Justices reaffirm race as college-admission factor

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court struck a compromise Monday in its first test of university affirmative action in a decade, telling a federal appeals court to give tougher scrutiny to a University of Texas admissions program.

In a 7-1 ruling, the court left intact a 2003 decision that reaffirmed the right of universities to use race as an admissions factor. The majority instead said a federal appeals court hadn’t properly applied the standards laid out in the 2003 ruling.

The decision provides a limited victory to opponents of racial preferences, giving them new grounds to challenge university admission policies around the country. The majority said universities must prove that their means of attaining diversity meet a demanding constitutional test known as “strict scrutiny.”

“Strict scrutiny imposes on the university the ultimate burden of demonstrating, before turning to racial classifications, that available,workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

Affirmative action has been a fixture on U.S. campuses since the 1960s, diversifying what had been many virtually all- white student bodies. Most of the nation’s selective colleges and professional schools consider race as they seek to ensure a multiracial student body. Blacks and Hispanics now make up more than a quarter of U.S. college students.

At the core of the debate was whether universities can adequately diversify without resorting to racial preferences.Texas admits three-quarters of its freshman class each year on the basis of high school class rank - the “top 10 percent” rule. That system, while race-neutral on the surface, ensures a significant number of minority-group students because it guarantees slots to students at predominantly Hispanic and black schools.

The university considers race only in admitting the rest of the class. Opponents of preferences say that’s unnecessary, given the success of the class rank method. Texas counters that even with race-based admissions, a high percentage of its classes have few if any black and Hispanic students.

Kennedy said that while courts should defer to universities in determining whether diversity is essential to their educational mission, judges should closely scrutinize the means schools use to bolster minority-group enrollment.

“The university must prove that the means chosen by the university to attain diversity are narrowly tailored to that goal,” Kennedy wrote. “On this point, the university receives no deference.”

Joining Kennedy’s opinion Monday were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor, the court’s first Hispanic justice, is a supporter of affirmative action who says she benefited from it during her career.

In a concurring opinion, Thomas said he would have outlawed the use of race by university admissions offices.

“If the court were actually applying strict scrutiny, it would require Texas either to close the university or to stop discriminating against applicants based on their race,” he wrote. “The court has put other schools to that choice, and there is no reason to treat the university differently.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Texas had followed the model the court approved in the 2003 case. She said government actors, including state universities, need not be blind to the lingering effects of “an overtly discriminatory past.”

Justice Elena Kagan didn’t take part in the case. She was the top courtroom lawyer for President Barack Obama’s administration when it filed a brief at the appeals court level.

Edward Blum, who organized the challenge to the University of Texas policy, said the court had established “exceptionally high hurdles” for colleges to meet.

“It is unlikely that most institutions will be able to overcome these hurdles,” Blum, the director of the Project on Fair Representation in suburban Alexandria, Va., said in an e-mailed statement. “This opinion will compel the Fifth Circuit to strike down UT’s current use of race and ethnicity.”

Texas said the ruling won’t force any immediate changes in its admissions policies. Bill Powers, the university’s president, said in a statement that its system “fully satisfies” the standards laid out by the Supreme Court.

Admissions practices at universities can continue for at least another year as the case works its way again through the courts, said Michael Olivas, a University of Houston law professor who helped draw up the University of Texas admissions plan. Proponents of affirmative action will be relieved by the ruling, he said.

“This could have been so much worse and may yet be,” Olivas said in a telephone interview. Affirmative action “lives on, but all of us believe it’s under an impending death penalty.”

The 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, said colleges and graduate schools could consider race as long as they do so through a broad review of a student’s application and don’t mechanistically award extra points to every minority-group member. The author of that 5-4 ruling, Sandra Day O’Connor,retired in 2006.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who was involved in the 2003 case, said before Monday’s ruling that a decision barring affirmative action would undermine the ability of universities to ensure integrated student bodies.

“The integration would not stop completely, but itwould fall very significantly,” Bollinger said on Bloomberg Radio’s Bloomberg Surveillance program. “If the Supreme Court were to overrule this, it would upset 50 years of very important and serious work to help realize Brown v. Board of Education,” the landmark 1954 school integration case.

The Texas policy was challenged by Abigail Noel Fisher, who applied unsuccessfully to the school in 2008 and later enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. A graduate of a Houston-area public high school, she said she was passed over by UT in favor of minority-member classmates with lower grades and fewer extracurricular activities.

Texas had support in the case from some of the nation’s most powerful institutions. Fifty-nine companies - including Microsoft, Wal-Mart Stores, Gap, General Electric, Pfizer, Shell Oil and Viacom - filed a brief saying they rely on universities to prepare a racially diverse work force.

Those corporations were in the unusual position of arguing alongside the Obama administration, which cast affirmative action as a national-security issue. The administration said race-conscious admissions, at the country’s military academies and at universities with Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, help ensure a diverse officer corps.

Texas argued that its program is a model of the type of plan the high court approved in the Grutter ruling.

The case is Fisher v. University of Texas, No. 11-345.

Information for this article was contributed by Bob Drummond, John Hechinger and David Mildenberg of Bloomberg News.