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Posted on 06/23/2016 10:21:04 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to a race-conscious admissions program at the University of Texas, Austin, handing supporters of affirmative action a major victory.
The vote was 4-3. Only seven justices participated in the decision. Justice Elena Kagan had recused herself for prior work on the case as United States solicitor general and the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat remains vacant.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., dissented.
The case concerned the University of Texas’s idiosyncratic admissions program. Most applicants from within the state are admitted under a part of the program that guarantees admission to top students in every high school in the state. (This is often called the Top 10 Percent program, though the percentage cutoff can vary by year.)
“A university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness,’” Justice Kennedy wrote, quoting from a landmark desegregation case. “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”
In a lengthy and impassioned dissent from the bench, Justice Alito denounced the court’s affirmative action ruling, saying the university had not demonstrated the need for race-based admissions and saying the program benefitted advantaged students over impoverished ones.
“This is affirmative action gone berserk,” Justice Alito told his colleagues, adding that what they had done in the case was misguided and “is simply wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A & M does NOT discriminate. If there’s a z in your last name you’re in. Even if your family picks you up at your high school every day in a new escalade with the other half still back where the came from making tons of dough
Whites should quit applying to Universities that practice racism. Let these universities die the death they deserve.
Dumb peoples of color need degree too, yo.
Unfortunately, that’s nearly all the public ones.
Which universities would THEY be?
Iniversity of Texas is what we’re talking about. That’s a big problem. We’re also hearing from people pretending A & M doesn’t discriminate
Tge situation of the caliber/academic non excellence not to of people they’re letting in versus who they’re rejecting on the basis of Mexican descent in addition to what the Supreme Court was looking at should be alarming. But people don’t see it
Then why the SC case?
affirmative action produces the best of the best , example Marilyn Mosby
Sounds to me like an opportunity. Affirmative action has been something they can do, I.e. no longer required. How about a new “Merit University”?
With all due respect I want the USA back, would you please specify constitutional clauses that you believe that justices have wrongly ignored concerning the Court’s decision?
Otherwise, the only race-based right that the states have amended the Constitution to expressly protect is voting rights as evidenced by the 15th Amendment. And this school-related issue is clearly out of the scope of voting rights.
The bottom line is that the states have never amended the Constitution to specifically prohibit what UT is doing. So since UT is not violating any constitutionally enumerated rights with its admissions policy, it’s ultimately up to the voters of a given state to decide how they want their state’s universities to be managed in that aspect.
Kennedy just said that they can discriminate.
And that means it can go the other direction. So now they can say, "race diversity is not our primary goal. Merit is. So race or ethnicity will not be a factor in admission".
He said, "considerable deference..."
Poor Abby Fisher. She had to get dissed by the phalanx of America hating filth who wear black robes, not one of whom can lay claim to the label "American".
Fisher sued over provisional admissions, a very narrow portion of UT admissions each year.
The provisionals account for 50 or so of the 50,0000 students at Texas.
UT can sit on it and spin.
This Top 10% Rule that created more diversity came about because UT discriminated against 4 white law students. See - Hopwood v Texas at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopwood_v._Texas
“Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996), was the first successful legal challenge to a university’s affirmative action policy in student admissions since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). In Hopwood, four white plaintiffs who had been rejected from University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law challenged the institution’s admissions policy on equal protection grounds and prevailed. After seven years as a precedent in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the Hopwood decision was abrogated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.[1] After being rejected by the University of Texas School of Law in 1992, Cheryl J. Hopwood filed a federal lawsuit against the University on September 29, 1992, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Hopwood, a white female, was denied admission to the law school despite being better qualified (at least under certain metrics) than many admitted minority candidates.”
Hopwood won the case.
After that, beginning in 1997, every state university in Texas was required to admit any applicant who ranked in the top 10% of their graduating Texas high school class. While the 10% had to take the SAT test, the score wasn’t counted. Yes, throwing out national test scores helped minority students.
However, in 2009, UT (with 45,000 students then and over 50,000 today) got pissy about it claiming the 10% Rule would not allow them a measly <100 admission slots for their football team. The university president said in a press conference, with a straight face, that they’d have to shut down Longhorn Football. Ohhhhh, nooooooo!!!!! Yeah, that was nothing but what Bevo left behind on the field after the games, a big pile of steaming bs. After wasting a year and untold tax dollars in the TX Legislature, it was decided to pat UT on their little pointy uber liberal heads requiring they only have to admit the top 8% while all other TX state universities continue to be held to the Top 10% Rule.
Also, the new Top 8% at UT would have to pass the SAT test. Oops, now they’re back to discriminating against minorities who aren’t able to make the score.
Funny how uber lib UT, who’s fault is was in the first place discriminating against white students, doesn’t have to follow diversity rules which everyone else must follow. Once again proving just how racist liberals are.
My run-in was along about the same time. I applied at a state park and was hired. Filled out all the paperwork, got settled into a new house, the whole nine yards. The day before I was to start, they called and said I was unhired because HQ in Austin said they had to hire a minority. I am female applying for a male dominated position but that wasn’t diverse enough. It must be a black person. That job number was on the jobs listings for many years without ever being filled. Why? Because no blacks lived in the area.
A short time before that, I applied to work for the post office. I had the highest test score and the post master was required to interview the top 3. He flat out told me he wasn’t hiring me because I was female. Wish I’d not been so naïve back then and had sued his butt off.
Even more painful when you realize that Reagan originally nominated Robert Bork to fill the chair that Anthony Kennedy eventually won.
Every Republican president since Eisenhower has nominated, or tried to nominate, at least one center-left RINO Supreme Court Justice.
And the Democratic Presidents?
Every one of their Supreme Court nominations has been a hard line Democratic partisan, except one.
Byron White, nominated by John Kennedy, was a center-right moderate.
There already is. If you don't work you get free housing, food, phone, heat, medical... If you do work, you get to pay taxes and drive by your non working neighbors every morning and afternoon who live in houses just like yours and drive a car just like yours and eat just like you.
A while back we had a discussion about an affirmative action admit that went to Harvard. She failed the bar exam three times and then sued the bar for some cockeyed racial discrimination claim.
Expect more of this in the future, especially for the UC system. As Asians, blacks, and whites with phenomenal test scores and grades are pushed aside in favor of “dreamers,” the university system will fall further into turmoil.
This will have an affect on all aspects of our economy. Unqualified lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other professionals will flood the market. If you want to see how this ends, look to what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. He purged the middle class and anyone with glasses, and brought in illiterate peasant farmers to work as doctors and engineers. The same thing is going on here, but it will just take longer.
Oh lord, the Post Office is affirmative action central. The only federal agency worse than that is OPM.
Still should not be based on race.
And those particular ones were not based entirely on academic merit, as was claimed.
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SCOTUS as usual full of short-sighted idiots (including RINO’s lke Kennedy), even worse is that they oppose these racial preferences and quotas on private businesses, one of the reasons my wife and I shifted much of our business overseas. In Germany, Netherlands and even France, they strictly forbid any kid of “affirmative action” to give preference based on unrelated BS like race, so at the very least we can be secure that when we hire someone with the academic and work credentials on paper, that this person actually qualified and went through the gauntlet. Whereas in the US it’s impossible to know if a minority hire in particular is qualified or was “boosted” by affirmative action, and yet the courts require us to hire them anyway. Unsurprisingly more and more companies just relocate out of the US entirely. Unintended consequences strike again.
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