Word: consciousnesses
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...Race-conscious affirmative action is as controversial as it has ever been, but last week’s oral arguments in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases make clear that subtlety rather than absolutism will determine the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision making in these hotly contested and vitally important cases...
...blind approach to college admissions, but the justices’ questions demonstrated that a far more nuanced analysis is required, one in which race could continue to play an important but limited role in college admissions. While several of the justices have obviously made up their minds on race-conscious admissions policies, the Court’s “swing” justices, particularly Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, grappled with some of the thornier issues in these cases, whether it was determining appropriate time limits on admissions policies or trying to define the meaning...
...narrowly tailored” to promote a “compelling governmental interest.” Specifically, the Court must decide whether promoting diversity in higher education is a sufficiently important goal to justify the use of race and whether the university’s race-conscious policies are, in fact, the ideal means to advance that goal. Both public universities and private universities that receive federal funding are bound by these constitutional standards when they employ race in admissions...
...fixed number of points for race is not flexible enough. Or the Court could impose a time requirement so that policies have a fixed duration. As a practical matter, the Court could, by establishing difficult or unreachable standards for narrow tailoring, sound a death knell for many race-conscious admissions policies...
Some colleges and universities, in anticipation of one of these negative scenarios, have already jumped the gun by revisiting or dismantling their race-conscious admissions and financial aid programs. Virginia Tech, for instance, has waffled, abandoning its race-conscious admissions policy a few weeks ago, only to reinstate it recently after more careful consideration. Prodded on by anti-affirmative action groups, schools such as MIT and Princeton have decided to abandon or revise their minority-targeted scholarship and pre-college preparation programs, even though the burdens on non-minority students in these programs are minimal compared to a denial...