Several days ago I discussed (here) Justice O’Connor’s command/hope/wish/pipe dream, in her Grutter opinion, that racial preferences would no longer be needed in 25 years and thus what even she called the “core purpose” of the Fourteenth Amendment and its “fundamental equal protection principle” could be taken out of storage, where she placed them, and made applicable again.
Now it appears that even Justice O’Credulous, as I called her in that post, believes her “deadline” is a pipe dream. In a talk yesterday at Wake Forest University,
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said yesterday that the deadline she gave universities to end affirmative action might not allow enough time to balance racial equality on their campuses.
….
“That’s a hope more than a certainty,” she said, answering a student’s question at a talk yesterday at Wake Forest University. “I don’t know that I see things happening well enough because in the educational area I worry that our public schools aren’t being effective enough yet in teaching all the students what they need to know to be good students at the university level and the law-school admission. It’s pretty pitiful.”
The good ex-Justice thus apparently believes that colleges and law schools thus will need to continue taking students who have not been taught “what they need to know” beyond her 25 year “deadline.”
Query: does her belief in the current and continuing need for racial preferences in law school admissions mean that she believes colleges, not just K-12 schools “aren’t being effective enough yet in teaching all the students what they need to know to be good students at the university level and the law-school admission”?
But Justice O’Connor does say one thing with which I completely agree: “It’s pretty pitiful.”
Finally, here’s a question for any “living Constitution” theorists in the audience: If Congress writes a 25 year “deadline” into a statute, it can lift or revise the “deadline” at any time by writing a new statute. But if the Supreme Court says the Constitution allows a 25 year “deadline” (not 24, not 26), will it have to overturn Grutter if it wants the “deadline” extended, i.e., give the Constitution more time to live and breathe, or can it treat its own “deadline” the way my mother is said to have treated “No Parking” signs in my home town as she pulled up and parked. “Well,” I was told she said to passengers on many occasions, “it doesn’t say ‘Positively!’”
If K-12 education is not getting minority kids ready for college, then continuing admissions preferences is enabling the continued poor performance of K-12 education, which hurts kids beyond just threatening their ability to get into college. She herself says that the kids aren’t being taught what they need to know to BE GOOD STUDENTS, not just to get in.
Can she really not see that?