A federal judge on Monday tossed out a lawsuit filed by two white applicants to the University of Texas at Austin who said they were rejected because of admissions policies that unfairly favored members of minority groups.
Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court here ruled that the university’s admissions policies were narrowly tailored, especially as they relate to race, and were thus constitutional.
Judge Sparks based his decision on considerations outlined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race in admissions. “The Texas solicitor general summarized this case best when he stated, ‘If the plaintiffs are right, Grutter is wrong,’” Judge Sparks wrote.
The lawsuit was filed last year by Abigail Noel Fisher, an 18-year-old applicant from Sugar Land, Tex. She was later joined in the suit by another rejected applicant, Rachel M. Michalewicz of Buda, Tex.
The suit argued that the university should not have been considering applicants’ race when it had in place a more-effective, race-neutral approach toward achieving diversity.
The lawsuit was backed by the Project on Fair Representation, a Washington-based legal-defense group that opposes affirmative action. The group’s director, Edward J. Blum, said it will appeal the case.
“The real issue that has been laid out for an appeals court is, Can you reintroduce race and ethnicity after a university has shown that a race-neutral admissions procedure can be effective?” he said.
The method he is referring to is a law, in place since 1997, that guarantees Texas applicants who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes admission to any public university in the state. State lawmakers in May voted to limit the number of students who can be automatically admitted to the Austin campus to 75 percent of an incoming class to give admissions officers more flexibility.
In its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges may consider race in admissions but must first give “serious, good-faith consideration” to “workable, race-neutral” alternatives to achieving diversity, and that race-conscious policies must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest.
Since the Grutter decision, the University of Texas has sought to reintroduce some consideration of race to ensure greater diversity than the 10-percent policy alone achieves.
Patricia Ohlendorf, vice president for legal affairs at the Austin campus, said that race is just one factor the university considers as part of a holistic review that also includes test scores, high-school grades, leadership abilities, and evidence of overcoming adversity.
She said in an interview on Monday that the automatic admissions policy hasn’t done enough to achieve diversity at the university. “We have not found that the top-10-percent law and policy in and of itself have been sufficient to achieve a critical mass of minority students.”
Anurima Bhargava, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s education practice area, said Monday’s ruling demonstrated that the University of Texas’s approach meets the criteria outlined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision.
“The court’s decision was consistent with Grutter v. Bollinger and the principles it espoused, that universities should be able to pursue diversity and consider race as one of many factors,” Ms. Bhargava said.
