On a day when President Barack Obama is paying tribute to the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery, we may be losing affirmative action.
Many Americans probably thought affirmative action was either a done deal or dead in the water. Apparently it was neither, and the compromise decision reached by the Supreme Court 12 years ago is once more before the court.
The under-representation of Black students at the major colleges in the nation has shown very little improvement since the Bakke decision in 1977, which split the court in its interest to make diversity a compelling issue.
It was widely believed that the issue was settled in 2003 with Grutter v. Bollinger in which affirmative action was upheld by the court, allowing race as a factor in the admissions policy at the University of Michigan Law School. But that decision was rendered when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a member. She would later be replaced by conservative Justice Samuel Alito. What this development means is that affirmative action may be over in higher education and another setback for African-American and Hispanic students, who continue to be under-represented at most major universities.
Wednesday, the court will decide if the University of Texas at Austin has a compelling reason to consider race among the factors to evaluate new applicants. This case will be the second time they are hearing Fisher v. University of Texas, based on a case presented by Abigail Fisher, a white student, who eventually earned her degree from Louisiana State University. Her case was mainly the brainchild of a lawyer opposed to racial preferences.
Even with the compromise decision 12 years ago, it did very little to increase the number of African-Americans at the major colleges. The recent turmoil now brewing on several top universities indicate that Black students are rarely in proportion to the population where the college is located. Last year at the University of Michigan, Black students underscored their paucity on campus demanding an increase in their representation on campus “equal to 10 percent.” The university, one student said, “should invest in our well being because we invest in it.”
At several colleges in the northeast—Boston University, MIT, Northeastern and Tufts—Black students are only 3 percent of the student body, according to a recent report. Although there has been a sizable increase of international students on the major campuses across the nation, the Black student population has remained dismally low or has dramatically shrunk.
If the Supreme Court moves to strike down affirmative action, that under-representation will only further decrease. And it may take an initiative on the part of a Black student, as Fisher did, to counter the negative decision.
It has been proved again and again that diversity is a positive issue, particularly in the realm of higher education, where students get a chance to study and commingle with different ethnic groups. When you consider that nearly 50 percent of the top corporate leaders are graduates of just a dozen or so colleges, the possibility of Black students having an opportunity to share their life experiences with them becomes increasingly remote if they are not allowed to matriculate with them.
On the other hand, these future corporate executives are denied the opportunity to learn a little bit more about African-Americans and their culture because they probably attended elementary and intermediate schools that had very few minority students.
The toxic plans of excluding Muslims from entering the country by Donald Trump is just an extreme version of a decision to limit the presence of Blacks and other minorities on the nation’s campuses.
American exceptionalism should not be the limiting of students of color to the realm of higher education but their increase. Let us hope that on Wednesday, our worst fears are not realized.