed under the high court’s decision in Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003 that upheld racial considerations in university admissions at the University of Michigan Law School. But Fisher appealed to the current Supreme Court, which is considered to be more conservative than the one that ruled in 2003 and more likely to jettison that decision or at least limit when colleges may take account of race in admissions.
Before adopting race as part of its admission policy, Texas’ student body was 21 percent African-American and Hispanic. By 2007, the year before Fisher filed her lawsuit, African-Americans and Hispanics accounted for more than a quarter of the entering freshman class.
“Race is considered not on its own, but as a piece of information that provides valuable context in understanding an applicant’s achievements and his likely contributions to the university,” Verrilli said. “That individualized consideration is designed to work in conjunction with the Top 10 plan to enable the university to construct a class that is diverse in all ways valued by the institution.”
The case is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 11-345.
Why is it that there are no scholarships that specifically target white people?
I mean, there are plenty of scholarships out there that are designed for people of certain ethnicities, such as the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund, and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, but it is hard (or maybe impossible) to find one that specifically caters to Caucasians. I mention this in order to point out a double standard in our society.
Although it does not directly address scholarships, affirmative action upholds a similar double standard in our country.
The Supreme Court has recently decided to review a case that is tied to affirmative action, and it seems the chances for upholding racial quotas are weaker than ever.
The case in question is Fisher v. the University of Texas. Abigail Fisher has alleged that UT denied her admission due to her race.
Since the last time it ruled in favor of an affirmative action plan in 2003, the Supreme Court has become decisively more conservative.
Justice Samuel Alito has subsequently replaced the moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor after her retirement in 2006, marking a shift away from a liberal majority. This leaves the Supreme Court with five conservative justices out of a total of nine.
In addition to that, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who most likely would have voted for use of race quotas in admissions, has recused herself from the upcoming review due to her involvement in the case as Solicitor General. No, things do not look well for affirmative action at all.
But we must ask ourselves if affirmative action is something we think truly represents the American spirit.
Consider this: what if you were told that you could not receive admission into a university or receive a scholarship because of the color of your skin? It would be devastating and blatantly outrageous, correct? Well, this argument used to only apply to ethnic minorities’ rights to education, but I think the same can now be said of those with a Caucasian background.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I am of Mexican descent and as swarthy as they come. But I just cannot help but call out this obvious hypocrisy in our culture.
We are all so quick to preach equality and fair opportunities for everyone regardless of race, but at the heart of the issue is a general notion to combat the idea of whites getting everything.
Accordingly, we establish that it is okay to grant scholarships and college admission to some and not to others. Is this not racism in and of itself? Is this not what the previous generations tried so hard to eliminate?
It is my opinion that affirmative action should be discontinued. It is nothing more than racial balancing with a catchy title. It purposely gives a select few an advantage while denying that same advantage to others. Racial balancing is racist and we all know it.
However, I will give our racism in this matter some credit: it does increase classroom diversity. Proponents of affirmative action could say that this increase in diversity leads to better classroom discussion and an increase in overall learning.
But I would argue that the link between classroom diversity and classroom learning is not as strong as one would think. It, of course, plays a role in greater multi-cultural understanding but we must not fool ourselves into thinking of classroom diversity as a cure-all solution for learning.
I propose that instead of continuing to discriminate based on race, college admissions should be based solely on merit.
This way, race would not even be taken into consideration and everyone would have an equal chance at gaining admission to the college of their choice. This is only fair.
Whatever the solution is, race needs to be kept out of the acceptance process. Until things like this are dealt with, racism will be hard at work in the U.S. as double standards continue to exist.
Partial view of the Afrikaans language monument at Paarl, Western Cape
Everyone knows the cliché about the frog being heated up slowly in water. Instead of jumping out of the pot, he becomes so used to it that he eventually boils to death. So many people have already used this metaphor for South Africa’s whites that it feels almost like plagiarism just to mention it.
However, last week’s mammoth conference by the ruling ANC in Midrand again gave me the idea that we are all being brainwashed into accepting the unacceptable: that we may lose our farms, property and equal rights simply because we are white.
During his opening speech, the ANC leader Jacob Zuma flew into a rage against “white men” who supposedly “still control the economy”. We reported on the ANC conference on www.praag.org, which led to a few altercations with black South Africans on Twitter.
White men are already self-employed
What blacks do not seem to understand is that white men no longer pose any kind of competition in the job market to them. All the banks and major corporations in South Africa follow the government’s affirmative-action rules to the letter. They are even eager to get rid of their white employees, to the extent that 75% of white men over fifty are already self-employed, eking out a measly living by doing odd jobs on their computers. South Africa is crying out for engineers, but many white engineers are sitting at home selling pet food on the internet or running gasoline stations. If they are still allowed to get gasoline franchises from the oil companies who have also excluded whites from doing that!
I came upon another statistic about white South African men: In 2006, one out of every four, of all ages, was self-employed. In short, while the ANC was ranting against white males at their conference, there were hardly any left in formal employment. Tens of thousands of young white men have already left the country and are working overseas, because no corporation would employ them in South Africa, let alone the government or municipalities where it is almost unheard of for any white person to be offered a job, except as cleaning staff.
Yes, this is the most bizarre effect of South African affirmative action, that well-educated but impoverished whites are now so desperate for an income that they will clean the floors and toilets for black office staff. I spoke to an alderman in the town of Brits, north west of Johannesburg, and she confirmed that the cleaning staff of the municipality was all white, employed as a “special favour” to the local white community. East of Johannesburg, in the horrible, Stalinist “megacity” of Ekurhuleni, a similar arrangement is taking place whereby whites are only employed to do menial labour. This is a way of boosting the self-esteem of the profligate black municipal potentates who regularly make the news because of corruption, unwarranted expenditure on luxury hotels and overseas conferences, and so on.
Taking the fight to the courts
As I am writing this, I am still awaiting the US Supreme Court decision on Fisher v. the University of Texas on affirmative action. Somehow it was not handed down last week, being overshadowed by the news of the Court’s decision on Obamacare. The Fisher decision, although important for the United States, might have a knock-on effect worldwide. South African universities practise the same kind of exclusion of white students on racial grounds, except far more radically. In some faculties, such as veterinarian science at the University of Pretoria, whites are banned altogether. In medicine, they are only allowed a quota of 10% of admissions, regardless of academic merit.
What astounds me, is why we have not had more court challenges of affirmative action and anti-white discrimination generally, in South Africa. The still relatively independent South African courts are often criticised by the ANC, so we should litigate while we still can, following all the US examples of whites who have successfully sued against race preferences.
Should we ‘prepare for war’?
However, many people believe that we are not far from even more violence than we are already experiencing. The Transvaal Agricultural Union recently asked whether farmers should “prepare for war”, given the belligerent rhetoric coming from many ANC politicians. The radical mood of the ANC and especially its militant, communist youth wing, suggests that we could see farm invasions like in Zimbabwe, with whites simply chased off their property within the next year or two, or even earlier. In a widely publicised statement, ANC Youth leader Ronald Lamola said in Durban ten days ago, about taking the land of whites: “We need an act as forceful as war to bring it back to the Africans.”
The ANC closed last week’s “policy conference” with the entire throng singing “bring me my machine gun” in Zulu, led by President Jacob Zuma, as usual.
That FW de Klerk happened to hand the ANC’s militia, Umkhonto we Sizwe, all 500 000 automatic weapons in the country’s arsenal in 1994, was the gravest error of judgement ever and a constant worry to us all.
So amid all this uncertainty and radical talk from the government, we must continue to fight for what is right, organise and defend ourselves.
Spread the message
I want to ask you, our overseas supporters, to please spread the word of our plight. Read the posts on our website and stay informed about the developing conflict in South Africa.
We are trying to keep www.praag.org updated on a daily basis, despite also running a full-scale news website in Afrikaans for our local readers on www.praag.co.za. Remember you can also use Google Translate to read some of those articles.
I recently came across an eBook on the internet about racial violence in America, White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return Of Race Riots To America by Colin Flaherty.
What amazed me about this book, was the similarity in the violence committed by blacks in the USA and in South Africa, except here it is more extreme, sadistic and informed by African ritual, such as the recent case where a young white female victim’s hands were amputated. Presumably to be used in the concoction of muti, or medicine.
We shall try to alert you about interesting eBooks regularly, which may stimulate the international debate around white and Western survival. As the visiting Dutch politician Martin Bosma of the Freedom Party said, “You Afrikaners are the canary in the coal mine for the whole Western or European world.”
Indeed. Don’t let us die for the sake of proving that multiculturalism does not work. With our increasing poverty and joblessness here, we rely on your PayPal subscriptions and donations to keep our struggle going here.
Please also tell your friends about our fund-raising site, as well as this site www.praag.org where the enfolding drama of South Africa’s slide into racial socialism is being chronicled.
For the solidarity and friendship that you have shown us so far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Things may look grim now, but there is hope for our civilisation yet.
Regards,
Dan Roodt
Director, Pro-Afrikaner Action Group (PRAAG)
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