The College Fix

NYT Supreme Court writer Linda Greenhouse profiled the next year of the Roberts Court, predicting that race would be its defining issue. As an example, she brought up the University of Texas at Austin case, where the university’s affirmative action program is on trial:

At issue is not the well-known Texas 10 percent plan, which achieves a fair measure of diversity at the flagship campus at Austin by admitting the top 10 percent of every graduating high school class in the state. Rather, the case challenges what the university has done since the Grutter decision, tweaking the 10 percent plan to achieve more targeted diversity by taking race, among other factors, into account to fill a small portion of each entering class.

The chance that this portion of the Texas admissions process will survive the Supreme Court’s scrutiny seems slight.

That’s because it shouldn’t survive. The Grutter decision made clear that affirmative action plans were only constitutional if the university could find no other way to achieve a diverse student body. Since Texas already admitted that the 10 percent plan helped it achieve the kind of student body it wanted, the university may not also engage in race-conscious admissions decisions.

Greenhouse is more concerned, however, that the Supreme Court’s decision will strike down affirmative action entirely:

The real question is whether the court will use this case, Fisher v. University of Texas, as a vehicle to overturn or sharply narrow the Grutter decision itself. That’s what the plaintiff is seeking, and it’s hard to imagine another reason for the justices to have accepted the case. Public and private universities, many of which employ Grutter-style affirmative action at least to some extent, are watching this case with great anxiety.

Only time will tell, but this is just one case that will weigh on the future of affirmative action. Conflicting rulings from the Sixth and Ninth Circuit courts on whether states may prohibit public universities from using race as a factor in admissions means the Supreme Court will likely have to rule on this matter as well.

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