Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decision Limits Racial Policies On Campus

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision is actually fairly limited in scope.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, a previous Supreme Court decision on the fifth amendment is proving to be unpopular.

Basically, the Supreme Court’s Fifth Amendment decisions say that simply hearing your rights is not enough. As an American citizen you have to specifically invoke your rights verbally in order to have the right to remain silent if a police officer hasn’t yet read off your Miranda Rights.

In this Supreme Court case a woman from Texas claimed the University of Texas denied admission to an undergraduate program because they were reserving seats for minorities as part of an affirmative action policy. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision came down seven to one, with the justices sending Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Supreme Court previously rejected the use of racial quotas 2003 but said that schools could consider race when reviewing a student’s application. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision “does not permit a court to accept a school’s assertion that its admissions process uses race in a permissible way without closely examining how the process works in practice, yet that is what the District Court and Fifth Circuit did here.” Basically, they’re saying courts should not assume college officials are acting in good faith.

Still, the Supreme Court did not strike down Texas’s affirmative action plan in total. Essentially, the justices are saying colleges must prove it’s necessary to achieve racial diversity on campus and “prove that its admissions program is narrowly tailored to obtain the educational benefits of diversity.” Any college’s affirmative action policies should be narrow in their impact.

The next major affirmative action case facing the Supreme Court is a 2006 Michigan ballot initiative that “bans the consideration of race or sex in public education, government contracting and public employment.”

Do you think the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision is fair?