Paper 2
Bailey Corbin
Ind. Law and Rights
Professor Zelden
While the Supreme Court of The United States had declared the segregation of schooling systems on the basis of race unconstitutional as well as taking steps to ensure integration; America was still struggling with the question that pertain to the legality of higher education universities and colleges voluntarily creating affirmative action programs. Such programs seemed to be seen as a necessity to reconcile all of the discrimination that amounted during the the previous years, but in the eyes of many this seemed to be just as much in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the segregation of AfricanAmericans had been. The Court struggles with this concept of the legality of these programs in the case of Bakke v. Regents of the University of California.
Bakke was a white male who had applied twice to the University of California Medical School.Each of the two time he applied, he was rejected. Ordinarily this would not have been an issue but the two years that Bakke applied, the school imposed a quota for qualified minority applicants as a part of the college’s affirmative action program. The school reserved sixteen seats out of the incoming one hundred for these minority members but when examining Bakke’s college GPA as well as his test scores he was shown to score significantly higher than any of his minority counterparts. This case carried up to the Supreme Court of America and posed the question was the affirmative action program created voluntarily by the University in violation of both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court, in their decision, could not come to a single majority opinion.
In a sense, this case broke apart the court. There were six majority opinions between the nine justices. Justice Powell concluded that the affirmative action program did not meet the strict scrutiny standard cases that are based on suspect classification are subjected to and must be struck down. He does, however, admit that such programs are permissible under specific circumstances and this formulated the majority of his plurality opinion. Four other justices wanted to affirm the lower courts actions and three justices wanted to uphold the program.3 This left Blackmun, who later returned to cast which side he favored, and his decision was what created Powell’s essentialness to either side of the majority. The Court’s eventual plurality decision was delivered by Justice Powell, which was crafted to ensure each sides viewpoints were emphasized (4 agreed with Powell and struck down the program, forcing the school to admit Bakke and 3 disagreed with that notion of the decision but agreed with the idea that such programs were permissible in certain case if subjected to strict scrutiny standards and they agreed with the reversal of the lower court’s decision saying that race is allowed to be considered in the admissions process).
Powell’s plurality opinion deemed that this was not a case of goal orientation in which the University had claimed but rather it dealt with a racial qualification. With the mandated reservation of the sixteen spots for minority applicants, it left only eighty four seats in which white applicants could apply too. The issue was that white could only apply to eighty four percent of the open spots while minority students could apply to one hundred percent of the spots available. The Court quotes the Equal Protection Clause requiring “no applicant may be rejected because of race, in favor of another applicant who is less qualified, as measured by the standard applied without regard to race.” The Fourteenth Amendment applies to every person not just African-Americans and in order to justify the difference in treatment between the two races there must be a compelling interest. Justice Rehnquist states that this difference in treatment, whether based on race or ethical background, is exactly what the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was aimed at . Powell writes of the Harvard affirmative action program, which was permissible, as an example of how the University of California’s misconduct differs due to their strict racial quota and their unwillingness to consider other more predominant factors in the admission’s decision other than just race. 4
The University claimed that the reason for this unequal treatment was that they were trying to remedy the past discrimination African-Americans endured but it differed from Brown, which attest to the importance of the state goal to remedy past discrimination and the judiciary commitment to attain this goal lawfully , but the school was ordered by the State by court order to “redress the wrongs worked by specific interest discrimination.”4 That goal was more explicitly focused than simply remedying the past social discriminations. Quoting both Korematsu and Hirabayashi, Powell asserts that any case that pertains to race and the curtails their rights is subject to strict scrutiny.2 With that being said the Court stressed that no classification which aided one group that had be victimized at the expense of another innocent group was approved or constitutional, that this disadvantages the majority but explicitly catering to the minority. The Court continues with the notion that the program in place for minorities creates a limitation which draws a line strictly on the basis of race and ethnic background.2
While Powell agreed that the government had a compelling interest in regard to a racially diverse student body, he rejected the assertions of the University that the government had a compelling interest in educating and producing more minority doctors as well as saying that the University’s goal to bring more doctors to those underserved was too undefined and white doctors with interest in serving in minority communities would also suffice in filling this goal.2&4 Powell then goes on to stay with the concurrence of Justice Berger and a few others that the reservation of sixteen seats for minorities did in fact discriminate against Bakke and this racial quota was not among one of the least intrusive methods to achieve the University’s “goals” and the school could use race as one of the factors of consideration in the admissions process, not the only factor in the decision.4 Due to the school’s inability to provide any reasons other than the reserved seats for the minority as a means for his rejection from the University the Court, the Court upheld the California Supreme Courts’s decision to make the University admit Bakke.
In the another opinion, Justice Brennan emphasized that the meaning or reasoning for this case was that a majority of the Court was on the side of the affirmative action programs to continue. The Justices that agreed with this wrote in their collective opinion “government may take race into account when it acts not to demean or insult any racial group, but to remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice".
This alluded to the notion that if a program had the intentions to remedy past discriminations then they should be constitutional and race can be taken into account if it is not to discriminate against a race. White, Marshall, and Blackmun each delivered individual opinions with Blackmun saying “that in order to end racism, the nation must look at race and in order to treat someone equally, we do not treat them differently.” Justice Stevens, Berger, and Rehnquist concurred in parts of this idea and dissented in other parts. They found the question of racial preference permissibility in regard to the constitution unnecessary.5&6 They found the University guilty of discriminating of against Bakke and agreed that he should have been admitted but said that the issue of race being used as a factor in the admissions process is not the issue needed to be discussed in this case and thus not appropriate to talk about.5&6 Steven’s states that the title VI exclusion ban is explicit in expressing that race can not be the reason one is exclude from a federally funded program.4
This case essentially sets out six separate opinions that came together to issue a decisions to admit Bakke and it upheld affirmative action programs in higher education schools, only disallowing those of unusual circumstances such as the rigid racial quotas that was seen in the medical school and it allowed race to be one of the factors to be considered in the admissions process but it could not be the sole reason for which they were accepted or denied. This case was a case that everyone won in a sense as each viewpoint and standing of the Justices was represented and stated in Justice Powell’s plurality opinion.