The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Finally, a ‘Fisher’ Decision

Many college presidents and admissions deans were among those breathing sighs of relief when the Supreme Court, ruling in a case that has been at the center of attention since 2008, held last month that the University of Texas at Austin’s approach to considering applicants’ race was “reasoned” and “principled” and, more to the point, “lawful under the Equal Protection clause.”

The decision disappointed those who assert that colleges have no business at all considering the race of would-be students. And the unusual details of the admissions policy that the Texas Legislature set for public institutions nearly 20 years ago led some to suggest that the ruling would have little bearing on challenges to other campuses’ use of race. The Texas law attempts to ensure diversity at state colleges by guaranteeing admission to all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes — which, given housing patterns, are largely segregated by race.

At issue in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, was whether the public flagship could consider race among other factors in admitting the rest of its students. Abigail N. Fisher, the plaintiff, is a young, white woman who did not graduate in the top tenth of her class. She sued after being denied admission to the university.

A 4-to-3 majority of the justices said UT-Austin had met the court’s earlier requirement to explain in “concrete and precise” terms why considering race was necessary to meet a compelling governmental interest — providing “the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity.”

The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, lays out the court’s expectations for race-conscious admissions policies, holding that colleges have an “ongoing obligation,” as demographics change, to make sure their policies continue to be fair and necessary. The guidelines should help colleges feel more comfortable in adopting or adjusting admissions policies going forward.

But the dissenters in the case — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — called the ruling “remarkably wrong.” Justice Alito delved deep into admissions minutiae in a lengthy dissent, worrying that the majority had approved the policies “simply because it is tired of this case.”

Louisville Blues

This is proving to be a season of drama and dismay at the University of Louisville. The FBI has been investigating the possible misuse of federal grant money there, and the NCAA is examining whether strippers were hired for basketball players and recruits, raising questions about the leadership of the longtime president, James R. Ramsey. In June, Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, dismissed the 20-member Board of Trustees, calling it “operationally dysfunctional,” and Mr. Ramsey announced he would resign. Then the state’s attorney general — Andy Beshear, a Democrat — filed a lawsuit claiming that the governor lacked the authority to replace the board.

Last week, however, the governor plowed ahead, naming 10 new board members. Among them are John Schnatter, founder of the Papa John’s pizza chain, and Douglas Cobb, a former president and CEO of Greater Louisville Inc., who has called climate change “a big hoax from beginning to end” and said being gay is incompatible with being Christian. Mr. Cobb is an elder at the city’s Southeast Christian Church, which three other appointees also attend, as does Governor Bevin.

Pat Summitt

Jim McIsaac, Getty Images

Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville women’s basketball team, died last week of Alzheimer’s disease at age 64. In the days afterward she was widely remembered, and not just for the victories listed in record books.

She had plenty of those, to be sure, including eight NCAA championships, more wins than any other coach, man or woman, in Division I, and a 100-percent graduation rate for her players. She was co-captain of the U.S. women’s basketball team at the 1976 Olympics — bringing home the silver medal — and then coached the team that won the gold medal at the 1984 games. She coached the Lady Vols for 38 seasons, winning 1,098 games and losing just 208. Ten years ago, she became the first female coach to earn more than $1 million a year.

But such successes only hint at what many consider her greatest achievements, summarized last week on the website Fusion by Jonathan W. Gray, an associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s John Jay College: “Summitt built her iconic program in part by convincing black families from Chicago and New York and Atlanta to entrust their children to her, to send their daughters, who could go to any school in the country for free, to the rural South. She would then turn around and do the same with young white girls from hardscrabble hamlets like Sparta, Tenn., inviting them to come and compete alongside these big city girls. … If you wanted to root for the Lady Vols, that meant rooting for women with first names like Niya and LaShonda and Semeka.”

While Ms. Summitt was known for what The New York Times called “her demanding style, her steely glare, and her unapologetically withering remarks to her players and to referees,” she was also known for helping players succeed, and not just on the basketball court. For more than 30 years, Mr. Gray notes, she “created a safe and nurturing space for queer women, and black women and white women, to develop into healthy and mature adults.”

“Other coaches used this against Summitt, of course,” he writes. “They noted her short hair and all those rugged athletes and would warn parents away from her program. She never seemed to care. ‘I am who I am,’ she was reported to have said in response to the criticism. ‘I will not compromise.’”

Accountability

Meanwhile, campus sexual assault remains in the news. While outrage was simmering over a former Stanford University swimmer’s six-month jail sentence for assaulting an unconscious woman, a former Indiana University fraternity member who was accused of raping two women avoided prison with a plea deal, and a former Vanderbilt University football player was found guilty of rape in an incident in which he encouraged three teammates to assault an unconscious woman.

Far more surprising was news that Brenda Tracy, who accused two Oregon State University football players and two other men of gang-raping her in 1998, spoke recently to the University of Nebraska’s football team. Its coach, Mike Riley, was the Oregon State coach in 1998. At the time, he suspended the two players for one game each and said they were “good guys who made a bad choice.”

Referring to the coach, Ms. Tracy told the team, “At one point I hated this man more than my rapists.” But she said his invitation to her to address them is “what accountability looks like.”

“We talked about how it’s OK to say sorry,” Ms. Tracy told reporters after the team meeting. “It’s OK to be accountable. It’s OK to stand up and say, ‘I didn’t do something right,’ or ‘I did something wrong,’ and move on from there. Sometimes when you wrong another person, all they really want is an apology.”

And This, Too

Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland, has named a just-retired U.S. Army brigadier general, Timothy Trainor, to a two-year term as interim president. Mr. Trainor, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for the past six years, replaces Simon P. Newman, who resigned this year after the student newspaper revealed a controversial plan to boost the college’s retention rate. … Dowling College, in New York, faces another challenge in its struggle to remain open: The Middle States Commission on Higher Education said it would withdraw the college’s accreditation on August 31. … Thanks to research by a California State University at Sacramento graduate student, a 1947 “temporary” building that has long housed part of the University of California at Davis’s art department has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Among notable artists who worked there was Robert Arneson, a ceramic-sculpture pioneer who taught at the university from 1962 to 1991.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.