Obama officials tell colleges to ignore the recent Fisher ruling.
Obama Administration regulators have made a specialty of ignoring Congressional intent, and even black-letter law. Now they’re showing the same disdain for the Supreme Court with advice to universities about interpreting racial preferences in the wake of June’s Fisher v. University of Texas ruling.
In a September 27 letter to university presidents, civil rights officials from the Departments of Justice and Education wrote that the Court’s decision in Fisher means that universities can continue with their same racial-preference policies. According to the Administration’s version of events, the ruling was merely a tweak on 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision that racial preferences could be used to achieve “diversity” on campus.
At a September 27 forum at the Justice Department to release the letter, Education Department Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said there was “no difference in content” between the two decisions, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That must be news to the Supreme Court, which in an 8-1 opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy rebuked Texas precisely because it had failed to heed Grutter. That decision said schools could use race in admissions but not as a dominant factor. In practice, however, the University of Texas like most other schools implemented a race-dependent admissions program and figured no one would notice. In Fisher, Justice Kennedy called that unacceptable and ordered courts to give universities “no deference” in subjecting racial preference policies to “strict scrutiny,” or the highest level of judicial review.
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