ERIC Number: EJ984446
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Sep
Pages: 12
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0895-4852
EISSN: N/A
Against "Diversity"
Clegg, Roger; Rosenberg, John S.
Academic Questions, v25 n3 p377-388 Sep 2012
The Supreme Court has granted review for the 2012 term in the case "Fisher v. University of Texas." Abigail Fisher, a rejected white applicant to the University of Texas, has challenged the use of racial and ethnic admission preferences, which the Court had allowed in its 2003 decision involving the University of Michigan law school, "Grutter v. Bollinger." The claim that "diversity" requires that each classroom be diverse is both novel and radical in its implications, as Judge Edith Jones noted in a blistering dissent for herself and four Fifth Circuit colleagues. In any event, new evidence and new developments make it appropriate for the Court to reconsider the holding in Grutter that the purported "educational benefits" from student body "diversity" justify the use of racial and ethnic preferences in the first place. Numerous amicus briefs urge it to do so, and the plaintiff herself explicitly raises that possibility. According to the proponents of this sort of discrimination, "diversity" is the mother's milk of higher education, more important, it would seem, than books in the library or professors behind the podium. Who could oppose such a noble concept? The authors contend that they could, and give ten reasons why other people should, too. They include not only some first principles to which they hope the Court will return, but also the emerging social science evidence that the costs of this discrimination are high and the claimed benefits--which the Court accepted in 2003--minimal at best. (Contains 28 footnotes.)
Descriptors: Evidence, Affirmative Action, Educational Benefits, Court Litigation, Reverse Discrimination, Equal Education, Selective Admission, Admission Criteria, College Admission, Student Diversity, Etiology, Administrative Principles
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Michigan; Texas
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A