Free Republic

In 2003, the Supreme Court held that the University of Michigan's law school could substantially relax its admissions standards in order to admit a "critical mass" of African-American and Hispanic students. Many observers interpreted that decision — Grutter v. Bollinger — as an open-ended embrace of affirmative action. The University of Texas was among the many universities emboldened to ramp up its use of race-preferential admissions policies. In 2003, the university already had in place an admissions policy designed to raise the number of under-represented minority students attending its flagship campus in Austin by admitting the "top 10%" of the graduates of each...

ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him. The 2003 Supreme Court...

  From the Dallas Morning News: She may have no judicial record, but Supreme Court justice nominee Harriet Miers took firm stances on issues ranging from taxation to democratic reforms abroad as a one-term member of the Dallas City Council, a Dallas Morning News study of city records indicates. For example, in 1991, Miers voted in favor of a council resolution reaffirming economic sanctions Dallas had imposed against South Africa, then under a white minority-rule apartheid government. The council adopted the resolution by a 6-2 vote with three absences. At the time, President George H.W. Bush was considering repealing federal...

The "educational diversity" argument—going back to Justice Lewis Powell's famous dictum in the 1978 Bakke case and now adopted by a majority of the Court—claims that the presence of a certain indeterminate number of non-whites in an undergraduate or post-graduate program helps provide an intellectual and social diversity that students, or, rather, white students (since whites are not considered part of the diversity but rather the experiencing subjects of it), need to experience if they are to be prepared for positions of leadership in our racially diverse society. The nation's future, wrote Powell, "depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure...

June 23 marks the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decisions in the two University of Michigan affirmative-action cases. The decisions were hailed by the proponents of racial preferences as an unalloyed triumph. They were indeed a disappointment to those of us who oppose such discrimination, especially since we had had such high hopes that the Court would reject outright the "diversity" justification for racial and ethnic discrimination but, in a singularly unpersuasive opinion by Justice O'Connor, the Court instead embraced it. Not So Gloomy After AllA year later, however, the landscape is less dark for the opponents of...

In the 1978 Bakke case—the first Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions—the Court was severely divided (4-4) on whether any racial preferences were constitutional under the "equal protection of the laws" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decisive vote was by Justice Lewis Powell, who ruled that race could be taken into account, but only among many other factors. In his long, carefully nuanced decision, Powell emphasized that race could not be the deciding factor. On the rather frail reed of this one justice's opinion, affirmative action in college admissions has been challenged, sometimes successfully, in lower...

A Residential College class titled "Race and University Admissions" will be taking a closer look at two 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases regarding the University's race-conscious admissions process this fall. The mini-course will concentrate on the plaintiffs' position that race-based admissions are unjust. Grutter v. Bollinger challenged the Law School's race-conscious admissions system, which was upheld, while Gratz v. Bollinger managed to strike down the point-based affirmative action system that the College of Literature, Science and Arts employed. Philosophy Prof. Carl Cohen, an outspoken critic of the University's race-conscious admissions policies and affirmative action in general, will be teaching the...

September Affirmative Action Panel at U-M Reveals First Amendment Problems with "New" Policy in Wake of Grutter and Gratz Decisions. Essays must be "risky but not too risky," scientist intentionally witheld contrary regression data. by Chetly Zarko On September 17, 2003 a public panel discussion was convened by the University of Michigan administration. The panel participants, all University administrators or researchers who have taken public positions in favor of race preferences. They made various statements that call into question the real nature of change, first amendment questions related to the weighting of the new essays, and previous statements by the...

Sandra Day O'Connor was almost squished last weekend in Philadelphia. At an event celebrating our living Constitution or some such nonsense, a giant beam from the stage almost fell on her. It was a scary moment. For a brief blinking instant it appeared as if Sandra Day O'Connor was headed to meet her Maker. And, if that happened, the Constitution as we know it would have died. As Charles Krauthammer and others have noted, Sandy Baby (as John Riggins once dubbed her) is the Constitution of the United States of America. If she wants the text to mean free speech...

Last week the Washington Times tipped us; White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, responded with a "we're-still-thinkin'-about-it" non-denial; Ward Connerly wrote a say-it-ain't so letter to Karl Rove; the Associated Press reported that President Bush was leaning the other way; and the clocked ticked relentlessly toward the Thursday deadline. The deadline is for the Bush administration to file an amicus brief in the two University of Michigan "diversity" cases that the Supreme Court will consider this term. As it happens, the northeast is in the midst of a cold spell. The sparrows and wrens are puffed up against the chill; the...

Sixth CircuitryLet us state at the outset that we think the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong to rule this week that the University of Michigan Law School could vary its standards of admission based on the color of an applicant's skin. This is racial discrimination, pure and simple, and it should not be taking place in 21st century America, especially at one of the nation's pre-eminent institutions of higher education.Our subject for the day, however, isn't the merits of Grutter v. Bollinger but the ethics and credibility of the federal court that decided it. For this, we call...