The chief justice took a highly skeptical view of race-conscious enrollment policies, even those intended for benign purposes such as promoting diversity. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote.
Another Friday news dump to avoid sticky political problems. In the latest example, Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are again imposing race-based policies on America in a way that violates the spirit and the letter of the most recent Supreme Court case that dealt with affirmative-action college admission programs.
Jess Bravin writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration issued new guidance Friday advising schools and colleges on how they can make race-based enrollment decisions to promote campus diversity, shortly before the Supreme Court is set to consider whether to re-examine a 2003 case holding that universities could sometimes use race in admissions decisions.
The departments withdrew prior guidance from the Bush administration, which officials said was too vague to assist school administrators seeking to promote diverse student enrollment. The new guidance parses the Supreme Court’s most recent rulings on student diversity to suggest policies the administration believes would not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Like the former Bush administration guidance, the new documents advise schools to use race-neutral policies if possible. If those prove insufficient, however, the new guidance states that a school “may consider a student’s race as a ‘plus factor’ (among other, nonracial considerations) to achieve its compelling interests” in diversity.
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