Quotas take another hit

Fighting the good fight

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 19, 2001]

The legal juggernaut to end quota diversity received another boost last month when a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of appeals unanimously agreed that the University of Georgia's admissions program was unconstitutional. A lower court had found in 1999 that three white women had been wrongly denied admission to the school because of the school's efforts to create "diversity."

This decision is comparable to earlier court decisions in Hopwood v. University of Texas and Grutter v. University of Michigan Law School, in which courts disallowed the use of race as a factor to achieve a diverse student body. In this case, however, the court drifted away from deciding whether achieving diversity could never be a "compelling governmental interest" that justifies racial classifications and preferences.

Instead, the panel ruled that it was not going to decide the "compelling governmental interest" issue, but rather find for the plaintiffs because the university's race-based system was not "narrowly tailored"--in other words, the race-based system was improperly designed and implemented.

The case is a solid win for defenders of color-blind principles and individual, merit diversity. But, the more important question--does achieving a "diverse" student body mean that a student's race may be considered--remains unanswered by this court. And until the U.S. Supreme Court takes up this case or another one from the University of Michigan, most of our nation's colleges and universities will continue classifying applicants by race, a practice that should have ended once and for all in 1964.

-- From The Egalitarian newsletter, published by the American Civil Rights Institute.

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