Federal Court Rules UNC May Use Race in Admissions
“has engaged in ongoing, serious, good faith considerations of workable race neutral alternatives in an effort to find options to its race conscious process in admissions.”
Shouldn’t all college admissions be merit based? If they’re not, what are we really doing here?
Jonathan Turley writes at his blog:
Federal Court Rules In Favor of UNC in Use of Race in Admissions
Many observers are waiting for the United States Supreme Court to decide whether to delve again into college admissions with a pending case out of Harvard University in which Asian and white students claim discrimination. We have been following that case for a couple years. However, there is a new ruling out of North Carolina that could present another opportunity for the Court to revisit the issue. Judge Loretta C. Biggs of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina just ruled that UNC can use race criteria to guarantee a “critical mass” of minority students in its classes. Both cases could offer the Court an opportunity to clarify its conflicted affirmative action rulings on college admissions.
In her decision, Judge Biggs rejected the claim of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) that UNC engaged in unconstitutional discrimination under its 2005 diversity plan for “critical masses of underrepresented populations.” Biggs said that it was not necessary for UNC to define the term critical mass beyond the desire for the educational benefits of a diverse student body. It was not a quota for how many students of particular races should be admitted and “race is not a defining feature.”
Judge Biggs further found that UNC “has engaged in ongoing, serious, good faith considerations of workable race neutral alternatives in an effort to find options to its race conscious process in admissions.”
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Comments
“The Way to Stop Discrimination on the Basis of Race Is to Stop Discriminating on the Basis of Race.” Chief Justice Roberts
With Judge Biggs ruling maybe we’ll see some whites on the UNC basketball team.
I have a theory: ANYONE applying to college to take a serious course of study are almost certainly qualified to BE in college, even if it is one of the brand-X ones. Even they can be serious places. Yes, I DO consider music and other “arts” majors to be serious in most circumstances.
My theory also states that anyone applying to take fluff majors like grievance studies, or what WERE serious majors decades ago (philosophy, anthropology, etc), are not college material.
Read the opinion– she did NOT rule in favor of UNC. She didn’t rule anything. She denied BOTH parties’ requests for summary judgement and said it needed to be decided by a jury….
And there’s the core of the problem. If there were any such benefits then she’d be right. And the Supreme Court has said these benefits do exist, so she’s bound by that. To reverse this it will be necessary for the Supreme Court to officially declare that these benefits either don’t exist or are too insignificant to justify racial discrimination.
This ruling pretty much aligns with the Bakke case – SCOTUS ruled you can have affirmative action as an admissions criteria, you just can’t reserve a specific number by race.
So by extension, “critical mass” is a useful argument as long as it remains undefined. Once a number is put on it, then it starts becoming a quota.
This insistence on vagueness is just a formula for continued employment of lawyers into the future, and social justice folks always seem to win when that happens.
So now the Harvard case is in favor of affirmative action, and this one too or at least not against it. Where is the controversy between circuits for SCOTUS to resolve?
Seems to me that this ruling makes it less likely that SCOTUS gets involved. Which I see as unfortunate, because someone needs to crack down on the far-left admissions offices.