The National Association of Scholars has signed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Together with the Pacific Legal Foundation, the American Civil Rights Institute, and the Center for Equal Opportunity, the NAS calls on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse and remand the district court’s decision to uphold the University’s use of race-based admissions.
Currently the University grants preferences to students of certain races and ethnic backgrounds. We believe that such preferences not only propagate racial discrimination and a double standard in higher education, but also directly violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the United States Constitution.
NAS president Peter Wood’s book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, quoted in the brief, characterizes the identity-group version of diversity:
Diversity raised to the level of counterconstitutional principle promises to free people from the pseudoliberty of individualism and to restore to them the primacy of their group identities.
The brief concludes:
In promoting racial diversity, the University dehumanizes and stereotypes the very students it attempts to protect. Because racial balancing clearly has been prohibited by the Supreme Court, the University calls its racial balancing “diversity.” But its policy lays its true intent bare. It is racial balancing by a different name, and cannot survive the demands of strict scrutiny.
To view the amicus brief, click here to download the PDF file.
