High
court’s decision not to affect Beach admission
By Li-Wei Yang
Summer On-line Forty-Niner
The
U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last week of
endorsing the use of affirmative action
in the University of Michigan law school
will most likely not have any effect on
the admission policy of the California State
University system.
Passed
by voters in 1996 as a state ballot initiative,
Proposition 209, now a part of the California
Constitution, clearly prohibits the state
from granting “preferences to any individual
or group on the basis of race or ethnicity
in public employment, contracting or education,”
according to a CSU press release.
Still,
the CSU system remains the nation’s most
diverse university system. Minority student
enrollment of all CSU campuses combined
makes up 53 percent of total students —
a number that is more than twice the national
average for public universities.
“I
think that the Supreme Court’s decision
to acknowledge the value of diversity on
a college campus is important,” said CSULB
president Robert Maxson. “Fortunately, we
have been successful in maintaining diversity
on our campus, primarily because we live
in probably the most diverse area in the
country, and many of our local students
want to attend school here.”
The
current CSU admission policy states that
any high school graduate student with a
GPA of 3.0 or better automatically qualifies
for admission. And students with less than
3.0 GPA are determined through standardized
testing and GPA.
The
ruling is likely to affect colleges and
universities across the nation. Already
legislators and school officials in Texas
are brooding whether to reinstate race-based
admission policy. Similar to California,
Texas now uses a “top 10 percent rule” in
which high school students that graduate
within the top 10 percent are automatically
guaranteed admissions to any state university
of their choice.
In
a 5-4 ruling that upheld the use of affirmative
action in the University of Michigan law
school, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor supplied
the swing vote to give the narrow victory
to proponents of affirmative action.
The court affirms the ruling set 25 years
ago in the Allan Bakke vs. the University
of California case that a student’s race
or ethnicity can be one of many plus “factors”
as long as it is not used as a sole factor
or as a quota system.
“When
raced-based action is necessary to further
a compelling governmental interest, such
action does not violate the constitutional
guarantee of equal protection so long as
the narrow-tailoring requirement is also
satisfied,” O’Connor wrote for the majority
opinion.
In
contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas dissented
and wrote that minorities need not special
treatments or protections to succeed in
society.
“The
Constitution abhors classifications based
on race, not only because those classifications
can harm favored races or are based on illegitimate
motives, but also because every time the
government places citizens on racial registers…it
demeans us all,” wrote Thomas.
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