scholarly journals The Fraudulent Case Against Affirmative Action -- The Untold Story Behind Fisher v. University of Texas

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Brodin
Author(s):  
James P. Sterba

Diversity instead of race-based affirmative action developed in the United States from the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978 to the present. There have been both objections to this form of affirmative action and defenses of it. Fisher v. University of Texas could decide the future of all race-based affirmative action in the United States. Yet however the Fisher case is decided, there is a form of non-race-based affirmative action that all could find to be morally preferable for the future. A diversity affirmative action program could be designed to look for students who either have experienced racial discrimination themselves or who understand well, in some other way, how racism harms people in the United States, and thus are able to authoritatively and effectively speak about it in an educational context.


Author(s):  
Lucas A. Powe

This chapter discusses the legal battles involving the University of Texas School of Law and its affirmative action program. In the wake of its success in 1944 in the all-white primary case, Smith v. Allwright, the Texas NAACP called for the integration of Texas's flagship university in Austin. Some months later Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter to Austin's only African American lawyer asking for information about how to apply to the UT School of Law. The chapter examines the Supreme Court case of Heman Marion Sweatt that produced a major stepping-stone toward Brown v. Board of Education, along with another case involving UT's undergraduate admissions that reaffirmed a state's right to implement affirmative action policies. In particular, it analyzes McLaurin v. Regents and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, along with the Texas legislature's response to Hopwood v. Texas in the form of the “10% rule.”


2013 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Farley ◽  
Matthew Gaertner ◽  
Michele Moses

In this article, Amy N. Farley, Matthew N. Gaertner, and Michele S. Moses examine the use of ballot initiatives as a particularly attractive form of direct democracy for opponents of affirmative action in higher education. Building on previous scholarship, the authors question whether anti-affirmative ballot initiatives validly reflect voters’ attitudes toward affirmative action. The authors examine the case of Colorado's Amendment 46, an anti-affirmative action ballot initiative. They investigate the language of the initiative itself, as well as voters’ perceptions of and confusion around its intent, and the factors that influenced voting behavior. They employ item response theory to estimate voters’ attitudes toward affirmative action. The authors then describe the prevalence of voter confusion around the initiative's intent. Finally, employing a binary logistic regression model, they analyze survey data to determine which factors influenced voting behavior. They find that the initiative's language was successful at confusing voters who intended to support affirmative action. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Fisher v. University of Texas and in anticipation of its decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the authors call for greater scrutiny with regard to the use of initiatives to craft education policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on members of disadvantaged populations.


Author(s):  
J. Scott Carter ◽  
Cameron D. Lippard

This chapter looks at the most recent case to challenge affirmative action in college admissions policies in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin (2013 and 2016). Like chapter 5, the purpose of this chapter is to understand precisely what supporters and opponents are saying about the controversial policy. That is, how are they framing the debate surrounding affirmative action. However, this chapter looks at how framing may have changed over a decade later. We again focus on amicus briefs submitted by social authorities to the U.S. Supreme Court who had interests in the outcome of the cases. While we were interested in variation in types of frames used in these two cases (Fisher I and II) relative to the Gratz and Grutter cases, we mainly focused on authors continued use of both color-blind and group threat frames to state their positions. While some nuanced changes were observed from Gratz/Grutter to Fisher, our findings revealed a great deal of consistency from case to case and that the briefs continued to rely on color-blind and threat frames to characterize the policy. Particularly among opponents’ briefs, threat frames suggested that whites, in general, were losing in a country consumed by liberal agendas of diversification and entitlements only afforded to unqualified and ill-prepared non-whites.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma M. Riccucci

In June of 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas that threatened the continued use of affirmative action to promote diversity in university admissions. It vacated the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld its use, and remanded the case back to the appellate court. This legal brief examines the implications of the Fifth Circuit’s decision on remand. It examines the appellate court’s response to the High Court on remand, where it once again upheld the affirmative action program at the University of Texas.


2016 ◽  
Vol 106 (5) ◽  
pp. 343-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney J. Andrews

In the wake of challenges to affirmative action, access to oversubscribed elite public universities remains a contentious issue. Much of the research on these issues focuses on freshman admissions. This paper examines the University of Texas at Austin's Coordinated Admissions Program which offers Texas residents that were not admitted to the University of Texas at Austin as freshman the option of transferring from a participating University of Texas System school. Using the regression discontinuity design, I show that this path to an elite public university has an impact on academic outcomes.


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