A statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis that sits as a centerpiece of the University of Texas’ Main Mall was vandalized sometime Wednesday night or early Thursday, reports statesman.com.
It seems that the anti-white movement in Cape Town, South Africa, that succeeded in getting a statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed, is spreading to the USA.
Jefferson Davis’s statue, defaced with graffiti
A message stating “Davis must fall” was spray painted in red across the pedestal on which the bronze statue of the Confederate leader stands. This echoes the “Rhodes must fall” slogan in at the University of Cape Town.
UT police discovered the vandalism at 8:42 a.m. Their investigation in ongoing. In the meantime, a cleanup crew has been sent to scrub the message from the statue, a UT spokeswoman said.
The two people nominated by Gov. Greg Abbott to join the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System support affirmative action.
On Thursday, Abbott nominated Sara Martinez Tucker of Laredo, head of an education nonprofit and a former U.S. undersecretary of education, as well as David Beck, a prominent Houston attorney and a founding member of the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group formed to oppose education reform proposals put forward by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and to defend the university’s president, Bill Powers, from criticism.
Martinez Tucker and Beck signed their names to a friend-of-the-court brief filed in a 2013 case before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding affirmative action known as Fisher v. UT. The brief argued in favor of affirmative action at UT, and the list of signers reads like an invite list to a Powers’ Christmas party.
As attorney general, Abbott represented UT in the early stages of the litigation but dropped out in 2012, apparently at Powers’ request. There was speculation at the time Abbott didn’t want to have to explain his defense of affirmative action during a run for governor.
Abbott also nominated Stephen Hicks, another friend of Powers, to serve another term on the board.
The nominees must still be confirmed by the state Senate, which is now run by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has called for investigations into UT’s admissions practices.
The pro-Powers nominations come as little surprise, as Abbott sat on an investigation into the UT Law School foundation for nearly two years. When Deputy Attorney General John Scott produced a highly critical report, the Attorney General’s office withheld it until the 11th hour — Dec. 31 of last year.
Affirmative actions policies at the University of Texas have been the subject of two major Supreme Court decisions. – watchdog.org
Eight months after attorneys for Abigail Fisher argued in front of the Supreme Court that the University of Texas’ affirmative action admissions policy discriminates against white students, the justices still have not handed down their decision in the potentially paradigm-shifting case.
The unusual delay has many court-watchers stumped, though as with everything Supreme Court-related, all explanations for the wait are, at best, educated guesswork.
Lyle Denniston, who has covered the Supreme Court for more than 50 years and now works for the legal website SCOTUSblog, said he couldn’t remember another case that had been argued in the fall yet still undecided by mid-June.
“I have absolutely no idea what is holding it up,” Denniston said.
One reason why the delay is so surprising: During oral arguments in October, it seemed fairly clear that the four conservative justices would band together with swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy in striking down the use of race as a factor in undergraduate admissions. Kennedy has voted against affirmative action policies in the past and showed no willingness during questioning to reconsider his past position.
Additionally, the four liberal-leaning justices are short Elena Kagan, who had to recuse herself in this case due to her work on it while a part of the Obama administration. That seemed to clear the way for an easy 5-3 decision in favor of Fisher.
“It’s really surprising that it’s taken this long for the court to issue an opinion,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA School of Law. “It’s almost unheard of for the court to take the entire term to decide what really is a straightforward case.”
Winkler said he believes the court will rule broadly against the University of Texas in a way that will outlaw affirmative action programs nationwide. He thinks that instead of ruling narrowly against this particular school, the court will overturn its own 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision that said affirmative action is allowable as long as it’s not a quota system as a way to ensure schools have a diverse student body. In that decision, the court ruled that eventually, in 25 years, the use of race would again becoming legally suspect, but that until then it’s needed to correct societal discrimination.
Winkler guesses the decision is taking so long because the liberal justices are writing lengthy dissents to the conservative judges’ sweeping decision.
“The dissenting justices are very upset about something,” Winkler predicted. “A narrow ruling only striking down Texas’ policy without significantly reshaping the law of affirmative action should be an easy opinion to write and shouldn’t inspire unusually long dissents.”
Long-time court reporter Linda Greenhouse, however, wrote in The New York Times that it’s possible Kennedy’s decision is considered “frustratingly narrow” by his conservative colleagues, since the court has already agreed to hear another affirmative action case in the fall. That suggests they may want another crack at the issue next year.
Another theory floating around legal circles is that the court may be waiting to release the Fisher case at the same time as it hands down Shelby County v. Holder, another landmark case this term (heard in February) that has the potential to significantly diminish the reach of the Voting Rights Act. Alabama sued the federal government, arguing that Southern and other states covered under the act are unfairly monitored by the federal government for discrimination in voting.
One theory is that the court will release the decisions together to make a broader statement about race in society today and how far government institutions may consider race as a way to correct past institutionalized discrimination. The justices could strike down the use of race in admissions as unconstitutional while upholding the Voting Rights Act, as a way to split the issue down the middle and avoid charges of overreach.
But other court watchers said it’s routine for the court to save its most controversial opinions for the last minute, and that it’s impossible to know why the supremes are dawdling.
“This means nothing,” Geoffrey Stone, the former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, said. “The court generally holds its most important decision for the end of the term. We can’t read anything at all into the fact that it hasn’t handed down Fisher yet.”
“I think the more likely explanation is simply that dealing with tough issues requires a lot of thought and care,” said Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego. – Yahoo 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
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
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