This is one of those Supreme Court precedences that I both admire and despise. To reiterate what the Court ruled on in this case (see "Scuette, Attorney General of Michigan v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigration Rights and Fight for Equality by all Means Necessary (BAMN) et al," no. 12-682, October 2013 Term, at: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-682_j4ek.pdf), Michigan apparently passed, by ballot referendum, a law amending the state's constitution that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race in admissions to public colleges and universities. The intent, in this regard, was not to sanction a level playing field between minorities and White applicants to public higher education in the state but to prohibit preferences for minorities under affirmative action programs. In this manner, public colleges and universities in Michigan will be constrained to select applicants strictly based on academic merit to fill limited enrollments for incoming classes of undergraduate students, rather than setting aside a limited number of spaces for ethnic and racial minorities seeking to benefit from engagement in higher education at institutions for which they might not otherwise qualify without the application of preferential admissions standards.
I have three separate points to make in regard to this decision. First, strictly in regard to the principle of federalism and the preeminence of the democratic process, I think the Court made the right decision. The electorate of Michigan, assembled as a sovereign polity, was entitled to make a decision that, as a minimum, served a legitimate public purpose (the maintenance of racial and ethnic neutrality in the organization of public institutions chartered for the political, cultural, and economic benefit of Michigan's citizens) and was rationally directed toward such ends. I cannot see how the invalidation of this law in reference to a more restrictive standard of constitutionality would have been merited in order to defend contrary public policy objectives for which the people of Michigan made clear that they disagreed with the means by which such objectives had been advanced. Stare decisis notwithstanding, I am of the opinion that democracy, as majority rule, needs to be our first jurisprudential principle in evaluating whether a particular legislative enactment meets constitutional muster. In this regard, the decision of an assembled polity through the referendum process needs to be accorded some degree of preference, at least to the extent that it does not, on its face, expressively contradict constitutional standards by the intent of its authors.
Having made this point, it seems clear to me, as it seems to be have been clear to Justice Sotomayer in dissent, that, in its effects, this law will not establish a level playing field between White, Anglo college applicants, on the one hand, and non-White, non-Anglo applicants, on the other. Rather, allowed to stand, a rigorously merit-based applications process to public institutions of higher learning in Michigan will lead to enhanced admissions of White and Anglo applicants from secondary institutions in suburban and/or rural environments with relatively higher community median incomes and relatively higher-level academic performance in comparison with urban communities. As such, these institutions will pervasively underserve poorer urban communities like those of Detroit, Flint, and Ann Arbor in preference to suburban counties and students from comparable secondary educational environments out of state (where, in any case, public colleges and universities will be able to charge heavier tuition rates relative to what they would charge to in-state students for whom they were commissioned with a mandate to serve and provide an affordable higher education!). In this sense, there is something not merely racist embodied within the law which the people of Michigan enthusiastically endorsed, but also succinctly oriented to privilege minorities of the state's population based on higher income. I cannot see how this law could ever have been intended to advance a larger mission of public higher education to promote the social mobility of individuals and social groupings left behind by economic development in previous generations with the promise of an affordable avenue to a better life through education. It simply enacts into law, on the one hand, the spitefulness of a small number of households with academically marginal White candidates that did not get into the public institution of their choice because equally qualified candidates of color had to be admitted in their place and, on the other hand, the prejudices of libertarians who despised both the conception of public higher education, per se (wishing that these places could simply be transformed into quasi-public, profit making entities), and the notion that public colleges and universities might be used as a vehicles to enable lower income groups to crawl up from the lowest ranks of society by their own efforts, albeit with a helping hand from policies intended to sow the seeds of prosperity for a broader segment of the population!
Lastly, off the top of my head I cannot vouch for the inherent value of diversity in higher educational institutions with any specific empirical evidence, but it seems likely that, if Michigan's public colleges and universities do become lily White places of learning, they will also become academically sterile places, catering to a truncated range of students looking for reinforcement of particular parochial perspectives on the universe of knowledge, and attracting few truly innovative academic thinkers as faculty outside of disciplines that attract disproportionate numbers of students at every institution of higher learning in the United States based on the perceived marketability of their degrees. They will cluster small handfuls of departments, in high tech fields or in exclusive business programs, enjoying substantial funding for respectable faculty and high-quality students, and larger numbers of departments, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, with mediocre faculty and below average students from families with the ability to pay overinflated tuitions for a subpar higher educational experience. Rather than being the sorts of places that support vigorous debate over public policy issues, relevant to the workings of the democratic process in the state, and generate energetic, passionate graduates in fields like education and health care, they will become factories for graduates with degrees that, by and large, carry little weight in competition with graduates from public and private institutions that accord greater attention to recruiting both students and faculty from a wider range of cultural backgrounds and, hence, create educational environments more conducive to critical learning and development of the sort of social capital associated with the experience of diversity. In short, I would hope that the good people of Michigan would realize the extent to which the law they enacted through democratic consent will not only diminish the value of their public higher educational system but have a detrimental effect on the economic development environment that a good system of public higher education might otherwise help to support. In view of the present state of Michigan's economy, and especially that of its most populous city, it would seem that the state needs all the help that it can get to promote an energetic, entrepreneurial environment within a broader range of its population and that enacting laws likely to promote degeneration of the quality of its public higher educational system by limiting its inclusiveness to certain populations can only accentuate the negative.
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