The Supreme Court has upheld the affirmative action admission policy of University of Texas. Abigail Fisher, a white woman, applied to the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) in 2008. She sued the university after she was denied admission on the grounds that the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
On Thursday, June 23, the Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions program was constitutional – a decision that the three scholars on our panel welcome. They tell us why existing educational inequalities need considerations of race and ethnicity in admissions.
How else do you eliminate inequality?
Richard J. Reddick is an associate professor in educational administration at University of Texas at Austin.
UT Austin’s history on legal decisions about race in higher education goes back to Sweatt v. Painter (1950), a case that successfully challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1898). The landmark case helped pave the way for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in education. (Read more)
