“Reflecting” Supreme Court Opinions That “Support” Affirmative Action?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that advocates of racial preference have urged Texas to amend its top 10% admissions policy “to reflect recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions supporting the practice….” Michael Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston, criticized Texas A&M for refusing “to employ Grutter.” by re-instituting race preferences.

In what sense, I wonder, does the Texas policy (however wise it might or might not be as educational policy) not “reflect” what the Supreme Court has held, especially since the Texas plan was often cited as a commendable race-neutral alternative to preferences. Under that plan the number of entering minority freshmen at the flagship Austin campus has risen “from 17.5 percent in 1995 to 20.6 percent in 2003.”

How many times must it be repeated that the Supremes did not command race preferences? It allowed them subject to certain limitations. The Supremes have also allowed municipalities to provide school vouchers. Do the preferentialists believe that every city, town, and hamlet must now rush to provide vouchers in order to make their policies “reflect” Supreme Court “support” for them?

ADDENDUM

Maybe it’s just me, but I also find it quite interesting that the press release of the Equal Justice Society about this matter reveals that Norma Cantu, one of the advocates for a return to racial preferences, is a professor of education and law at the University of Texas.

Why, you might ask, is this interesting? Well, as this reprinted article from the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals, in the not so distant past Ms. Cantu was an assistant secretary in President Clinton’s Dept. of Education, where she put forward some, er, novel legal opinions.

In a series of letters to state officials in Texas last month [March 1997], Ms. Cantu, the Assistant Secretary of Education for civil rights, contended that a year-old federal appeals-court ruling barring the University of Texas law school from using race as a factor in admissions did not prohibit other colleges in the state from doing so.

That conclusion clashes with the view of many legal observers and — most important to the college officials — the formal guidance of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, who has declared that the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Hopwood v. State of Texas prevents all public colleges in the state from taking race into account in decisions about admissions and financial aid.

Ms. Cantu also suggested in her letters that the federal government could cut off aid to Texas colleges if an impending desegregation review by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights finds vestiges of past discrimination in the Texas higher-education system and if the state — citing the Hopwood decision — refuses to use racial preferences to correct it.

So, on who knows what authority, Ms. Cantu decides that the only institution in the Fifth Circuit bound by the Fifth Circuit’s Hopwood decision is the University of Texas at Austin, and then she threatens to cut off federal funds even to that institution if it refuses to engage in a practice specifically barred by Hopwood if she deems it necessary to correct a problem her department finds.

The University of Texas discriminated against blacks for generations, and it obviously regrets and resents that the Fifth Circuit barred it from discriminating against whites and Asians for a few more generations. Now that the Supremes have given the green light to such discrimination, one can understand its eagerness to resume it, and even to hire someone like Norma Cantu.

Say What?