Back in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in a pair of cases emanating from the University of Michigan (
Gratz,
Grutter) that the Constitution did not prohibit public universities from implementing narrowly tailored programs intended to create a racially diverse student body. You can give each student an individualized consideration to see if he or she personally would help you build a critical mass of representative students (Grutter), but you can't give every every underrepresented minority applicant a +20 on your admissions matrix automatically (Gratz). Moreover, as Justice O'Connor warned in her majority opinion in Grutter:
It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
Well, it's only nine years later, but Justice O'Connor has been replaced by Justice Alito, and apparently it's soon enough to look again.
Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz are white students who were denied undergrad admission at the University of Texas in fall 2008. Each claims that UT's consideration of race as a factor in its admissions policy discriminated against her and should be deemed unconstitutional. So, what is UT's admission's policy, and why should the composition of the Court be a concern?
As the Fifth Circuit described it, first there's the Top Ten Percent provision, which accounts for 81 percent of the entering class, filling 88 percent of the seats allotted to Texas residents and leaving only 1,216 offers of admission university-wide for non-top 10 percent residents:
In 1997, the Texas legislature responded to the Hopwood decision by enacting the Top Ten Percent Law, still in effect. The law altered UT's preexisting policy and mandated that Texas high school seniors in the top ten percent of their class be automatically admitted to any Texas state university.
The Top Ten Percent Law did not by its terms admit students on the basis of race, but underrepresented minorities were its announced target and their admission a large, if not primary, purpose. In 2004, among freshmen who were Texas residents, 77% of the enrolled African-American students and 78% of the Hispanic students had been admitted under the Top Ten Percent Law, compared to 62% of Caucasian students.
What about the rest of the class? Unsatisfied with the diversity produced from the Top Ten Percent Law alone, race can enter the process. The school looks at each student's Academic and Personal Achievement Indices—the former is what you'd expect—standardized test scores and class rank, and if you're high enough you can get in on that basis alone. But what's Personal Achievement?
The Personal Achievement Index is based on three scores: one score for each of the two required essays and a third score, called the personal achievement score, which represents an evaluation of the applicant's entire file. The essays are each given a score between 1 and 6 through "a holistic evaluation of the essay as a piece of writing based on its complexity of thought, substantiality of development, and facility with language." The personal achievement score is also based on a scale of 1 to 6, although it is given slightly greater weight in the final PAI calculation than the mean of the two essay scores.
This personal achievement score is designed to recognize qualified students whose merit as applicants was not adequately reflected by their Academic Index. Admissions staff assign the score by assessing an applicant's demonstrated leadership qualities, awards and honors, work experience, and involvement in extracurricular activities and community service. In addition, the personal achievement score includes a "special circumstances" element that may reflect the socioeconomic status of the applicant and his or her high school, the applicant's family status and family responsibilities, the applicant's standardized test score compared to the average of her high school, and — beginning in 2004 — the applicant's race. To assess these intangible factors, evaluators read the applicant's essays again, but this time with an eye to the information conveyed rather than the quality of the student's writing. Admissions officers undergo annual training by a nationally recognized expert in holistic scoring, and senior staff members perform quality control to verify that awarded scores are appropriate and consistent. The most recent study, in 2005, found that holistic file readers scored within one point of each other 88% of the time.
None of the elements of the personal achievement score — including race — are considered individually or given separate numerical values to be added together. Rather, the file is evaluated as a whole in order to provide the fullest possible understanding of the student as a person and to place his or her achievements in context. As UT's director of admissions explained, "race provides — like [the] language [spoken in the applicant's home], whether or not someone is the first in their family to attend college, and family responsibilities — important context in which to evaluate applicants, and is only one aspect of the diversity that the University seeks to attain."
And the Fifth Circuit, like the district court below it, approved UT's plan:
In this dynamic environment, our conclusions should not be taken to mean that UT is immune from its obligation to recalibrate its dual systems of admissions as needed, and we cannot bless the university's race-conscious admissions program in perpetuity. Rather, much like judicial approval of a state's redistricting of voter districts, it is good only until the next census count — it is more a process than a fixed structure that we review. [...]
A university may decide to pursue the goal of a diverse student body, and it may do so to the extent it ties that goal to the educational benefits that flow from diversity. The admissions procedures that UT adopted, modeled after the plan approved by the Supreme Court in Grutter, are narrowly tailored — procedures in some respects superior to the Grutter plan because the University does not keep a running tally of underrepresented minority representation during the admissions process. We are satisfied that the University's decision to reintroduce race-conscious admissions was adequately supported by the "serious, good faith consideration" required by Grutter. Finally, it is neither our role nor purpose to dance from Grutter's firm holding that diversity is an interest supporting compelling necessity. Nor are we inclined to do so.
Ah, but Justice O'Connor has been replaced by Justice Alito, and Chief Justice Rehnquist by Chief Justice Roberts, and
the last time he got a big affirmative action in education case,
he wrote:
The parties and their amici debate which side is more faithful to the heritage of Brown, but the position of the plaintiffs in Brown was spelled out in their brief and could not have been clearer: “[T]he Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race.” What do the racial classifications at issue here do, if not accord differential treatment on the basis of race? As counsel who appeared before this Court for the plaintiffs in Brown put it: “We have one fundamental contention which we will seek to develop in the course of this argument, and that contention is that no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” There is no ambiguity in that statement. And it was that position that prevailed in this Court, which emphasized in its remedial opinion that what was “[a]t stake is the personal interest of the plaintiffs in admission to public schools as soon as practicable on a nondiscriminatory basis,” and what was required was “determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis.” What do the racial classifications do in these cases, if not determine admission to a public school on a racial basis? Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again, even for very different reasons. For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County, the way "to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis" ... is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
But in these issues, Justice Kennedy may swing, even multiple times within the same opinion.
From his concurring opinion in that 2005 case:
[P]arts of the opinion by The Chief Justice imply an all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account. The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race. The plurality’s postulate that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” ante, at 40–41, is not sufficient to decide these cases. Fifty years of experience since Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954) , should teach us that the problem before us defies so easy a solution. School districts can seek to reach Brown’s objective of equal educational opportunity. The plurality opinion is at least open to the interpretation that the Constitution requires school districts to ignore the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling. I cannot endorse that conclusion. To the extent the plurality opinion suggests the Constitution mandates that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools, it is, in my view, profoundly mistaken.
But, he concludes ...
Though this may oversimplify the matter a bit, one of the main concerns underlying [the opinions supporting the school assignment plan at issue] was this: If it is legitimate for school authorities to work to avoid racial isolation in their schools, must they do so only by indirection and general policies? Does the Constitution mandate this inefficient result? Why may the authorities not recognize the problem in candid fashion and solve it altogether through resort to direct assignments based on student racial classifications? So, the argument proceeds, if race is the problem, then perhaps race is the solution.
The argument ignores the dangers presented by individual classifications, dangers that are not as pressing when the same ends are achieved by more indirect means. When the government classifies an individual by race, it must first define what it means to be of a race. Who exactly is white and who is nonwhite? To be forced to live under a state-mandated racial label is inconsistent with the dignity of individuals in our society. And it is a label that an individual is powerless to change. Governmental classifications that command people to march in different directions based on racial typologies can cause a new divisiveness. The practice can lead to corrosive discourse, where race serves not as an element of our diverse heritage but instead as a bargaining chip in the political process. On the other hand race-conscious measures that do not rely on differential treatment based on individual classifications present these problems to a lesser degree.
The idea that if race is the problem, race is the instrument with which to solve it cannot be accepted as an analytical leap forward. And if this is a frustrating duality of the Equal Protection Clause it simply reflects the duality of our history and our attempts to promote freedom in a world that sometimes seems set against it. Under our Constitution the individual, child or adult, can find his own identity, can define her own persona, without state intervention that classifies on the basis of his race or the color of her skin.
But then again, he explains ...
A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. Likewise, a district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population. Race may be one component of that diversity, but other demographic factors, plus special talents and needs, should also be considered. What the government is not permitted to do, absent a showing of necessity not made here, is to classify every student on the basis of race and to assign each of them to schools based on that classification. Crude measures of this sort threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.
The case will be argued some time this fall. Justice Kagan has disqualified herself—as solicitor general, she supervised the Justice Department's brief before the Fifth Circuit. In case of a 4-4 tie, the decision below (upholding the policy) prevails.