Did Univ. of Texas reject student because she is white?

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-hear-case-brought-white-student-claims-112510107.html

Supreme Court to Hear Case Brought by White Student Who Claims Race Cost Her Admission to UT

By ARIANE DE VOGUE | ABC OTUS News – 5 hrs ago

Supporters of affirmative action fear that the Supreme Court could curtail or further restrict the use of race-conscious admissions policies at public universities.

On Wednesday, all eyes will be on Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose vote is considered pivotal in the case brought by a white Texan who has sued the University of Texas at Austin, claiming that she was denied admission to the school in 2008 because of her race. Abigail Fisher, who has since graduated from Louisiana State University, said she was subject to unequal treatment in violation of the 14th Amendment.

"I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong, and for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me," Fisher said in an interview clip posted on the website of the Project on Fair Representation, a legal defense foundation that's providing her with legal representation.

On the other side are lawyers for the University of Texas, who argue that, like many other universities, UT seeks to assemble a class that is diverse in innumerable ways -- including race -- and that "race is just one of many characteristics that form the mosaic presented by an applicant's file."

More than 90 friend of the court briefs have been filed in the case, with the Obama administration weighing in favor of the university. Others, who support Fisher, argue that diversity can be achieved through race-neutral programs, and that race-preferential admissions policies can do more harm than good.

"What's at issue is: (1) whether it will remain permissible to consider race in an attempt to ensure that higher level education remains integrated; and (2) whether universities or the court are going to be the ones to determine what academic diversity consists of," said David D. Cole, a professor at Georgetown Law, who believes UT's plan should be upheld.

It was only recently, in 2003, that the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the limited use of race in public university admissions policies in Grutter v. Bollinger. The five-four opinion was written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who said that diversity was a compelling government interest. But O'Connor has since retired from the high court, and has been replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, who is more skeptical of race-conscious admissions preferences.

In 1997, the Texas legislature passed the "Top 10 Percent Law," which mandates that Texas high school seniors in the top 10 percent of their class be automatically admitted to any Texas state university. But after the Grutter decision came down, another policy was added that allows the school to consider race among several other factors for admission. Fisher did not qualify for automatic admission, and was forced to compete with other non-top-10-percent state applicants. She said she was denied admission, even though her academic credentials exceeded those of some of the admitted minority candidates.

The University of Texas, which was racially segregated during the first 70 years of its existence, argues that its current program exemplifies the type of plan the Supreme Court allowed in Grutter v. Bollinger: "Race is only one modest factor among many others weighed; it is considered only in an individualized and contextual way that examines the student in their totality."

But lawyers for Fisher said that the top 10 percent plan had made UT one of the most diverse public universities in the nation, and that the school did not need to overlay the successful race-neutral program with another one that considered race. Furthermore, they said that the school is working toward an impermissible goal of using race in admissions to mirror the demographics of Texas, which they said amounted to "racial balancing."

While Fisher's lawyers argue that Grutter should be clarified or even overturned, supporters of UT's program take solace in Kennedy's opinion in Grutter. He ruled against the University of Michigan Law School program named in that case but said, "There is no constitutional objection to the goal of considering race as one modest factor among many others to achieve diversity, but an educational institution must ensure, through sufficient procedures, that each applicant receives individual consideration and that race does not become a predominant factor in the admissions decision making."

Despite those words, Kennedy has never -- in his entire career on the bench -- voted in favor of racial preferences.

"That fact makes it hard to predict how Justice Kennedy will address this plan," said Cole. "If any plan would satisfy Justice Kennedy, it would seem that this one would because the university formulated its plan to meet the specific objections that Justice Kennedy had to the Michigan affirmative action plan."

Justice Elena Kagan will not participate in the case, because she dealt with it in her previous position as solicitor general.

Lawyers for Fortune 100 companies filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the UT, arguing that those who have been educated in a diverse setting are "better equipped to understand a wider variety of consumer needs" and are "likely to generate a more positive work environment by decreasing incidents of discrimination and stereotyping."

Even the National Association of Basketball coaches said in briefs, "Our student athletes, and all of the students who attend our institutions, receive the best education when they are able to interact with others within a university community that is broadly diverse across its entire scope."

Filing on behalf of Abigail Fisher, three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights point to empirical evidence that they said shows that race-preferential admissions policies do more harm than good. "If this research is right," argued lawyers for commission members Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow and Todd Gaziano, "We now have fewer minority science and engineering graduates than we would have under race-neutral admissions policies."

There are six states that have laws banning the use of affirmative action in public universities (Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, California and Florida, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures). The University of California has filed a brief arguing that its inability to consider race has hurt the school's diversity. The university said it has experimented with different strategies to address underreprestend minority student populations, but that these measures have enjoyed only "limited success," and that the school, particularly, in its most highly ranked campuses, has not been able to reverse a decline in minority admissions and enrollment.

A decision in the current case, likely to come down sometime in early 2012, could have implications for private institutions that receive federal funding, as well as hiring decisions in public institutions.

Edited October 9, 2012 by Bad_Daddy

[Obama 2012 1,714]

I am so sick of this #######. Take "ethnicity" off of College applications, job applications, etc.. Hire people based on qualifications alone. So sick of the affirmative action BS that gets people denied (or applications tossed out entirely) because they don't have the right pigmentation. Quality should always supercede at the end of the day.

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

Admissions haven't been based solely on "qualifications" for a long while. Affirmative Action is an imperfect fix to a broken system.

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge#ixzz28pWHmkNN

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

I am so sick of this #######. Take "ethnicity" off of College applications, job applications, etc.. Hire people based on qualifications alone. So sick of the affirmative action BS that gets people denied (or applications tossed out entirely) because they don't have the right pigmentation. Quality should always supercede at the end of the day.

It's a shame that people like Obama and his supporters support racist laws like Affirmative Action.

[Danno 1,228]

How often are we reminded that "Race is merely a social construct".. and yet they cling to this construct, so much so that two neighbors of different race are presumed to bring a assumed quality with them to the campus... unique to their skin color.

If I were to speak in terms of "Them" when referring to Blacks it is racist.... how it their doing the same thing not?

On the other hand, the achievement gap is so large and pervasive even within same social economic brackets that without some means or method to take account for it, how can you have a society where 13% can't participate?

It's not a recipe for a harmonious nation.

But rather than curse the darkness, let me try to light a candle

- First step is to stop blaming wholesale racism and Slavery, this is counter productive to collective solutions and poisons young minds. How do you constructively tell a child "You can be anything" .... "if you can get around all the racism out there".

-Secondly, We need to rethink our whole social / cultural shift which has exacerbated the single-mother segment of our society .....and surprise surprise, Blacks have the highest rates of this. A number of Black "thinkers" have written extensively about the shift that has taken place in the Black family and community as the Black family has deteriorated.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

WASHINGTON — Abigail Fisher is a slight young woman with strawberry blond hair, a smile that needs little prompting, a determined manner and a good academic record. She played soccer in high school, and she is an accomplished cellist.

But the university she had her heart set on, the one her father and sister had attended, rejected her. "I was devastated," she said, in her first news interview since she was turned down by the University of Texas at Austinfour years ago.

Ms. Fisher, 22, who is white and recently graduated from Louisiana State University, says that her race was held against her, and the Supreme Court is to hear her case on Wednesday, bringing new attention to the combustible issue of the constitutionality of racial preferences in admissions decisions by public universities.

"I'm hoping," she said, "that they'll completely take race out of the issue in terms of admissions and that everyone will be able to get into any school that they want no matter what race they are but solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it."

The university said Ms. Fisher would not have been admitted even if race had played no role in the process, and it questioned whether she has suffered the sort of injury that gives her standing to sue. But the university's larger defense is that it must be free to assemble a varied student body as part of its academic and societal mission. The Supreme Court endorsed that view by a 5-to-4 vote in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.

University officials said that the school's affirmative action program was needed to build a student body diverse enough to include minority students with a broad range of backgrounds and for the campus to have a "critical mass" of minority students in most classrooms. Interaction among students in class and around campus, said Kedra Ishop, the university's director of admissions, helps students overcome biases and make contributions to a diverse society. "The role of U.T. Austin," Dr. Ishop said, "is to provide leadership to the state."

The majority opinion in the Grutter case, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, rejected the use of racial quotas in admissions decisions but said that race could be used as one factor among many, as part of a "holistic review." Justice O'Connor retired in 2006, and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. may open the way for a ruling cutting back on such race-conscious admissions policies, or eliminating them.

Admissions officers at colleges and universities almost universally endorse the idea that students from diverse backgrounds learn from each other, overcome stereotypes, and in so doing prepare themselves for leadership positions in society. Many critics of affirmative action say that there is at best a weak correlation between race and having a range of views presented in the classroom.

Others say the Constitution does not permit the government to sort people by race, no matter how worthy its goal. "While racial diversity on college campuses is beneficial, it cannot be attained by racial discrimination," said Edward Blum, an adviser to Ms. Fisher and a driving force behind the Fisher case.

The competing arguments are hard to test, but a recent visit to a freshman seminar at the University of Texas at Austin suggested that the intellectual life of undergraduates there is varied and vibrant.

The course was called Debates on Democracy in America, and the topic that day was "The Known World," Edward P. Jones's novel about a black slave owner.

It was only the third week of class, but the 18 students, of all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds, talked easily and earnestly about contemporary echoes of slavery. An Asian student mentioned cheap labor in China. A Hispanic one talked about the ways employers in the United States take advantage of illegal immigrants.

http://www.nytimes.c...smid=fb-nytimes

[Danno 1,228]

Bad_daddy has this one up already I think.

But you included a pic so points for that.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/393381-did-univ-of-texas-reject-student-because-she-is-white/ <----- Mods please merge identical topics. Thank you. Edited October 9, 2012 by Bad_Daddy

[Ban Hammer 13,594]

dupe topics merged

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-supreme-court-affirmative-action-20121010,0,6849950.story

Supreme Court justices skeptical of affirmative action for college

By David G. Savage

October 10, 2012, 11:16 a.m.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative justices sharply questioned a lawyer defending a University of Texas affirmative action policy, suggesting they are inclined to further limit the use of race in college admissions.

Since Justice Samuel Alito replaced the retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, the court has had five justices who are skeptical of affirmative action. But Wednesday marked the first time since then that the high court had heard a constitutional challenge to affirmative action in higher education.

It arose when Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant, sued, alleging she was denied the equal protection of the laws.

In his opening question, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that applicants to the University of Texas applicants must check a box to certify their race or ethnicity.

Roberts asked whether a student would qualify as a minority if he were one-fourth Latino. When the attorney for Texas said the student could decide for himself, Roberts asked: How about one-eighth? The chief justice made clear throughout the argument that he is troubled by the use of race as a deciding factor in public policies.

Alito said he was surprised to learn that the Texas university seeks black and Latino students who grew up in affluent families with professional parents. Alito said he assumed affirmative action was designed to give a preference to students from “underprivileged backgrounds,” not for minority students from wealthy families.

He was referring to a passage in the University of Texas brief which said the university may wish to give a preference to a black student with professional parents and from a good Dallas-area high school over a black or Latino student who earned top grades at an “overwhelmingly” black or Latino high school.

Under the “top 10%” law adopted by the Texas Legislature, the university must admit the top graduates of all of its high schools. That policy has succeeded in steadily raising the percentage of Latino and black students. But the university decided in 2004 to adopt a new affirmative action policy and to seek qualified minority students who did not graduate in the top 10% of their high schools.

Alito said he did not understand why the university would give a preference to the minority student from a wealthy family over a white or Asian student with good grades and test scores but who came from a middle-class family.

Gregory Garre, the Washington attorney for the University of Texas, said the minority student from an integrated suburban high school could contribute more to the diversity on campus.

“You are saying what counts is race above all else,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Kennedy and the court’s conservative bloc could write an opinion that puts new limits on affirmative action in colleges and universities.

But the hourlong argument gave little hint as to how far the opinion would go. In the past, Kennedy has agreed that universities need to seek racial diversity on campus, but he also said they should use “race neutral” policies whenever possible.

Bert Rein, the attorney for Fisher, sounded that theme. He said there was no need for a race-based affirmative-action policy at the University of Texas since about one-fourth of its new students are Latino or black as a result of the top 10% law.

Using race as an admission criteria “should have been a last resort, not a first resort,” Rein said. And since Texas has achieved considerable diversity on campus, it did not need to adopt an extra affirmative action policy, he argued.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. cautioned the justices about reversing course on affirmative action. He said colleges and universities have adopted admissions policies that allow for a limited consideration of race based on the court’s past rulings.

College officials should be allowed the “flexibility” to design admissions policies that bring a diverse group of students to their campuses, he said.

But Rein countered that college officials think they have a “green light” to pick students based on their race. It is time, he said in his concluding comments, for the court to stop “the unchecked use of race” in university admissions.

It will likely be several months before the court hands down an opinion in the case of Fisher vs. University of Texas.

Only eight justices will decide, since Justice Elena Kagan withdrew. The three liberal justices spent part of the argument time suggesting the court should throw out Fisher’s case because she had already graduated from Louisiana State University.

Edited October 10, 2012 by Bad_Daddy

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

So the lib justices wanted this thrown out? Why don't they just throw out those justices for not wanting to do their job?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano <----- Ricci v. DeStefano

[Danno 1,228]

It's kind of interesting that Colleges say they don't have enough diversity so they plead with the court to allow special measures to bring these different students togather while on the other hand......

Prisons have no shortage of diversity and they plead with the court to allow special measures to segregate.