Board V Regents//CONCLUDE

 Weston Hill Theoharis

7 December 2021

Fys 1000

BAKKE V. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

The Supreme Court reversed a policy for admissions at the University of California in 1978.  While generally approving affirmative action programs. In 1973 and 1974, Allan Bakke, a white guy, was denied admission to the medical school at Davis. In both years, the school only accepted one hundred students, with sixteen spots set aside for minorities. Bakke filed a lawsuit, alleging "reverse discrimination" because some of the minorities accepted had worse grade point averages and MCAT scores than he did. Four justices wanted to abolish the program because it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but they didn't want to review the medical school's affirmative action program's validity. Four others requested the Court to decide that the program was legal and that the medical school had made the proper decision in rejecting Bakke. Justice Lewis Powell Jr. basically split the difference, arguing that fixed racial quota programs like the medical schools were illegal under the Civil Rights Act, but that a public school's admission criteria "may" include race as long as it was not the deciding factor. He contended that because it permitted educational institutions to foster cultural variety, it was constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment. Because it was determined on narrow statutory grounds, the Court's judgment, which only addressed affirmative action programs at schools receiving federal monies, did not resolve the matter of reverse discrimination. 

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/bakke-v-regents-university-california 

As opposition to affirmative action programs grew in the 1990s, the ruling became a flashpoint for debate. The University of California Board of Regents, for example, rejected the Bakke standard, which allowed "race as one of many considerations" in admissions choices, opting to bar UC campuses from utilizing "race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" in admissions decisions in July 1995. In Hop-wood v. State of Texas, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of four white students who had been denied admission to the University of Texas Law School. The court found that the students had been subjected to reverse discrimination and deemed the use of race as one of numerous factors in admissions choices to be unlawful. The Supreme Court declined to hear the issue again, leaving Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana to follow it as law. https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/constitutional-law/constitutional-law-keyed-to-chemerinsky/equal-protection/regents-of-the-university-of-california-v-bakke/

Judge Bernard Friedman's district court finding in Grutter v. Bollinger in March 2001 ordered the University of Michigan Law School to stop using race as a consideration in admissions, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals imposed a stay in April. In May 2002, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court's decision and upheld the school's use of race in admissions.