Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling won’t affect Kansas schools

The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday upholding a University of Texas admissions program that takes account of race won’t affect Wichita State University, the school’s provost said.

In a major victory for affirmative action, the justices voted in favor of the Texas program by a 4-3 vote, an outcome that was dramatically altered by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who opposed affirmative action.

Just seven justices participated in the decision because of Scalia’s death in February. Justice Elena Kagan sat out the case because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department.

WSU does not consider applicants’ race in its admissions process, said Tony Vizzini, provost and senior vice president. He noted the university’s high acceptance rate — more than 90 percent — and said the school encourages students from diverse backgrounds to apply.

“We’re meant to be highly accessible,” said Lou Heldman, WSU’s vice president for strategic communications.

Breeze Richardson, director of communications for the Kansas Board of Regents, which governs Kansas’ six state universities, said it does not have a cross-university admission policy that includes race as a factor. She noted that Kansas universities have more open spots for students than applicants.

Students in Texas who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class are guaranteed automatic admission to all state-funded universities. In Kansas, five of the six schools governed by the Board of Regents assure admission to Kansas students who maintain at least a 2.0 grade point average in the Kansas Scholars or Qualified Admissions curriculum and score at least a 21 on their ACT, a 980 on their SAT or graduate in the top third of their class.

The sixth, the University of Kansas, operates on a slightly different index system that requires a higher GPA, a higher SAT score or, in some cases, a higher ACT score.

The high court ruled in the case of Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who was denied admission to the university’s flagship campus in Austin in 2008. Fisher claimed she was rejected while African-American applicants with lower grades and test scores were admitted.

The school said Fisher, who did not graduate in the top 10 percent of her high school class, would not have been admitted with or without race as a factor. But officials did conditionally offer to allow her to transfer in as a sophomore if she maintained a 3.2 grade point average at another public college in Texas.

Instead, Fisher went to Louisiana State University, from which she graduated in 2012, and pursued her lawsuit. Fisher was recruited for the suit by Edward Blum, an opponent of racial preferences who has been successful in persuading the Supreme Court to hear cases challenging the use of race in education and politics.

Blum was behind a major challenge to the landmark Voting Rights Act that resulted in the court diminishing a key provision of the law, and he also led an unsuccessful challenge to states’ widespread practice of counting all their residents, not just those eligible to vote, in drawing legislative districts.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion that the Texas plan complied with earlier court rulings allowing colleges to take account of race in pursuit of diversity on campus.

“The university has thus met its burden of showing that the admissions policy it used … was narrowly tailored,” Kennedy wrote.

The court’s three more conservative justices dissented, and Justice Samuel Alito read portions of his 51-page dissent, more than twice as long as Kennedy’s opinion, from the bench.

“This is affirmative action gone wild,” Alito said. The university “relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions,” he said.

In a separate dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas repeated his view that the Constitution outlaws any use of race in higher education admissions.

Justices heard Fisher’s case once before and issued an inconclusive ruling in 2013 that sent her case back to a lower court and set the stage for Thursday’s decision.

In 2003, the justices reaffirmed the consideration of race in the quest for diversity on campus. Their decision then set a goal of doing away with such programs in 25 years.

Separate legal challenges have been filed to affirmative action plans at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. It was unclear how those cases would be affected by the decision in the Texas case.

Eight states prohibit the use of race in public college admissions: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

This story was originally published June 23, 2016 at 7:18 PM with the headline "Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling won’t affect Kansas schools."