Assoc. Dean Amar Comments on Affirmative Action for NY Times, KPCC
Associate Dean Vikram Amar commented on Fisher v. Texas for media including the New York Times and Los Angeles-based NPR affiliate KPCC. The case, which concerns a white student who sued in federal court claiming she was denied admission to the University of Texas on the basis of her race, could be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, spurring discussions of affirmative action programs intended to increase diversity in higher education.
The University of California has been prohibited from using race, religion, gender, ethnicity, or national origin as considerations in the admissions process since 1996, and African-American enrollment has suffered, Amar told the New York Times. "I would say that we have lost systemwide - undergraduate, graduate and professional - about one-third of the black students we would have enrolled if affirmative action hadn't ended," he said, adding that the proportion of African-Americans has dropped to about 3 to 4 percent from the 5 to 7 percent it would have been.
In an interview with KPCC, Amar referenced the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which allowed states the opportunity to use race as a factor for admission. "The real question is whether the U.S. Supreme Court, in the name of the Constitution, has any right to be shutting this down. And for a court that purports to care about the original text and the original framers of the Constitution, I think it's very odd that a conservative majority of the Justices would say that the Constitution is completely colorblind, when the very people who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment and the equal-protection clause of the Constitution themselves engaged in race-based affirmative action," Amar said.
Vikram Amar, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Law with the UC Davis School of Law, is a national authority in the fields of constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal procedure, and remedies. His biweekly column for Justia.com, a leading provider of online legal information, centers on his expertise in constitutional law.