Newsletter

April 2015

Scholars ask supreme court to revisit Fisher and rationales for racial preferences

New
York (March 16, 2015) -The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has joined a
petition to the Supreme Court to hearFisher v. University of Texasonce again.
This appeal challenges the right of a public university to use racial
preferences in student admissions.

Signing on as a
friend-of-the-courtin a brief filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, the
Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO),
Project 21,
and the American
Civil Rights Institute, the NAS called
on the Court to review theFishercase “to make it clear that the use of
race in admissions must be supported by clear, coherent goals, adopted after all
other means of achieving racial diversity have been tried and shown to be
unsuccessful.”

In June 2013, the Supreme Court
decided thatFisherwould be remanded back to the Fifth Circuit and that
the burden would rest on universities to demonstrate that they have exhausted
race-neutral means of achieving racial diversity in admissions.

Under that decision, public
institutions may use race as a factor in admissions policies only as a last
resort when all other possibilities have proven unsuccessful, and they must also
demonstrate that they have tried other such means.

Justice
Kennedy delivered
the opinion in Fisher (quotingBakke),
enunciating a
“strict scrutiny” Standard
for colleges
seeking to increase
racial diversity: “a university must clearly demonstrate that its purpose or
interest is both constitutionally permissible and substantial, and that its use
of the [racial or ethnic] classification is necessary . . . to the
accomplishment of its purpose.'”

As a follow-up to the decision in
that case, the NAS and fellow amicus CEO have sent public disclosure requests to
select public universities to ascertain whether college admissions programs are
in compliance with the Supreme Court’s “strict scrutiny” requirement. Rather
than demonstrating their conformity to this standard, these universities have
resisted public accountability and sought to keep their admissions practices
concealed.

“Universities, when they do reply
to requests in response to public disclosure laws, often refer to official
statements on their websites stating compliance with the Supreme Court’s
rulings. But they always find ways to avoid producing responsive documents, as
they are legally obliged to do. Instead, they act as if they have something to
hide,” said NAS public affairs director Glenn Ricketts, who has worked with NAS
members and state affiliates to request this information.

At other universities, CEO studies
from previous years show that admissions are deeply discriminatory on the basis
of race. For example, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 and 2008,
“Black and Hispanic applicants were preferred at ratios of between 500 and 1500
to 1 over both Asian and white applicants.”

In his article, “Why
Racial Preferences Are Wrong,” NAS president Peter Wood wrote:

Racial preference are profoundly unfair. We are a society founded on the truth
that all men are created equal. Our history as a nation is in a large part a
history of striving to better live up to this truth. Racial preferences move in
the opposite direction by treating some individuals as worthy of preferred
treatment merely because of racial attribution.

Contact: Peter Wood, President, pwood@nas.org