Affirmative Action: UC versus Oklahoma

As blog readers will know, California voters banned affirmative action in university admissions under Proposition 209 in the mid-1990s, effectively endorsing a resolution by the UC Regents of that period. Voters recently refused to repeal Proposition 209, despite an endorsement of that repeal by the Regents.

Now the matter of affirmative action has come before the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving Harvard - a private university - and the University of North Carolina - a public university. The case has attracted friend-of-the-court briefs from various universities. Given the Court's recent willingness to overturn precedent with regard to abortion, it appears that its current position on affirmative action is also at risk. The NY Times reports:

...Two of the country’s top public university systems, the University of Michigan and the University of California, were forced to stop using affirmative action in admissions. Since then, both systems have tried to build racially diverse student bodies through extensive outreach and major financial investment, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Those efforts have fallen abysmally short, the universities admitted in two amicus briefs filed this month at the Supreme Court, which is set to consider the future of affirmative action in college admissions this fall...

The University of California system says it has spent more than a half-billion dollars since 2004 to increase diversity among its students...

The Supreme Court is scheduled on Oct. 31 to hear the lawsuits brought by the anti-affirmative action organization Students for Fair Admissions that challenge the race-conscious methods that Harvard and the University of North Carolina use to pick freshman classes. The organization says that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans and that North Carolina gives an admissions boost to underserved racial minorities. And the group argues in its own brief, filed this week, that ending affirmative action nationwide would help improve diversity at the University of California and the University of Michigan, “because they could better compete with universities who currently use race.” ...

Affirmative action is banned by local edict in nine states, including Michigan and California. Some states without affirmative action programs, like Oklahoma, have taken the opposite position in briefs to the court, arguing that the University of Oklahoma “remains just as diverse today (if not more so) than it was when Oklahoma banned affirmative action in 2012.” Thirteen other states joined the Oklahoma brief...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/affirmative-action-admissions-supreme-court.html.

===

We are experimenting. You can hear the text above at the link below: