Washington
Despite striking down two voluntary school-integration plans in a 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court left solidly intact its precedents dealing with affirmative action in higher education.
Rather than signaling any clear desire to revisit its past decisions on race-conscious admissions policies -- as some conservative groups had urged it to do -- the court’s majority cited those precedents repeatedly as justification for holding that the school-integration policies before it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Education lawyers, as well as both supporters and critics of affirmative action, said the court’s decision would prompt many public-school districts to alter policies they had adopted for the sake of promoting racial integration. But they said it did not significantly change the law governing colleges’ use of race-conscious policies in admissions and other areas. It mainly just reaffirmed that colleges must seriously consider race-neutral alternatives, must not put too much weight on race or ethnicity, and must show that such policies have educational benefits.
“I think higher education came out as one of the big winners in this decision,” said John C. Brittain, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, an umbrella organization for higher-education groups, said the majority’s ruling “recognizes the interest in diversity that exists in higher education” and has “a special niche in our Constitutional tradition.” At the same time, however, it also makes clear that colleges need to make sure their consideration of race and ethnicity is narrowly tailored to advancing their educational missions.
The decision is expected to have no impact on higher-education desegregation plans.
Drawing Distinctions
The two cases joined in the court’s decision were Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, involving public schools in Louisville, Ky., and its suburbs, and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The cases differed from past disputes over race-based student-assignment policies brought before the Supreme Court in that neither of the two districts named in the complaints was under a court order to desegregate its schools. Because the integration policies were adopted voluntarily, they were subject to a higher level of judicial scrutiny than court-ordered efforts.
One of the key issues before the court was whether the policies at issue should be thought of as “affirmative action” and governed by the same legal principles and precedents as race-conscious college-admissions policies.
The court’s last major rulings on race in admissions were two 2003 decisions involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In one of the cases, Grutter v. Bollinger, the court narrowly upheld the consideration of race by the university’s law school, based on its conclusions that promoting racial diversity on campuses serves a compelling government interest and that the law school treated applicants as individuals and did not give their race or ethnicity too much weight. In the companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger, the court struck down a point-based admissions formula used by Michigan’s main undergraduate school because it automatically treated students differently based on their race.
In Thursday’s decision, the court’s majority suggested that the key justification Michigan offered in defending its policies -- the need to have diverse viewpoints represented on its campus -- did not hold as much weight in the context of elementary and secondary education.
Moreover, the court said, the school-integration policies at issue went well beyond the limits on affirmative action established in the Grutter and Gratz rulings because race was a primary factor considered in the assignment of some students.
Not Black and White
Writing for the court’s majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said: “The entire gist of the analysis in Grutter was that the admissions program at issue there focused on each applicant as an individual, and not simply as a member of a particular racial group. The classification of applicants by race upheld in Grutter was only as part of a ‘highly individualized, holistic review.’”
Even with regard to race, the school-assignment plans in these cases had only a limited concept of diversity, classifying students as white or “nonwhite” in Seattle and black or “other” in Jefferson County, Justice Roberts wrote.
Noting that the Seattle district had never been racially segregated by law, and that the Jefferson County district had been declared desegregated and released from court supervision in 2001, Justice Roberts argued that the districts’ interest in maintaining some level of racial integration does not justify assigning students to schools based on which of two racial categories they fall under, “an extreme approach in light of our precedents and our nation’s history of using race in public schools.”
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” his opinion said.
Whereas the court had held in its Grutter decision that colleges must demonstrate their “serious, good-faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives” if they are to argue that their race-conscious admissions policies are narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest, the Seattle and Jefferson County districts had “failed to show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals,” the chief justice wrote.
In a dissent in which he was joined by the three other members of the court’s minority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the chief justice’s opinion ignored past Supreme Court precedents allowing voluntary integration plans that used race-based student assignments and holding that not all government use of racial classifications should be treated in the same way.
The majority’s opinion “reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion,” Justice Breyer wrote. “In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant Constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by the state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines [Brown v. Board of Education’s] promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality.”
Levels of Uncertainty
Three justices -- Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas -- agreed with Chief Justice Roberts on all points of his opinion. A fifth justice, Anthony M. Kennedy, concurred with the opinion on most points -- including its bottom line that the integration plans at issue fell outside the law. He dissented in part, however, to emphasize his view that school districts have a compelling interest in promoting diversity that justifies their giving some consideration to race, even in the absence of past segregation.
Justice Kennedy listed several areas in which he thought school districts could take race into account, including the drawing of attendance zones, the selection of sites for new schools, and the recruitment of students and faculty members. Because his view was shared by the four justices who completely dissented against Chief Justice Roberts -- Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, and John Paul Stevens -- many legal analysts saw his view as representing the holding of the Supreme Court’s majority in that area.
Maureen Dwyer, an education lawyer for the firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, issued a statement saying that Justice Roberts’s opinion places school administrators “in a challenging position” in which “the courts are on their side in seeking diverse classrooms, but the means to get there are continually scrutinized and subject to interpretation.”
Terence J. Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which helped represent the plaintiffs in the Grutter and Gratz cases, said Thursday’s ruling reiterates the Grutter holding that colleges need to show that their race-conscious admissions policies have educational benefits. He added, however, “I think many colleges and universities are more or less in compliance with Grutter, so I doubt this is going to have a huge effect.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
