A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that University of Texas can continue to discriminate in favor of minority applicants based on race, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a closer scrutiny of the school's practices, Reuters reported. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed in 2008 by Abigail Fisher, who is white and was denied admission.
By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the appellate court's original ruling that the state's flagship university can use race as an admissions factor in addition to a state law mandating that the school must accept in-state students who have graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, the Daily Caller reported.
After re-hearing the case, which challenged the university's admission policy, the judges reached the same conclusion that affirmative action is constitutional and barring the university from using race would hurt diversity on campus. A contrary ruling "would hobble the richness of the educational experience," Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote for the majority. "University education is more the shaping of lives than the filling of heads with facts."
In June 2013, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, but instead of directly ruling on the program's constitutionality and issuing a landmark decision on affirmative action, the high court voted 7-1 and stated that the federal appeals court based in New Orleans didn't apply "strict scrutiny" when making its initial decision to uphold the University of Texas admissions policy. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for a 7-1 majority that courts must "verify that it is necessary for a university to use race to achieve the educational benefits of diversity."
After the plaintiff, a white woman named Abigail Fisher, received a rejected application in 2008, she filed a lawsuit against UT Austin which admits most freshmen through a program that guarantees admission to students in roughly the top 10 percent of their high school classes. But for the remainder of admitted applicants, like Fisher, the school uses other "holistic" factors, including race, to achieve a "critical mass" of minority students.
Fisher's attorneys argued that she would have been admitted over less qualified candidates had admissions staffers not judged her by the color of her skin, stating that using race as a factor is unconstitutional. But two Fifth Circuit judges disagreed, saying, "The increasingly fierce competition for the decreasing number of seats available for Texas students outside the top ten percent results in minority students being under-represented - and white students being over-represented - in holistic review admissions relative to the program's impact on each incoming class."
University President Bill Powers welcomed the decision Wednesday, saying it encourages the exchange of ideas and thoughts "when students who are diverse in all regards come together in the classroom, at campus events and in all aspects of campus life."
However, opponents have pledged to appeal, which could give the Supreme Court a chance to again review the case in its next term.
