More than 440 scholars have signed onto a brief telling the U.S. Supreme Court that research supports colleges’ use of race-conscious admissions policies like the one the justices are weighing in a case involving the University of Texas at Austin.
The brief, prepared by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at the University of California at Los Angeles, argues that the Austin campus cannot achieve sufficient levels of diversity for educational purposes without evaluating some share of its applicants using holistic admission criteria. It argues that sufficient levels of diversity cannot be produced by class rank-based admissions guarantees such as a Texas law assuring young state residents in the top tenth of their high-school class a spot at any Texas public university.
In states that have banned public colleges from considering race, the brief says, graduate and professional programs and selective undergraduate colleges “have experienced a substantial decline in racial diversity,” which “damages the quality of education and educational opportunities for all students.” The brief urges the court not to hand down a sweeping decision affecting other colleges around the nation based on the Texas case, given the differences in various colleges’ circumstances.
Although all of the 444 scholars who signed the brief are described as social scientists, most played no role in producing the research that the brief cites.
The brief, submitted to the Supreme Court on Thursday, resembles other research-based defenses of race-conscious admissions offered to the court when it last considered such policies, in separate 2003 decisions involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s chief undergraduate program and law school. Much of the research presented to the court then was challenged, and some of those involved in presenting it to the court subsequently acknowledged simplifying their findings or glossing over such policies’ shortcomings in an attempt to sway the justices.
The Civil Rights Project’s latest brief was criticized as similarly slanted by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at UCLA who serves as principal investigator of Project Seaphe, a collective of researchers critical of race-conscious admission policies. Mr. Sander, who criticized research supporting race-conscious admissions in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court in May, argued that the Civil Rights Project’s brief spins some research findings and relies on other research based on surveys of students who felt pressure “to endorse the diversity ideology” of their college. More-objective studies “find that many of the diversity claims are overstated,” he said.
In July the Civil Rights Project publicized a new report concluding that state bans on race-conscious admission policies have severely reduced black and Hispanic enrollments at graduate programs at public universities. The report was based on research that had been presented at an academic conference in 2010.
