ICYMI: Gratz says affirmative action 'on life support'

ICYMI:

Here is a news story I wrote based on anti-affirmative action activist Jennifer Gratz's view of Monday's Supreme Court decision:


By CHAD SELWESKI
chad.selweski@macombdaily.com
Monday, June 24,2013
Michigan’s top anti-affirmative action crusader called the Supreme Court’s decision Monday on the University of Texas admissions policies a modest victory that indicates the high court sees racial preference programs “on life support.”

In contrast to legal analysts who said the court “punted” in its 7-1 ruling by sending the Texas case back to the lower federal courts, Jennifer Gratz said the court was enforcing its standard of “strict scrutiny” of college admissions policies that claim racial diversity of the student body as their goal. The legal standards at issue in this case date back to two 2003 affirmative action cases decided by the high court involving the University of Michigan.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion released Monday that said diversity is a legitimate factor in admissions only after a university concludes “that no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.”

Gratz, who won the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court struck down U-M’s undergraduate racial preferences, said the ruling in the Texas case shows that the current makeup of the court “barely tolerates” racial factors in admissions.
In the dual rulings of 2003, the court ruled in Grutter vs. Bollinger that the U-M law school was correct in establishing diversity as a compelling governmental interest, and pursuing that goal was acceptable if no quotas or bonus points were awarded to minorities in the admissions process.

At the same time, in the Gratz case, they decided that the racial preferences that blocked Gratz’s entrance as a U-M bachelor’s degree candidate were not constitutional. At that time, Gratz said, U-M President Mary Sue Coleman chose to praise the ruling in the law school case and ignore the high court’s decision for undergrad students.
Three years later, Michigan voters overwhelming approved the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or MCRI, that ended all racial preferences in college admissions and government contracting. 

On Monday, Gratz said the praise directed at the court’s ruling by the University of Texas-Austin president was as “delusional” as the Coleman comments of a decade earlier.
“I don’t think we can expect the court to deliver a bold ruling on this issue when the attorneys before the court aren’t making bold demands,” said Gratz, now a California resident, who has promoted anti-affirmative action campaigns in numerous states. “This … decision shows that these policies are on life support.”

Gratz, who has formed a nonprofit foundation that fights against race-based policies, hopes for a bold decision in October when the Supreme Court takes up a federal appeals court decision against MCRI that was issued last November.
In the current case, the justices said the federal appeals court in New Orleans did not apply the highest level of judicial scrutiny when it upheld the Texas plan, which uses race as one among many factors in admitting about a quarter of the university’s incoming freshmen. The school gives the bulk of the slots to outgoing Texas high school seniors who ranked in the top 10 percent of their graduating class, without regard to race.
The high court ordered the appeals court to take another look at the case of Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who was not offered a spot at the university’s flagship Austin campus in 2008.
Kennedy said that the lower courts must determine that the use of race is necessary to achieve the educational benefits of diversity, the Supreme Court’s standard for affirmative action in education since 1978.

“As the court said in Grutter (vs. Bollinger), it remains at all times the university’s obligation to demonstrate, and the judiciary’s obligation to determine, that admissions processes ‘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,’” Kennedy said.

University of Texas president Bill Powers said the school plans no immediate changes in its admissions policies as a result of Monday’s ruling and will continue to defend them in the courts.
“We remain committed to assembling a student body at the University of Texas at Austin that provides the educational benefits of diversity on campus while respecting the rights of all students and acting within the constitutional framework established by the court,” Powers said.

But Edward Blum, who helped engineer Fisher’s challenge, said it is unlikely that the Texas plan and many other college plans can long survive.
“The Supreme Court has established exceptionally high hurdles for the University of Texas and other universities and colleges to overcome if they intend to continue using race preferences in their admissions policies,” said Blum, director of The Project on Fair Representation in Alexandria, Va.
AP contributed to this report.