The Supreme Court will take up the question of affirmative action in college admissions Wednesday, hearing arguments in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas.
In the case, which could potentially signal an end to affirmative action, Abigail Fisher, a white student, argues that the university denied her admission because of her race. She says that reverse discrimination was to blame for her absence of an admissions offer from the school.
The University of Texas (UT), founded in 1873, was segregated for the the first 70 years of its history, banning students of color from admission, like many other institutions of higher learning across America.
In all, almost 100 briefs have been filed in association with the case, with 73 briefs on the side of the University of Texas and 18 on the side of Abigail Fisher, according to a recent article from Slate.
“The family of Heman Sweatt, who was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 because he was black — and won a court case challenging that decision four years later — is asking the court to be patient and let affirmative action stand as is for now. One Asian-American group argues that affirmative action penalizes Asian-Americans by the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points at elite schools because Asians are overrepresented among academic achievers. Another Asian-American group argues, to the contrary, that there’s no such effect, and that after UT started taking race into account in admissions, the number of Asian-American students held steady. Retired military officers told the court that ordering UT and other schools to stop considering the personal attributes of aspiring students, including race, would ‘seriously disrupt the military,’ which needs college-educated recruits from a range of backgrounds,” Slate reports — also noting that African-American enlisted troops outnumber African-American officers 2 to 1.
One group siding with Fisher is the Center for Individual Rights, which argues that minorities don’t benefit from affirmative action. Instead it causes them to be seen as undeserving and sets up to fare poorly in school.
However, the Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to uphold the use of race in the University of Texas’ college admissions process. The White House points out that the practice advances an essential governmental interest.
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. filed the amicus brief in Fisher v. University of Texas — a brief co-signed by counsel representing five different federal agencies and the Justice Department. In the filing, the government argues that considering race when admitting students to universities makes a critical contribution to the function of the federal government.
“The government … has a vital interest in drawing its personnel — many of whom will eventually become its civilian and military leaders — from a well-qualified and diverse pool of university and service-academy graduates of all backgrounds who possess the understanding of diversity that is necessary to govern and defend the United States,” the administration writes, citing as examples the Department of Defense and the Armed Services, federal law enforcement and national security, the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies.
A history of affirmative action
The term “affirmative action” was first used in the United States in Executive Order 10925 and was signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 — the same time that the civil rights movement was in full swing in America. This era saw an outgrowth of social movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against black Americans and restoring voting rights to them.
Affirmative action was to be used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. It was aimed at the economic arena in its first phase, requiring that government employers “not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color or national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.”
After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to take “affirmative action” to hire without regard to race, religion and national origin. In 1968, gender was added as a category.
A persistent problem
In higher education, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans have been underrepresented for decades in America. In addition, these people have faced a wide range of barriers because of their racial backgrounds — from being forced to live in segregated neighborhoods to being denied adequate medical care and fair access to employment.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, college graduates are dramatically lower for all ethnicities, with 13.9 percent of those with Hispanic origins receiving their college degree and only 20 percent of blacks.
A 2005 report from the American Council on Education, based on Education Department and Census Bureau data found that between 1993 and 2003, shows that white high school graduates were more likely than their black or Hispanic peers to enroll in college. While some gains were made in minority students attending college due to affirmative action policies, “We are also concerned by what still seems to be slow growth,” Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta, and chair of a commission that produces the annual report told USA Today. “While we see forward movement, it is incremental and not transformational.”
In a recent article on the topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michele Moody-Adams, an African-American college professor and administrator, points out that while the Texas case is itself complex, and no one is sure exactly what it could mean for affirmative action in regards to education moving forward, “We must recognize that controversies about race-conscious admissions have unhelpfully narrowed the debate about equality of educational opportunity and diverted attention from the extraordinary inequalities that continue to exist.”
The article also points out that today many Americans of color struggle to attend underfinanced universities, and many, because of a variety of factors, may have no hope of attending college at all.
“Most Americans who attend college matriculate at institutions that accept a majority of their applicants and then struggle to find resources to provide them with a quality education. Those students often take on sizable debt to attend, and far too many never complete a degree, whether because elementary and secondary schools have left them academically underprepared or because their families have no tradition of higher education or because they cannot balance the demands of school and employment. Moreover, as Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, too many minority young men ‘matriculate’ into the prison system, often in states that devote proportionately greater resources to prisons than to higher education.”
The fact is that affirmative action is required to redress social imbalance, by raising the aspirations of youth from minority groups who have been typically underrepresented in higher education. By having more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, affirmative action will generate more role models for ethnic minorities.
Studies have shown that university graduates have better access to higher paying professions and are more likely to enter politics, law or become the heads of major corporations.
Recruiting minority students to attend colleges and universities allows the aspirations of disenfranchised youths to change — it will become more realistic for them to see themselves in public life. This in turn will also help wider society by tackling social problems faced by minorities in the workforce and other areas.
Thanks to affirmative action, college campuses have grown more diverse over the years, and diversity is a value which undoubtedly should be sought by colleges and universities.
Beyond attending lectures and taking exams, higher education is also about the development of character and the broadening one’s mind. If a university is overwhelmingly white and privileged, students are not exposed to different cultures, viewpoints and social experiences, thus a diverse student body benefits every student and adds to the overall learning experience. Affirmative action in higher education is needed today as much as it ever was.