<p>In the amicus brief submitted by **Harvard University, Brown University, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University **in support of the University of Michigan, and the reasons that they feel AA is importand.</p>
<p>Let's call it what it is, at the crux of these AA rants is some getting admitted into a handful of schools because no one is up in arms about how to Podunk U. fulfills it institutional mission or how it selects a class.</p>
<p>They state:</p>
<p>We are not so far removed from the days when segregation by race in education, and race discrimination in all sorts of vital opportunities relevant to educational performance, were for many a matter of law.</p>
<p>The major points for affirmative action in their breifs are as follows:</p>
<p>These schools collectively stated</p>
<p>Academically selective universities have a compelling interest in ensuring that their student bodies incorporate the experiences and talents of the wide spectrum of racial and ethnic groups that make up our society. Amici should be free to compose a class that brings together many different kinds of students; that includes robust representation of students from different races and ethnicities; and that prepares graduates to work successfully in a diverse nation. Indeed, highly selective universities have long defined as one of their central missions the training of the nation’s business, government, academic, and professional leaders. By creating a broadly diverse class, amici’s admissions policies help to assure that their graduates are well prepared to succeed in an increasingly complex and multi-racial society.</p>
<p>The colleges presented the following arguments
·
I- Consideration Of Race And Ethnicity In An Individualized Admissions Process Serves Compelling Interests.</p>
<p>A. There Is a Broad Consensus On The Important Educational Benefits of Diversity.</p>
<p>***Diversity helps students confront perspectives other than their own and thus to think more rigorously and imaginatively; it helps students learn to relate better to people from different backgrounds; it helps students become better citizens. </p>
<p>The educational benefits of student diversity include the discovery that there is a broad range of viewpoint and experience within any given minority community – as well as learning that certain imagined differences at times turn out to be only skin deep. </p>
<p>It is surely fitting for universities to undertake to prepare their students to live and work in a global economy within a multiracial world. The challenges of contemporary life demand that students acquire not just traditional forms of knowledge regarding science and the arts, but also techniques of bridging differences in perspective and in personal experience.***</p>
<p>B. Consideration of Race and Ethnicity Grows Naturally Out Of The Needs Of The Professions and Of American Business.</p>
<p>***Every major profession in this country has sought greater diversity within its ranks. Businesses have demanded more minority managers and executives, as well as non-minorities who can work well with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.</p>
<p>Leading corporations, business groups, professional organizations, and executives have repeatedly called for consideration of race and ethnicity in university admissions.</p>
<p>In adopting their admissions policies, universities are responding to “the clearly articulated needs of business and the professions for a healthier mix of well-educated leaders and practitioners from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds.***</p>
<p>The Interest In Racial Diversity Cannot Be Served By Race-Neutral Reliance On Factors, Such As Economic Disadvantage, That Are Already Carefully Considered.</p>
<p>The United States urges (as one solution) that universities look to such factors as special economic hardship instead of race. See U.S. Grutter Br. 24-25. But the decisive fact is that all of the suggested race-neutral factors, and many more besides, already enter into admissions decisions. </p>
<p>Consideration of those factors alone does not achieve the distinctly racial diversity that amici seek in their student bodies. To accomplish that goal, admissions committees must give favorable consideration to minority race in addition to those other factors, not instead of them.</p>
<p>By deliberately tilting individual admissions toward “hardship” students in the hope of thereby selecting a large enough increment of minority students to make up for the losses that would result from race-blind admissions – would be disingenuous at best. Such an approach would in truth be a race based policy and not a race-neutral alternative at all. Indeed, such programs, if adopted to assure increased minority enrollment, would be based on race in a causal sense and would thus raise obvious constitutional questions of their own.</p>
<p>A race-neutral preference for economically disadvantaged students, for example, would admit many more whites than non-whites, because of sheer demographic realities. And, of course, the university interest in admitting minority students goes well beyond just admitting minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds.</p>
<p>Race-Conscious Admissions Programs Are Not Open- Ended Commitments.</p>
<p>The decision of a university as to which minority groups deserve favorable consideration in an individualized admissions process designed to foster such diverse representation, and the weight of such consideration, are necessarily and appropriately decisions to be made as a matter of educational judgment, taking into account both the university’s sense of its mission and its best estimate of the leadership needs it will address – not as a matter of conflicting “rights.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/...us_harvard.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/...us_harvard.pdf</a></p>
<p>Keep in mind that we live in a time of choice. After all has been said and done, if you don't like the institutional mission of a particular college or how they go about fulfilling that mission (especially at a private university), the solution is simple- don't apply to that school. However, I am willing to be dollars to donuts, that there is still going to be record numbers of applicants tossing their hats into the ring and very few if admitted will be turning them down becasue they find the methods that these schools use to craft a class so egregious that they are not going to attend.</p>