Asian-Americans and Competing Rationales for Affirmative Action in Higher Ed

volokh.com

2 points·cwan··3 comments

"I think that private universities such as Princeton should be free to engage in whatever kind of affirmative action they want."

That may be the blogger's opinion, but that is not the law of the land. In fact, higher education institutions are prohibited from discrimination on the basis of race,

http://www.ed.gov/policy/rights/guid/ocr/raceoverview.html

and one student who filed a complaint

http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/complaintprocess.ht...

against Princeton under that process found that his complaint was broadened into a compliance review, which still hasn't been resolved as of the last press report on the review.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/09/08/21307/

but the article said:

"the Supreme Court, in its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger ruled that diversity is a permissible objective for the use of racial preferences in admissions"

That's for a narrowly tailored program. An explicit quota would still be illegal (the Bakke decision was not overruled by Grutter) and a system of giving every minority applicant more points than other applicants would also be illegal under Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003) (decided the same day as Grutter v. Bollinger).

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