A federal lawsuit filed here on Monday accuses the University of Texas at Austin of improperly considering an applicant’s race when more-effective, race-neutral, ways of achieving diversity were available.
The plaintiff, a white, 18-year-old applicant from Richmond, Tex., who was rejected by the university, filed the suit with the backing of the Project on Fair Representation, a Washington-based legal-defense fund that opposes affirmative action. A copy of the complaint is available on the organization’s Web site.
Edward J. Blum, the group’s director, said the student, Abigail Noel Fisher, was discriminated against because she is white. The lawsuit seeks to force the university to re-evaluate her application using race-neutral criteria and to stop considering race and ethnicity in undergraduate admissions decisions.
Ms. Fisher applied to the university in January as a high-school senior. She had a grade-point average of 3.59 out of a possible 4.0, and her highest combined reading and math SAT scores of 1180 were competitive with those of students who were accepted, according to the lawsuit. She also participated in numerous extracurricular activities and was ranked in the top 12 percent of her class, the complaint says.
Since 1997, Texas law has guaranteed in-state applicants who are in the top 10 percent of their high school’s graduating class admission to any public university in the state.
For several years before that, universities in Texas were banned from considering race in admissions under a federal-appeals-court ruling known as Hopwood v. Texas. That decision was superseded by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which gave colleges nationwide a green light to resume using race in admissions decisions but attached some conditions. One caveat held that colleges must first consider whether they could achieve the same results using race-neutral policies.
That is what Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit alleges that the University of Texas neglected to do in 2005, when it resumed using race-conscious admissions criteria, in addition to the top-10-percent formula.
“The top-10-percent plan has proven more successful in achieving diversity than did race-based affirmative action,” Mr. Blum said in an interview on Monday. “Because of that, we believe the University of Texas is foreclosed from even considering a student’s race.”
According to the lawsuit, the university’s admissions policy “has had a pervasive negative effect on nonminority applicants, while producing only marginal increases in minority admissions and enrollment” at the university’s flagship campus here.
Patricia C. Ohlendorf, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said her office was reviewing the lawsuit.
“Each year we are very fortunate to receive applications from thousands of very able high-school seniors,” Ms. Ohlendorf said in a written statement, “but as with many universities around the country, we are limited in the number of applicants that we can admit. We believe that our undergraduate admissions policies are well-administered and in compliance with Supreme Court precedent and all other applicable law.”
The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has received four complaints about race-based admissions policies at Texas universities (The Chronicle, August 3, 2007). Mr. Blum, whose group filed one of the complaints, said he was tired of waiting for the cases to be heard. He said he received an acknowledgment from the department that it had received his group’s complaint, which was filed in July, but that he has heard nothing since then.
“The Office for Civil Rights has had a number of complaints pending for going on four years, and clearly the Bush Department of Education doesn’t want to address the issue,” he said. “Now it will be up to the courts to decide.”
No one was available for comment at the Education Department on Monday afternoon. In August a spokesman said the department was working as fast as it could to resolve the cases.
