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California

Impact of Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decisions on CA

Students passing through Suthergate at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022.  Proposition 209 of 1996 prohibited the University of California and other state agencies from hiring, contracting, or enrolling people on the basis of race or sex 27 years before the Supreme Court ruled in its affirmative. was action.

Students passing through Suthergate at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. Proposition 209 of 1996 prohibited the University of California and other state agencies from hiring, contracting, or enrolling people on the basis of race or sex 27 years before the Supreme Court ruled in its affirmative. was action.

APs

The Supreme Court on Thursday said universities and colleges could no longer use a form of race-conscious admissions, overturning a 40-year precedent in affirmative action policy.

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Rather race should be considered in an individual’s experience — conveyed through an essay, interview or otherwise — instead of their identity in composing a demographic make-up of the student body.

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In two split decisions, the court sided with a group that sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina over admission policies that take an applicant’s race into account as a method to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in a campus body.

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In the majority opinions for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

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It means that California’s private colleges and universities — including Stanford University, the University of Southern California and the California Institute of Technology, among others — must now face the same prohibition on race-conscious admissions that covered its public schools when voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996.

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The decision affects the University of California and California State University system less than other states’ public institutions, given California’s has a long-standing ban on race-conscious admissions.

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Prop. 209, passed by voters in 1996, blocked public universities and colleges, governmental bodies and other public systems from using race, gender and other factors in hiring, contracting or admissions. There were minimal exceptions to prevent breaking federal law that, at the time, required race-conscious hiring for funding, such as research grants that the UC campuses rely on.

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Private institutions — like Stanford University, USC and Caltech — were exempt from Prop. 209.

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Now they must face the same shift that their public counterparts had after Prop. 209 went into effect.

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UC leaders, so concerned about this outcome, filed an amicus brief in November urging the Supreme Court to uphold affirmative action policies. An amicus brief, filed on behalf of people who are not part of a case, can offer courts insights.

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Blocking race-and-gender-conscious admissions is detrimental to students, attorneys for the president and chancellors of UC wrote, because inclusivity policies promote greater intellectual diversity and show the next generation that all people are welcome.

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“In a Nation where race matters, universities must maintain campus environments that enable them to teach their students to see each other as more than mere stereotypes,” they wrote. “Succeeding at that endeavor is crucial to preparing the next generation to be effective citizens and leaders in an increasingly diverse Nation.”

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What is California Prop. 209?

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California was the first state to institute a ban on race-and-gender-conscious hiring and admission in public higher education and the public workforce. Washington state, which repealed its ban in 2022, followed suit in 1998. Now Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Idaho have similar restrictions.

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Public universities starting applying affirmative action in the late 1960s. Affirmative action originated with former President John F. Kennedy who in 1961 issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure equal opportunity in employment.

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Race-conscious admissions were designed to promote campus diversity, reduce inequality and make up for historical hindrances that have prevented people of color from accessing education.

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“It existed for about 30 years and became impactful in Black and Hispanic student admissions,” said Zachary Bleemer, an expert in higher education who earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, in an interview the week before the Supreme Court released its ruling.

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Even then, race-conscious admissions weren’t popular: Prop. 209 passed with a 10% margin.

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When Prop. 209 passed, Republican Pete Wilson was governor, three-quarters of the California voting population was white and some politicians were pushing nativist policies to garner support. About two-thirds of white voters were for Prop. 209, whereas a majority of Black, Latino and Asian voters were against it, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.

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Said Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford Law School professor who is an expert on race relations and discrimination, “affirmative action has always been controversial and many voters oppose it.”

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Speaking to The Bee before the Supreme Court released its decision, Ford said the Constitution allowed “affirmative action under limited circumstances, but it has never required it. As such, states — as well as private institutions — have already been free to choose whether or not to use affirmative action.

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“Prop. 209 simply reflects California’s decision not to engage in race-based affirmative action,” he said.

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Proportion of minority students ‘fell dramatically’

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With the Supreme Court gutting affirmative action, Bleemer said, “What you’d see is a much smaller scale version of what happened after Proposition 209.”

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In the amicus brief before the Supreme Court this term, UC’s attorneys wrote that the proportion of students from underrepresented groups “fell dramatically” after Prop. 209, forcing the system to use “race-neutral measures to pursue diversity.”

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While that “improved the UC system’s overall student body diversity substantially since the precipitous drop caused by Proposition 209,” it has been insufficient to make campus bodies reflect California’s diversity, particularly at more selective UCs.

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Students who previously chose to attend a UC went to private systems in and out of state.

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“A group of high-testing Black and Hispanic students, who under affirmative action went to Berkeley and UCLA and now couldn’t get into those schools, flowed into the ivy league and private universities that still had affirmative action and were getting admitted,” Bleemer said.

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In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, the opposite could happen. Since public universities like UCLA, Berkeley and Davis have lived by the Prop. 209 protocol for far longer and had to adjust, more Black and Latino students might switch their preferences and apply there.

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Still, the impact on the average California student could be minimal: Such a small population of students attend the state’s private institutions, Bleemer noted: Just 15-20% of students in California go to private colleges, and far fewer attend elite universities.

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Failed attempts to repeal Prop. 209

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In actuality, affirmative action remains unpopular — across racial lines, as shown by a recent attempt to pull Prop. 209.

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Since Prop. 209 passed, there have been several failed attempts to rescind at least parts of it in the courts, Legislature and a 2020 ballot initiative.

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The Democrat-controlled Legislature in 2020 thought that voters might back Prop. 16 after a summer of civil unrest onset up the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minnesota, and the pandemic that highlighted racial inequity.

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Members of the Legislature hastily got the measure on the ballot. They argued repealing Prop. 209 would increase racial and gender representation in higher education and in the public workforce, particularly aiding Latino and Black residents.

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But Prop. 16 failed by a larger margin than Prop. 209 had passed. At the time, lawmakers and advocates for the proposition said not enough public opinion groundwork was done and that the issue got lost on a crowded ballot, according to previous reporting by The Bee.

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Ford said that “post-election surveys showed that many voters thought repealing Prop. 209 would also repeal basic anti-discrimination protections. This is incorrect and the misperception might have made the difference.”

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People against Prop. 16 said it was discriminatory and that diverse communities in California had made strides in representation.

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“In a state hardly seen as conservative, voters rejected a repeal of the state constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment by race,” Arnold Steinberg, a strategist with the “No” on Proposition 16 campaign who worked on Prop. 209, said following the results.

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Hispanic and Latino state workers are underrepresented compared to the California population, according to a review of 2020 data by the California Department of Human Resources, the most recent year data is available. Black and white civil workers were overrepresented, while workers of different Asian descents about matched California’s population.

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Most of California is Hispanic: 40% of the state identifies as Hispanic or Latino, 35% as white, 16% as Asian and 6.5% as Black, according to 2020 census data.

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Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

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The Supreme Court, in its split decision released Thursday, ruled that the 14th Amendment prohibits the use of racial preferences in admissions. The conservative-leaning justices made up the majority.

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The Supreme Court heard two cases concerning race-conscious admissions in October brought forward by an organization that claims students were harmed because of affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., which claims to represent 20,000 people, said that race-conscious admissions discriminated against Asian students and that schools should not refuse a race-neutral alternative in fear of potential changes to the student body if there’s no proof that it could detriment the school’s academic quality. The group called for the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 case affirming that considering race in a holistic admissions process to promote campus diversity did not harm nonminority applicants nor violated federal law.

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The 2003 precedent followed a 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In this case, a white student who twice failed to get into UC Davis’ medical school argued that a program to admit a certain number of students from minority backgrounds blocked him from getting in. While the justices said “no” to racial quotas and found for Allan Bakke, who was then admitted to the school, they also said that considering race in admissions was allowed under federal law.

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Siding with the 2003 Supreme Court precedent, Harvard and UNC contended that diversity improves academic experiences and that considering race in the admissions process does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Civil Rights Act or the 14th Amendment.

This story was first published June 29, 2023, 7:22 AM.

Articles related to Sacramento Bee

Gillian Brassill is a Congressional Correspondent for McClatchy’s California Press. From Capitol Hill, she covers federal policies, people, and issues that affect the Golden State. She graduated from Stanford University.



https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article276655881.html Impact of Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decisions on CA

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