US Supreme Court to hear again race in admissions
Print Edition
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday will again take up the highly charged question of race in admissions to public universities, hearing arguments for the second time from a white woman who claimed that a University of Texas policy caused her to be rejected in favor of less qualified blacks and Hispanics.
In the three years since the justices last heard the case and sent it back to a lower court for more scrutiny of the university’s rationale for considering an applicant’s race, legal battles over admissions have intensified.
The conservative advocates behind the Texas challenge have separately mounted an even more sweeping lawsuit against the nation’s most iconic private university, Harvard.
In a twist on the Fisher case, the Harvard lawsuit asserted that Asian Americans have been particularly hurt by affirmative action programs in university admissions. A similar case has been filed against the University of North Carolina.
These new Asian-American cases, which both sides believe are destined for the Supreme Court, could ultimately have greater national consequence than the Texas dispute because they take aim at the landmark decision that first upheld campus affirmative action, a policy under which minorities subject to discrimination are given certain preferences.
That 1978 ruling, in the case Regents of the University of California v Bakke, forbade quotas but allowed race to be used as one of many admissions factors.
Lawyers for Abigail Fisher, the woman who challenged the University of Texas policy, do not question the Bakke decision or a major 2003 ruling in a University of Michigan case that affirmed it. Rather, they make the narrower argument that Texas could have accomplished its diversity goals with a policy that did not look at race.
The state of Texas enrolls most freshmen at the Austin campus of its flagship public university by guaranteeing places to the top 10 percent of a high school graduating class. A supplemental diversity policy looks beyond grades to a range of attributes including race.
A ruling in the Fisher case might not apply to schools that have other systems that consider applicants’ race.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
