Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Hands-On Career Preparation
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    Alternative Pathways
Sign In
Legal

The Supreme Court Could Fuel Campus Unrest in Ruling on Race in Admissions

By Peter Schmidt December 8, 2015
Protesters stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2012, as the justices heard arguments in a case involving affirmative action at the University of Texas. The court’s decision to rehear the case this week gives it a chance to further limit colleges’ efforts to meet rising student demands for more diversity.
Protesters stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2012, as the justices heard arguments in a case involving affirmative action at the University of Texas. The court’s decision to rehear the case this week gives it a chance to further limit colleges’ efforts to meet rising student demands for more diversity.Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call, Getty Images
Washington

Black and Hispanic student activists demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court whenever it debates affirmative action in college admissions, but this time around, they are already protesting throughout the nation.

As the court prepares to hear oral arguments on Wednesday in Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (No. 14-981), a lawsuit challenging that institution’s consideration of race in admitting undergraduates, colleges elsewhere are on edge. They have been rocked by a wave of demonstrations by minority students who complain of feeling unwelcome and isolated on campuses.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Black and Hispanic student activists demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court whenever it debates affirmative action in college admissions, but this time around, they are already protesting throughout the nation.

As the court prepares to hear oral arguments on Wednesday in Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (No. 14-981), a lawsuit challenging that institution’s consideration of race in admitting undergraduates, colleges elsewhere are on edge. They have been rocked by a wave of demonstrations by minority students who complain of feeling unwelcome and isolated on campuses.

At the nearly 70 colleges where such protesters have issued formal lists of demands, the most common include calls for big increases in the share of students and faculty members who are black, Hispanic, or Native American.

A coalition of educators concerned with minority students’ access to college warned in a friend-of-the-court brief that the sense of isolation such students are complaining about will only worsen “if race-conscious college-admission processes are terminated too soon.”

Seldom have the questions being asked by the Supreme Court seemed so divorced from the reality outside its doors. The campus protests are part of a broad social movement, sparked by police shootings of unarmed black men, that denounces structural and systemic racism.

Yet the justices have taken up a lawsuit predicated on the belief that American society should focus less, not more, on remedying the effects of discrimination. They’re being asked to second-guess a public university’s efforts to ensure that members of minority groups stand a good chance of passing through its doors.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the case, expected by next summer, almost certainly will do nothing to make it easier for colleges to meet student protesters’ demands. If anything, the court appears likely to hand down a decision that imposes new restrictions on colleges’ ability to give extra consideration to minority applicants, further hindering the already meager flow of black, Hispanic, and Native American people into the advanced-degree programs that train college professors and administrators.

The Shadow of the Past

Ms. Fisher’s lawyers argue that the Austin campus does not need to consider applicants’ race because it achieves sufficient diversity without doing so, through a state law that guarantees admission to students in the top tenth of their high-school class.

Briefs filed in support of Texas by dozens of colleges and higher-education organizations say other institutions cannot achieve enough diversity through race-neutral means without compromising their educational missions. A group of 13 universities argued that their use of admissions guarantees based on some objective measure, such as class rank or SAT score, would “quickly produce unmanageable numbers of admittees” and would undermine their goal “of admitting a student body with a diverse array of talents, interests, backgrounds, and worldviews.”

The University of Texas accuses Ms. Fisher’s lawyers of ignoring the history of that institution, which remained off-limits to black students under a state law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1950, and, they argue, continues to struggle to overcome its reputation as unwelcoming to members of minority groups.

ADVERTISEMENT

Some briefs filed in support of Texas note that the university’s system relies on a high level of housing and school segregation to produce diversity through the top-10-percent plan. Another brief characterizes the difficulty colleges face in trying to achieve diversity without race-conscious admissions as symptoms of the same history of discrimination that gave rise to the recent movements to end racial bias in the criminal-justice system.

Such a focus on dealing with historical and societal segregation carries legal risks for Texas, however. The Supreme Court has rejected remedying such ills as a justification for race-conscious admissions, leaving the educational benefits of such policies as their only allowable justification.

Briefs from the California Association of Scholars and two of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ eight members say Texas’ supporters betray its motives. Its policy has less to do with pedagogy than “with indulging the tastes of legislators, accreditors, donors, students, and others for what they superficially regard as social justice,” the two commissioners’ brief says.

History’s Legacies

Several Supreme Court precedents likely to shape the pending Texas decision already loom as obstacles to any college’s efforts to bring about steep increases in minority enrollment.

ADVERTISEMENT

Beginning with its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court has long held that colleges can give only slight consideration to race, and only for the sake of advancing students’ educational interests, not to remedy societal discrimination or to try to ensure that student bodies mirror diversity in the broader population.

In a pair of 2003 rulings involving the University of Michigan, the court barred colleges from using admissions formulas that automatically reward applicants for minority status, and said colleges must give good-faith consideration to race-neutral policies that help promote diversity.

The Supreme Court initially weighed in on the Fisher case two years ago, ruling 7 to 1 that lower federal courts had failed to conduct a “searching examination” to ensure that no race-neutral alternatives would suffice. As it considers the case again, Ms. Fisher’s lawyers are urging it to “remind universities that the use of race in admissions must be a last resort — not the rule.”

The court also has left intact formidable political obstacles to colleges’ diversity efforts, by last year upholding bans on race-conscious admissions policies approved by voters in six states: Arizona, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Washington.

ADVERTISEMENT

Factor in Florida, where the state-university system’s governing board barred its campuses from considering applicants’ race, and New Hampshire, where such policies are barred under state law, and about two in five Hispanics and one in five blacks live in states where public colleges may not give them extra consideration in admissions decisions. Briefs from the University of Michigan and from top administrators at the University of California both blame their states’ bans for big dips in their enrollment of black and Hispanic students.

Leaning Right on Race

Among the nine-member Supreme Court’s four reliably liberal voices on issues of race, Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself from hearing the Texas case because she weighed in on the university’s behalf in a lower court when she was U.S. solicitor general. Of the court’s more-conservative members, the most likely swing vote, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, wrote the majority opinions in both the court’s previous Fisher ruling and its 2014 decision to uphold state bans on racial preferences.

Although Ms. Fisher’s lawyers have not asked it to do so, the court could even end up heeding calls from conservative groups to ban such policies as impossible to square with federal antidiscrimination laws. In past decisions on affirmative action, some of the court’s conservative members have urged their colleagues to take such a step.

Some statements in their opinions — such as assertions that jobs should go to the most-qualified applicants — could get them accused of committing a “microaggression” if uttered aloud at their alma maters today. Knowing as much could leave them skeptical of assertions that racial diversity on campuses fosters the exchange of different ideas.

ADVERTISEMENT

Fifty years have passed since Yale University adopted the nation’s first race-conscious admissions policies, in response to the urban uprisings and black-student unrest of that era. Researchers debate whether such policies help build better race relations or fuel tensions. The current campus unrest, however, serves as a reminder that, whatever their virtues, they have not managed to bring lasting racial peace.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

Read other items in 'Fisher' in Context: Making Sense of the Decision.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Law & Policy Race
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Peter Schmidt
Peter Schmidt was a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He covered affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. He is a co-author of The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020).
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo-based illustration of a mirror on a green, patterned wallpaper wall reflecting Campanile in Berkeley, California.
A Look in the Mirror
At UC Berkeley, the Faculty Asks Itself, Do Our Critics Have a Point?
illustration of an arrow in a bullseye, surrounded by college buildings
Accreditation
A Major College Accreditor Pauses Its DEI Requirements Amid Pressure From Trump
Photo-based illustration of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia obscured by red and white horizontal stripes
'Demanding Obedience'
How Alums Put DEI at UVa in the Justice Dept.’s Crosshairs
Colin Holbrook
Q&A
‘I Didn’t Want to Make a Scene’: A Professor Recounts the Conversation That Got Him Ejected From Commencement

From The Review

American artist Andy Warhol, posing in front of The Last Supper, a personal interpretation the American artist gave of Leonardo da Vinci's Il Cenacolo, realized 1986, belonging to a series dedicated to Leonardo's masterpiece set up in palazzo delle Stelline; the work holds the spirit of Warhol's artistic Weltanschauung, demystifying the artwork in order to deprive it of its uniqueness and no repeatibility. Milan (Italy), 1987.
The Review | Essay
Were the 1980s a Golden Age of Religious Art?
By Phil Christman
Glenn Loury in Providence, R.I. on May 7, 2024.
The Review | Conversation
Glenn Loury on the ‘Barbarians at the Gates’
By Evan Goldstein, Len Gutkin
Illustration showing a valedictorian speaker who's tassel is a vintage microphone
The Review | Opinion
A Graduation Speaker Gets Canceled
By Corey Robin

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin