The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of affirmative action as a constitutional method of establishing racial diversity in higher education while at the same time setting limits on such programs.
In opinions released June 23, the justices affirmed by 5-4 the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race as a factor in admitting students, but they rejected by 6-3 the same school’s undergraduate admissions program, which grants 20 points of a maximum possible of 150 to racial or ethnic minorities.
In the court’s assessment of the law school program, O’Connor said the justices were satisfied it did not operate on a quota system in which a fixed number of slots are reserved for certain minorities. The school’s “goal of attaining a critical mass of underrepresented minority students does not transform its program into a quota,” she wrote.
“The court did make it clear in its 6-3 decision that heavy-handed, race-norming quotas based on automatic points just for being a member of a particular ethnic group were clearly beyond the pale of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “The bad news is that in its 5-4 decision in the Michigan Law School case the justices made it clear that they still consider it constitutional to use race as a factor in admissions.”
The Supreme Court first upheld race-conscious admissions policies 25 years ago in Regents of University of California vs. Bakke, and O’Connor said in her opinion the justices hope 25 years from now “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
O’Connor, however, joined Rehnquist and four others in a judgment against the university’s undergraduate admissions program.
A school’s admissions system “must remain flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application,” O’Conner wrote.
The point system utilized by the university violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Rehnquist wrote for the majority. The automatic crediting of 20 points to every minority applicant demonstrates the system fails to provide “individualized consideration,” he wrote.
This aspect conflicts with the high court’s guidelines established in the 1978 Bakke opinion, Rehnquist said.
(BP, RNS)
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