Case Study: Two Recent Supreme Court Approaches to Affirmative Action
One of the most difficult issues modern American universities have had to grapple with is the issue of fairness in the wake of the historic discrimination against minorities in the United States. To do so, the University of Michigan's University Office of Undergraduate Admissions (OUA) put forth written guidelines that required the admissions department to consider a number of factors in making admissions decisions, "including high school grades, standardized test scores, high school quality, curriculum strength, geography, alumni relationships, leadership, and race." 1 The university defined African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans to be historically "underrepresented minorities." 2 These minorities, Michigan alleged, had been the subject of historical injustices, and it was legitimate to take such experiences into consideration when building a freshman class much as one might consider the applicant's status as a son or a daughter of an alumni, the candidate's membership in the high school marching band, or location in another region of the country to lend geographic diversity to this state school, a recipient of federal funds.A rejected student, the plaintiff Gratz and a number of other petitioners filed a class act
When discussing the Michigan case, unsurprisingly the most cited case in the decision of both the minority and the majority was that of the Bakke decision. Powell's contention that allowing more minority students to go to medical school than their qualifications might entail would automatically increase the number of doctors to such unserved populations, however, seems fairly watertight. Justice Powell, in defense of the majority decision, cited the four reasons the David Medical School offered for its special program, first to reduce "the historic deficit of traditionally disfavored minorities in medical schools and the medical profession;" to counter "the effects of societal discrimination;" to increase "the number of physicians who will practice in communities currently underserved," by physicans, presumably minority communities, and to obtain "the educational benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body. As the result of the Bakke decision, Bakke was admitted by court order to the medical program. This policy was set forth in the 1970s, during the early days after the historic civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and affirmative action was still a relatively new concept. 5 Four of the justices on the Supreme Court at the time, led by Justice Stevens, felt that the UC policy was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which stated that no person shall be subjected to discrimination "on the ground of race. "4 Special consideration of an applicant's unique circumstances, such as a white student from a highly disadvantaged background, was a rarity rather than part of the University of Michigan selection process, according to the majority's decision. Thus, Michigan would have to review its admissions policies, because an injustice had occurred. By using the numerical points system, the defendants were able to demonstrate this in more clear and quantifiable terms than if race had been considered as a mere, ambiguous 'factor' in the decision-making process, as it often is at other universities across the country. "3 The court found that Michigan's use of race in its admissions policy was too narrowly tailored to suit the school's interest in creating a diverse student body, thus the policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Supreme Court regarding the Michigan policy, written by Chief Justice Reinquist, "it is undisputed that the University [of Michigan] admits virtually every qualified applicant from these [underrepresented] groups. This is reflected in the argument made frequently that affirmative action, as it is currently practiced by employers and universities alike, is not true discrimination, because race and ethnic background or experience creates a positive or desirable societal effect, and also because unqualified minority applicants are not admitted, as no places are set aside for minority candidates alone. Michigan's 20-point automatic distribution of the admissions policy simply asked if a candidate was of a particular race, and did not, as Justice Powell deemed acceptable in Bakke, merely allow university admissions program to consider "race or ethnic background " as simply an additional 'plus' in a particular applicant's file. Gratz and others argued that the university's use of racial preferences in undergraduate admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Common topics in this essay:
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Justice Powell,
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justice powell,
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Acceptance Essays
