Good news: we've just learned that the US Supreme Court has granted certiorari in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, a major challenge to the "diversity" based admissions policies at UTexas Austin. You can read some preliminary coverage about it here at IHE. You may recall that we signed on the amicus petition filed with the Court last October by the Pacific Legal Foundation, as we had in several previous cases involving race-based affirmative action admissions policies.
At issue here is the Court's unfortunate ruling in the 2003 Grutter v Bollnger, (see our brief in that case) which in effect gave academic institutions a green light to continue using race as a signifiacnt facdtor in their admissions policies. In practice, that's often meant that race is the determining criterion, as the petitioner alleges in the present case.
It's impossible, of course, to know how the Court will rule, although it's likely that the vote will be a close one, as it's often been in affirmative action cases. But since opposition to preferences of any kind - whether by race, ethnicity, gender or whatever similar category you like - has always been central to our organizational mission, we hope that the Court will at least trim back - even better reverse - its bad decision in Grutter.
