Supreme Court Rules in U-M Race Cases

June 28, 2003

June 23, 2003 - The much-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decisions on two challenges to race-conscious college admissions at the University of Michigan were released this morning, carrying mixed news for proponents and opponents of the policies alike.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the 5-4 majority that upheld the University’s law school admissions programs that “The law school’s educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer.”

The Constitution, O’Connor wrote, “does not prohibit the law school’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

In the law school case, Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice O’Connor was joined in the majority by Justices Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg, and Stevens.

However, in Gratz v. Bollinger, a separate challenge to Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy, which employs a point-based scale that assigns points based on a variety of applicant criteria, a 6-3 Court majority found the policy “too broad.” The undergraduate program’s more rigid method of automatically assigning 20 points out of a total 150 to minority applicants was struck down 6-3, with only Souter, Ginsburg, and Stevens dissenting.

Writing for the majority in that case, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that Michigan’s undergraduate policy “which automatically distributes 20 points, or one-fifth of the points needed to guarantee admission, to every single underrepresented minority applicant solely because of race, is not narrowly tailored to achieve the interest in educational diversity.”

While the Gratz ruling demands that Michigan’s undergraduate point-system approach will have to revised, the rulings hardly constituted the “Affirmative Action’s Alamo” sought by Center for Individual Rights, which had led the charge in the suits and in August also filed a suit against HUD and the EEOC.