Future of Affirmative Action May Be for the Supreme Court to Decide
Feature Story by Tia Sumler - 4/12/2001
The future of affirmative action in higher education is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. District Judge Bernard Friedman's March 27 ruling struck down the University of Michigan's program because it because he said it was "practically indistinguishable from a quota system." The decision recognized that there are educational and societal benefits to a racially diverse law school, and Friedman said, "It would be unfortunate if the number of students from any racial group would decline" because of his ruling. However, Friedman did not view the university's goal of a diverse student body as a compelling interest for the state.Furthermore, he asserted that any acceptable program would need to be "narrowly tailored" to avoid illegal discrimination against whites, Friedman said. This week, the high court agreed to hear a Colorado case that tests whether affirmative action can be used in federal contracts to remedy past discrimination against minorities.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke in 1978, which outlawed quotas, affirmative action has been a mainstay of admission policies at public universities that receive far more applicants than they can admit. In 1996, however, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against such policies at the University of Texas law school. Voters in California and Washington state, meanwhile, forced public universities to drop their race-based admission policies.
Lee Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan, said the university will appeal the ruling and will seek to continue using its current admissions policy until the case is resolved. "This is an issue of the highest importance and we will pursue it to the highest levels," Bollinger said.
The lawsuit was filed in 1997 by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) on behalf of Barbara Grutter, a white woman who said she was denied admission while minority students with lower test scores and grade-point averages were accepted. CIR is a conservative public-interest firm in Washington, D.C., that also challenged affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Washington law schools and the University of Michigan's undergraduate school.
The focus of the case was an admissions policy that had been in place since 1992. In 2000, under this policy, the school says that thirty-five percent of minority applicants were accepted. In contrast, the school says that without the policy, only ten percent of those applicants would have been accepted.
Friedman's decision contradicts several recent rulings affirmative action, including a December decision in which another federal judge deemed Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy acceptable. That ruling was based on the judge's assertion that the benefits of a diverse campus justify race-based admissions policies.
