Abstract
Five experts, Bret D. Asbury, Richard D. Kahlenberg, Sigal Alon, Jennifer Pierce, and John D. Skrentny, explore what the recent Supreme Court decision means for the future of race preferences in higher education.
Fisher v. University of Texas is one of the most important cases on higher education to be heard by the Supreme Court. Given its conservative bent, many observers expected the Court to end affirmative action with this case. But instead of issuing a landmark decision, it remanded the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. ¶
Abigail Fisher, the Caucasian plaintiff (as described by the Supreme Court), sued the University of Texas for denying her admission. She alleged that the consideration of race in admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause. Her argument was framed in meritocratic language; considering race to help blacks and Latinos would harm more deserving white students.
Fisher’s perspective reflects an ideal of meritocracy that runs deep in U.S. culture. We say things like “work hard and you’ll get ahead” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” White people are big proponents of the idea of meritocracy, likely because they do well in meritocratic systems due to socio-historical advantages of income, wealth, parents’ education, better schools and neighborhoods, etc. But University of Miami sociologist Frank Samson found an interesting twist on white support for meritocratic admissions. As he expected, the whites he surveyed in California were great cheerleaders of basing admissions on test scores. But when they were told that the proportion of Asians in the University of California is twice their proportion of the state’s population, whites decided that using criteria other than just tests was a good idea. So being judged on their merits is a great system for whites, until they think it might stop working for them. Then some kind of affirmative action program becomes desirable.
The authors in this Viewpoints approach the topic of affirmative action from very distinct angles. Law professor Bret D. Asbury rebuts recent interpretations by pundits who claim that the Fisher ruling implies stricter scrutiny in considering race. He argues that Court’s decision actually left standards of scrutiny undefined, leaving lower courts to figure it out. Richard D. Kahlenberg argues that instead of race-based affirmative action, we’d all be better off using class as a proxy for race, as it would greatly increase class diversity, sorely lacking at top universities. Also, it would short circuit political objections to the use of race as a criterion for affirmative action and achieve the same goal of diversity in the end. Writing from Israel, Sigal Alon tells us that when class-based affirmative action programs were adopted, geographic and socioeconomic diversity increased at elite universities, and half of all students admitted under the programs were ethnic minorities at the bottom of Israel’s social hierarchy. Still, she says that under race-based policies the overall level of ethnic diversity would have been much higher.
Two other articles discuss why the fact of continued discrimination belies the idea that we are becoming a color-blind country. Jennifer Pierce examines how in one large company she studied, white lawyers keep black lawyers out of the loop by leaving them out of social events and not mentoring them. And finally, John D. Skrentny argues that racial preferences, reviled by Republicans, are widely practiced outside of formal affirmative action programs in a great number of settings, including within the Republican Party.