JUSTICE AND RACE
WASHINGTON – In its most important ruling on race in decades, a sharply divided Supreme Court yesterday said colleges can give preference to applicants based on race, but cautioned that it can’t be the overriding factor.
The closely watched case – based on a 1996 University of Michigan Law School rejection – clears the way for the continuation of flexible college-admissions policies, under which candidates can be evaluated on more than just “hard” variables like grades and test scores.
A majority on the nation’s top court cited the value to society of encouraging all races to learn and work together.
“Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized,” Justice Sandra O’Connor wrote in the majority decision.
The Constitution permits schools to consider an applicant’s race as among the many factors when weighing which students will win a place at a top-notch school, O’Connor wrote.
What a school cannot do, the justices said, is install inflexible or automatic racial preferences.
A second Supreme Court ruling yesterday, also involving Michigan, struck down a more rigid undergraduate admission system that assigned “points” to race. In that case, the justices nixed the undergraduate school’s 150-point grading system, which had automatically given minorities a 20-point bonus.
But the 5-4 ruling on the law school – the most significant affirmative-action case since the Bakke ruling of 1978 – left the court bitterly divided, with four conservative justices strongly objecting to using race as a factor in admissions.
One lawyer predicted that because the court didn’t specify what is and isn’t permitted, it could lead to decades of lawsuits over which racial preferences are legally acceptable.
The case centered on the case of Barbara Grutter, a white Michigan woman who applied to the law school in 1996.
With a 3.8 GPA and 161 score on her LSAT, Grutter thought she was a shoo-in, but instead was placed on the waiting list and ultimately rejected.
The law school uses an admissions formula that gives extra consideration to blacks, Hispanics and applicants from other groups the school says have historically suffered discrimination.
With Post Wire Services
Here’s what the Supreme Court decided yesterday on affirmative action:
The major issue:
Yes, universities can give minority applicants an edge in admissions.
But they cannot make race the crucial factor.
However, the court didn’t say how to do one without doing the other.
The other key points:
* Racial quotas remain unconstitutional.
* A undergraduate point system at the University of Michigan gave minority students too much of an edge.
* A less rigid system at the university’s law school to increase minorities on campus passed was constitutional.
The effects:
* Race-conscious policies can remain on campus – at least until the next major ruling.
* It virtually guarantees years of new legal battles as colleges, students and parents try to clarify how affirmative action can be translated into admissions decisions.