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The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would decide whether race-conscious university admissions procedures intended to promote racial and ethnic diversity illegally discriminate against white applicants — setting the stage for a historic battle at the court over access to American higher education.

At issue are claims by prospective students who say they were rejected by the University of Michigan’s undergraduate program and law school because they are white. The applicants say Michigan uses admissions criteria that systematically shut out whites in favor of African Americans and other minorities with the same or lower grades and test scores.

But Michigan says its admissions process considers each applicant as an individual, factoring in race only as part of an effort to ensure all students the benefits of learning in an ethnically diverse environment.

It is a rationale invoked by hundreds of other colleges and universities, many of which say that without affirmative action, they would go back to being nearly all-white.

A high-profile Supreme Court case over race-based admissions could rekindle the wider political debate over affirmative action, which became a “wedge issue,” pushing many white voters from Democratic to Republican ranks in the 1980s and ’90s before receding in recent years.

The case is potentially sensitive for the Bush administration, whose core conservative supporters oppose affirmative action, but whose outreach efforts have targeted Hispanics and other minority voters.

Noting that “race is among the factors considered by virtually every selective college and university,” Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman said, “[t]here is no effective substitute for the consideration of race as one of many factors in our admissions process. Other methods do not allow us to recruit a diverse student body while maintaining our consistently high academic standards.”

In choosing applicants for admission, the university relies in part on charts ranking them by grades and test scores — but uses separate charts for white and minority students.

“No matter how the majority rules, the court now can’t help but make a historic decision,” said Terence J. Pell, chief executive of the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, a public-interest group that represents the white students in the litigation. “The court is clearly serving notice to all interested parties that high noon is fast approaching.”

The Michigan issues “represent the most significant civil rights cases the Supreme Court will have decided in the last quarter-century,” said Theodore Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents minority students at Michigan.

Shaw unsuccessfully urged the court to consider whether the Michigan policy is lawful both for diversity reasons and as a remedy for the lingering effects of past racial discrimination.

Specifically, the court will consider whether Michigan is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination by federally funded institutions, or the clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that guarantees equal treatment for all citizens under state law — or both. Arguments will be held in March, and decisions are expected by July.

At the heart of the university admissions issue is the court’s splintered ruling in the 1978 case of Allen Bakke, a white applicant who was denied admission to medical school at the University of California at Davis, which reserved 16 percent of its spots for minorities.

Four justices — two of whom, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice John Paul Stevens, are still on the court — ruled that the quota violated Title VI. Four others said that even quotas could be constitutional if imposed to help minorities overcome discrimination.

The ninth vote in the Bakke case came from the late Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who wrote his own opinion agreeing that quotas were impermissible, but saying that the use of race as a “plus factor” in the pursuit of diversity could be allowed.

Since then, educational institutions have said that a majority of the justices in the Bakke case approved of some use of race and have relied on the Powell opinion’s reasoning in fashioning admissions programs that look at applicants’ race as well as other factors, such as grades and extracurricular interests.

But opponents of affirmative action in university admissions say Powell’s opinion did not establish the court’s holding. They are confident of victory now partly because, since Bakke, the court has taken a dim view of race-based affirmative action in other contexts.

Indeed, under Supreme Court precedent, Michigan must convince the court that diversity is a “compelling” objective — and that its use of race is carefully designed to meet it.

Rehnquist, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas are considered the court’s strongest opponents of affirmative action. Stevens, who has grown more liberal in his years on the bench, and Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer are likely to be most sympathetic to Michigan’s case.

As is so often the case, legal analysts say the probable swing vote belongs to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Michigan case represents the culmination of a series of lawsuits by white applicants who challenged the “diversity rationale,” saying that it produces de facto quotas.

At issue now are two such challenges. The first is by Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, who were denied admission as undergraduates in 1995 and 1997, respectively. Their lawyers note that, according to the chart used by Michigan’s admissions officers, African American and Latino students with Gratz’s grades and SAT scores were guaranteed a place in the class, but two out of three similarly situated whites were excluded.

The second case, brought by Barbara Grutter against Michigan’s law school, alleges that she was denied admission under a system that, in the name of ensuring a “critical mass” of minority enrollment, created a de facto minority quota.

One U.S. district judge in Michigan upheld the undergraduate program, and another struck down the law school program.

The cases were appealed to the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. In May, that court, bitterly divided, ruled 5 to 4 that the law school program was constitutional based on Powell’s opinion in the Bakke case. That ruling differed from rulings by appeals courts in New Orleans and Atlanta and coincided with one by a San Francisco-based appeals court.

As a result of this disagreement, lawyers from the Center for Individual Rights appealed the law school case to the Supreme Court. But because the 6th Circuit has still not issued a ruling on the undergraduate case, they also asked the justices to hear it under a special provision of Supreme Court rules.

Michigan objected to hearing either case but told the court that if it agreed to hear the law school case, it should hear the undergraduate case because they are so closely related.

The cases are Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, and Gratz v. Bollinger, No. 02-516.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2002 at 11:22 am and is filed under Race and Public Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.