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Chronicle article: Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action in College Admissions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Shulman)
Mon Jun 23 14:32:50 2003
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:05:11 -0400
From: Peter Shulman <skip@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
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--**Peter
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- The text of the article is below -
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Monday, June 23, 2003
Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action in College Admissions
By PETER SCHMIDT
The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the use of affirmative
action in college admissions in two cases involving the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but struck down the
mechanics of Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy.
In a case involving the law school, the Supreme Court upheld
Michigan's policy in a 5-to-4 decision. The majority said that
the policy was narrowly tailored to further a compelling
interest in "obtaining educational benefits that flow from a
diverse student body." The majority said that Michigan's
efforts to maintain a "critical mass" of minority students did
not amount to using illegal quotas.
In the undergraduate case, the majority did not reject the use
of racial preferences to promote educational diversity. But
the justices said that the university's current policy, which
is more formulaic, is not narrowly tailored to achieve the
goal of a diverse student body. The vote in the undergraduate
case was 6 to 3.
Today's ruling marks the first time the Supreme Court has
waded into the controversy over affirmative action in college
admissions in more than two decades -- a period in which deep
divisions have emerged among lower courts over whether
colleges can legally use some types of race-conscious
admissions policies to promote diversity on their campuses.
The admissions policy at issue in the undergraduate case uses
a point system, and awards black, Hispanic, and American
Indian applicants a 20-point bonus on its 150-point scale. (To
put that bonus in context, 20 points is the difference between
what applicants receive for a 4.0 grade-point average and what
they receive for a 3.0.)
The University of Michigan Law School's admissions policy
gives more-individual consideration to applicants but
considers race and ethnicity in an attempt to enroll a
"critical mass" of underrepresented minority students on the
campus. The policy typically has resulted in combined black,
Hispanic, and American Indian enrollments of 10 to 17 percent.
The law-school case involves a lawsuit filed by Barbara
Grutter, a white woman rejected by the school in 1997. Her
lawyers brought the case, Grutter v. Bollinger, before the
Supreme Court in hopes of persuading the justices to overturn
a May 14, 2002, ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit, that upheld the law school's admissions
procedures as constitutional.
Ms. Grutter's lawyers argued that the appeals court had erred
in its ruling, which accepted Michigan's arguments that the
government has a compelling interest in maintaining racial and
ethnic diversity on campuses, and that the admissions policies
used by the law school are narrowly tailored to give just
enough consideration to race without unduly harming
nonminority applicants. They said that the law school
discriminated against white and Asian applicants, and was
essentially operating an illegal quota system in seeking to
maintain a "critical mass" of minority students.
In petitioning the Supreme Court to review the case, Ms.
Grutter's lawyers noted that the Sixth Circuit was deeply
divided in its 5-to-4 decision. The majority held that the law
school's admissions policy is permissible under the
Constitution, because the educational benefits offered by a
racially diverse campus justify the use of race-conscious
admissions policies, where needed, to maintain enrollments of
black, Hispanic, or American Indian students. But the four
dissenting judges said that the case "involves a
straightforward instance of racial discrimination by a state
institution." The Sixth Circuit's decision reversed a March
2001 U.S. District Court ruling by Judge Bernard A. Friedman,
who concluded that Michigan was operating an illegal quota
system because the law school consistently kept minority
enrollments above certain levels.
Also urging the Supreme Court to take the case were lawyers
representing several students who had intervened in the
lawsuit to defend Michigan's race-conscious admissions
policies as necessary to remedy past and present racial
discrimination. Although they agreed with the Sixth Circuit's
decision to leave Michigan's policy intact, they argued that
the appeals court ignored evidence of racial discrimination by
the university.
The University of Michigan had urged the Supreme Court to let
the Sixth Circuit's ruling stand. The university's lawyers
argued that the law school's admissions policy complies with
guidelines set forth by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the
Supreme Court's last ruling on affirmative action in college
admissions, the 1978 decision Regents of the University of
California v. Bakke. In his opinion in that case, Justice
Powell held that public colleges could not use quotas in
admissions, but could give some consideration to race in an
effort to attain a diverse student body.
In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the university's
lawyers argued that the law school's consideration of race in
admissions "is moderate in scope, treats all applicants as
individuals, and does not employ quotas or set-asides (or
their functional equivalent)." They argued that the Supreme
Court cannot strike down the law school's admissions policies
without overturning the Bakke decision, and that Ms. Grutter's
lawyers have offered "no persuasive justification for making
such a radical and disruptive break with settled precedent."
Ms. Grutter's lawyers argued that the diversity rationale
articulated by Justice Powell in Bakke did not represent the
views of the four other justices in the majority. Moreover,
their brief said, several subsequent Supreme Court decisions
-- in cases involving the government's use of preferences for
minority candidates for jobs or contracts -- have taken a dim
view of preferences used for reasons other than remedying
specific acts of discrimination.
The lawsuit challenging Michigan's undergraduate admissions
policies, Gratz v. Bollinger, was filed in 1997 on behalf of
two white applicants rejected by the university's College of
Literature, Science, and the Arts, its main undergraduate
college, at Ann Arbor. U.S. District Court Judge Patrick J.
Duggan had ruled in Michigan's favor in the case in December
2000. The Sixth Circuit subsequently heard both the law-school
and undergraduate cases at the same time, but its panel of
judges became mired in a bitter internal feud in the course of
deciding the law-school case, with judges in the minority in
that decision contending that judges in the majority had
manipulated court procedure to ensure a ruling in Michigan's
favor.
The undergraduate case remained undecided for months after the
law-school decision, and the Supreme Court took it up before
the Sixth Circuit had a chance to rule. Like the law-school
case, the undergraduate case also was the subject of
intervention by students who were trying to convince the
courts that Michigan needs to grant racial preferences to
overcome past and current discrimination on the campus.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs in the undergraduate case had
sought to depict the point system used by Michigan's
admissions officers as evidence that many applicants were
being accepted or rejected based solely on their race or
ethnicity. Michigan's lawyers argued that the system awarded
bonus points to applicants for a host of other nonacademic
qualities -- such as state residency or having relatives who
were alumni -- and was too complex for anyone to argue that
race was the deciding factor in any particular admissions
decision.
Two white students, Jennifer Gratz and Patrick
Hamacher, who were denied admission to the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor's chief undergraduate college file
a lawsuit saying the institution discriminated against
them by using different standards to admit students of
different races. The students are represented by the
Center for Individual Rights, university's law school,
files a lawsuit contending that it discriminated against
white students by looking at the life experiences of
applicants in an effort to enroll a "critical mass" of
underrepresented minority students. Ms. Grutter is
also represented by the Center for Individual Rights. As
in the undergraduate case, her suit is based in part on
internal admissions documents that university officials
produced in 1996 in response to a state open-records
request by a Michigan philosophy professor, Carl Cohen. Lee
including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as well
as 17 black and Hispanic high-school students, intervene in
the undergraduate case. The judge rejects the groups' claim
that they could not depend on the university to represent
the interests of minority students adequately. The ruling
comes a day after another federal judge denies a
similar request from several other groups and 41 students
seeking to intervene rules, 2 to 1, that black and
Hispanic students cannot count on the university to
represent their interests adequately, and should be considered
as "defendant-intervenors" in both lawsuits. The minority
students contend that the university needs affirmative
action to remedy its own past and present racial
discrimination -- an argument U.S. District Court
Judge Patrick J. Duggan rules that the university is
justified in considering race in admissions because of the
educational benefits of diversity on the campus. He
largely bases his decision, he says, on his belief that
the admissions policy, adopted in 1999, was "narrowly
tailored" District Court Judge Bernard A. Friedman
rules that the admissions policies are unconstitutional
because they "clearly consider" race and are "practically
Judge Friedman's decision. In a 5-to-4 ruling, the court
says that the university considered race appropriately
in trying to enroll a "critical mass" of minority
students to contribute to educational diversity on the campus.
Although the appeals court heard the undergraduate
case at the same time, the judges U.S. Supreme
Court to review the case. The following month, the university
even though the Sixth Circuit court has not ruled
in the undergraduate case. It marks the first time
that the Supreme Court has decided to hear a dispute over
affirmative action in college admissions in more than two
decades, since its landmark 1978 decision in Regents
of the University of California urge the Supreme
Court to strike down the university's admissions policies,
which he condemns as "fundamentally flawed" and as "divisive,
unfair, and impossible to square with the Constitution."
But briefs in the cases filed by the Justice Department
stop short of arguing that all race-conscious
Michigan's use of race in admissions. Legal observers say that
seldom in the court's history have so many amicus
curiae, or "friend of the as thousands of
affirmative-action supporters, mainly students, protest
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