<p>^^ I don’t want to take sides, but I think that the focus of the debate is on whether upper middle class URM’s should be given an advantage when competing with lower SES white and Asian students.</p>
<p>That’s not what I am saying at all. Being factitious of course, no one who secures a spot at a sought after university is going to give up their spot so that a poor minority student could attend. But that is what they are asking the Fishers and Bakkes etc to do.</p>
<p>And 168 minority students before her?</p>
<p>Maybe she should put on 200 pounds or so…or go out for bowling.</p>
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<p>No! 42/47 who were allegedly given preference over Fisher were white?</p>
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<p>@luisarose</p>
<p>Just a hypothetical question: Would you feel elated if a rich African American girl with low grades and a 2000 SAT, got into Harvard, but you got rejected despite being poorer and having a 2400?</p>
<p>“no one who secures a spot at a sought after university is going to give up their spot so that a poor minority student could attend. But that is what they are asking the Fishers and Bakkes etc to do.”</p>
<p>No, that isn’t what we’re asking them to do, because Fisher never earned a spot, and has nothing to “give up.” All the kids at Harvard DO have “their” spots, because they earned them according to Harvard’s judgment.</p>
<p>All we’re asking Fisher to do is accept that she was entitled to nothing except a spot in the competition, which she entered and lost fair and square. This argument would be a good one if she hadn’t been permitted to apply.</p>
<p>If she lost out fair and square that would be okay with me. Including race as a factor against her is not fair and square.</p>
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<p>It’s also not fair and square that many minority kids grow up in low-income homes and are first-generation college students. Or that people with “black” names are less likely to be offered a job interview than “white”-named people with identical resumes, or that black Americans are incarcerated at rates that are disproportionally high compared to the actual rates of crime. What do you suggest we do about that?</p>
<p>I thought it was already established that even taking away the race component, she was still not competitive enough to earn a spot?</p>
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<p>Fisher didn’t “secure a spot” and she never “gave up her spot.” You write as if Fisher was entitled to a place in the entering class and someone took it away from her. She wasn’t entitled. She may have felt entitled, but she wasn’t entitled. Her stats just weren’t that strong. She wasn’t an auto-admit under the (then) 10% rule, so that left her one of thousands of Texans who didn’t make the top 10% of their HS class, competing for a handful of remaining slots. Did the University of Texas consider race in making the final cut? Yes. Did that deprive Fisher of a spot that she had already secured, or otherwise would have gotten? No. University officials say she wouldn’t have been admitted even if they hadn’t considered race, because she just wasn’t that strong a candidate. Most of the black and Latino applicants who were admitted had better GPAs and SAT scores than Fisher. Five black or Latino admits had lower GPAs and test scores—but so did 42 white admits. How could that happen? Well, the University of Texas looks not just at GPAs and test scores, but at a lot of factors, including demonstrated leadership and overcoming personal challenges, and Fisher wasn’t particularly strong on any of those things. And neither were several hundred, or possibly several thousand other Texans of all races who had better GPAs and test scores than Fisher, and didn’t get admitted. No one took anything away from her. She wasn’t that strong a candidate, and she was denied admission. Suck it up, and stop whining about race.</p>
<p>“I thought it was already established that even taking away the race component, she was still not competitive enough to earn a spot?”</p>
<p>It is established, which is why she lost fair and square, no matter whether you consider a race-aware process fair and square.</p>
<p>AA Has far greater reach than the specifics of this woman’s particular application. So I’m not too interested in that.</p>
<p>Yes, there are poor high schools. But universities give extra points to minority applicants regardless of where they went to high school. There are also many poor high schools without AP classes etc in rural communities, not just the inner city. </p>
<p>And then professional schools give extra points to minority applicants who attended the same colleges as their white and Asian counterparts. </p>
<p>The government should treat people equally. That is the “radical” idea I want to see followed.</p>
<p>At this point, my head is spinning. She lost fair and square, but is claiming the process is tainted. Which is why Fisher (and it just being Fisher, alone) is so odd. A stronger case would have been made with a stronger candidate. </p>
<p>No one knows that they “included race as a factor against her.” I suspect none of us really know how race plays in the holistic round. Can you tell us where “points” come up in this case? So much certainty about a process that is not transparent-?</p>
<p>Btw, whether or not AA has far greater reach can be a point of interest to the court. But much rests on technicalities: does she have standing, as defined by law? We’ve been over that. If they choose to toss this based on standing, that’s that. For this case.</p>
<p>Even as a layperson, makes me think this is the mosquito approach.</p>
<p>And: after mini’s comment about bowling (which reminds me of a thread where we discovered there are bowling recruits,) don’t they handicap in golf?</p>
<p>I think that the case is set up so that it is not a matter of whether Fisher should have been accepted or not. For whatever reason, she through legal representation was able to bring about this suit and is challenging the inclusion of race in the holistic part of the UT Austin admissions process. At this point, FIsher is not going to get an personal remedy or reversal of her admissions decision. So the case is not about her anymore other than she is the face person in the case.</p>
<p>“AA Has far greater reach than the specifics of this woman’s particular application. So I’m not too interested in that.”</p>
<p>Fair enough, but the facts of the plaintiff’s case are pretty darn important to the matter before the Supreme Court. More broadly, the flaws in her case do illustrate what many of us perceive to be a weakness of the anti-AA movement: ultimately, they are advocating on behalf of white mediocrity. White excellence is doing just fine in this country, and doesn’t feel any need to sue. So this is, as usual, the best the movement can come up with.</p>
<p>“So the case is not about her anymore”</p>
<p>It doesn’t work that way. This isn’t a class action where the lead plaintiff can be replaced. The US Courts are empowered to resolve actual cases and controversies, not theoretical disputes. They are specifically forbidden from issuing advisory opinions (as in, “This is what we would decide under some imaginary facts”). Sure, if they render a decision it will apply to lots of people, not just Fisher, but their job here is and has to be deciding the case in front of them.</p>
<p>^The more I think about it, the more I am convinced she is going to lose. She is a weak plaintiff; she can’t demonstrate harm; minorities with similar stats were rejected AS WELL. She has no way to prove that race was THE factor that resulted in her being denied admission.</p>
<p>Having said that, I honestly don’t think Texas needs the “race” word expressly stated in its policy at this point. Isn’t race part of “personal characteristics” or some other category they consider? Maybe after they’re done wasting taxpayer dollars defending themselves in this seemingly frivolous case they will take the initiative to review the language.</p>
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<p>But that’s the whole point of the standing inquiry. If there’s nothing the Court can do for her, she doesn’t have standing, and the Court shouldn’t be hearing the case. The fact that she’s gotten this far means nothing. Other litigants have gotten to the Supreme court, only to have their cases thrown out on standing grounds (which has the effect of nullifying all the lower court rulings, too). To say “the case is not about her anymore” is pretty much to admit she doesn’t have standing. SCOTUS has said repeatedly that it would violate the Constitution for a federal court to hear a case where the plaintiff didn’t have a sufficiently concrete interest in the outcome. And that, in turn, requires 3 things: the plaintiff must show a concrete injury (here, presumably, denial of admission) that was caused by the defendant’s wrongful act (here, even if it was constitutionally impermissible for the University of Texas to use race, that’s not what caused Fisher to be denied admission), and third, the court must be able to offer some meaningful relief to the plaintiff (which it can’t do here because Fisher has already finished college and has no intention to re-apply to the University of Texas as a freshman, so anything the Court did wouldn’t help her one iota). Her lawyers are trying to say the injury is that she was denied a fair and equal chance, but in a similar case SCOTUS seemed to suggest that a wholly past wrong of that sort didn’t confer standing if the plaintiff would have been denied admission anyway, even without the improper consideration of race. It did say if the plaintiff was seeking to enjoin future activity, there could be standing, but all the cases it cited for that proposition involved repeat players, e.g., contractors who were still bidding on contracts and were claiming an ongoing wrong against them–not against some other guy.</p>
<p>Let’s see if I understand the last couple of posts. An applicant who wouldn’t have been accepted under any circumstances “lost” her spot because URMs with better stats weren’t accepted.</p>
<p>Very amusing. Keep up the insightful commentary!</p>
<p>Um, I might have to revise that last post. Someone PM’d me to explain it. The rejected URMs with better stats don’t count, because they clearly don’t belong at UT. By extension, the URMs who were accepted don’t belong at UT either. And even though Fisher has much poorer stats that other admits, this actually works in her favor … she gets in as a Diversity admit.</p>