Avoiding what could have been a wildly controversial ruling on affirmative action, the Supreme Court sent Fischer v. University of Texas back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals June 24. In a 7-1 opinion, the Court determined that the lower court inadequately evaluated the standards of the University of Texas’s admissions policies regarding race as a factor.
Instead of issuing a ruling that could have potentially generated a great deal of political controversy, the justices cited a precedent set after the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, where the Court had decided that race should be considered in a “holistic” approach to evaluating each student.
The opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, is likely to subject college and universities’ affirmative action programs to far tougher scrutiny in the future, as schools will be required to show that they have no other way to create a diverse student body, according to USA Today. The court stopped short of deciding whether it is constitutional or not to allow schools to consider race in the admissions process.
Instead, Kennedy argued that affirmative action is acceptable, as long as there are no “race-neutral” alternatives.
“It seems as though the opinion won’t carry precedent, but it’s important nonetheless,” said rising junior Colby Moore. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the affirmative action issue comes up again in the near future.” Moore has served as an intern on Capitol Hill and heard the ruling in person.
While this was not the first case involving affirmative action to come before the court, it was widely seen as the most significant opportunity for the Court to strike down race consideration in college admissions as unconstitutional. With a 5-4 conservative majority, many legal scholars thought that affirmative action was dead, even to the point where the woman who filed the law suit against UT Austin, Abigail Fisher, was referred to as “the woman who may kill affirmative action.”
Fisher, now 23 years old, was denied admission to the University of Texas in 2008, a decision she believed was based solely on the fact that she is white.
“There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin,” she said in a video posted by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative group that solicited her case. “For an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me.”
The university’s policy was to accept the top 10% of students from each Texas high school, which because of demographics produced a relatively diverse class. It then filled out its freshman class by assessing a number of factors including race – a system it said was devoid of quotas or numerical targets but was designed to achieve what it called “critical mass.”
John Dinan, professor of politics and international affairs who specializes in state constitutionalism, said that the case was a narrow ruling that will likely result in more debate over affirmative action. “It is difficult to draw much in the way of broader insight from the Fisher decision about the Court’s approach to affirmative action in future cases,” Dinan said.
“There is a good chance that affirmative action cases will continue to be heard in district and circuit courts and appealed to the Supreme Court. But the Fisher opinions contain little by way of signals as to how the Court will approach these cases in future years.”
While any future ruling on the constitutionality of affirmative action would impact only public universities for now, the issue is still one that hits close to home for many students. Wake Forest’s policy on race consideration in the admissions process is less than definitive. Marth Allman, Dean of Admissions, did not confirm or deny the use of affirmative action policies. “We do not have a numerical goal for diversity but instead seek to make Wake Forest representative of the multi-faceted nature of society,” Allman said.
“In order to enroll a class from a variety of backgrounds — geographical, racial, religious and socioeconomic — we visit a broad range of high school both in the US and abroad and create publications and recruitment programs not only for our general population but also for under-represented minorities.”
*Reporting contributed by Hilary Burns