Opinion ID: 777482
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Is Developing a Diverse Student Body a Compelling State Interest?

Text: 226
227 Holding that, generally speaking, diversity in education is a compelling state interest would not be terribly helpful. After all, it is not clear what the term means. From the outset therefore, it is crucial to be precise about the nature of the diversity that the Law School seeks to promote. Justice Powell discussed a diversity that would enrich the pedagogical activities of a school, a diversity of experiences, outlooks, and ideas that would challenge its students' settled preconceptions and open them to new intellectual paradigms. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 314, 98 S.Ct. 2733. The Law School adopts this dialogic vision of diversity as the purpose behind its admissions program. 228 Some versions of diversity are clearly not included in the Law School's vision. For example, the Law School does not seem to promote the potential for moral education in racial tolerance created by a more diverse student body. On this view, the mere presence of minority students may indeed be sufficient to enhance the educational experience. Similarly, the Law School does not seem to rely on the promotion of post-graduation diversity in the legal profession. 229 Instead, the Law School rests its claim to the benefits of a diverse student body on the unique experiences that students from under-represented groups will be able to share with their fellow students. Closely related, the Law School implies that a student body diverse with regard to race is one diverse with regard to viewpoint, experience, and opinion. Through the Socratic Method, the keystone of legal education, the students from groups otherwise over-represented will be pressed to consider new ideas as their previously under-represented minority colleagues discuss the legal questions at issue. 230 For all these educational benefits to diversity, the majority uses the shorthand academic diversity. Majority Op. at 747. From the implementation of the Law School's program, however, it is perfectly clear that academics has nothing to do with the type of diversity sought. After listening to the Law School extoll the virtues of educational diversity, one might think that preference would be given across the board for life experiences. The Law School's rhetoric implies that it is searching tirelessly for the applicant with the most unique of experiences: for example, the Mormon missionary in Uganda, the radical libertarian or Marxist, the child of subsistence farmers in Arkansas, or perhaps the professional jazz musician. The Law School, however, never claims that there is any similarity between the preference given to those with such unique experiences and that bestowed upon those it considers under-represented racial minorities. 231 Most poignantly, the Law School's offering of non-racial exemplars for such non-racial diversity betrays the profound and experientially unrelated preference that the Law School places on race. Mentioning status as an under-represented minority in the same breath, the Law School generalizes, in the abstract, that it would also give a preference to an applicant with an Olympic gold medal, a Ph.D in physics, the attainment of age 50 in a class otherwise lacking anyone over 30, or the experience of having been a Vietnamese boat person. Admissions Policies, University of Michigan Law School, April 22, 1992, JA at 4240. Yet to equate bare racial status with the experiential gains of these generally remarkable (and exceedingly rare) achievements demonstrates that the Law School's desired diversity is unrelated to the experiences of its applicants. After reading the description of its admissions criteria, a Michigan law student might yearn to meet the mere Olympian who failed to medal and was thus considered insufficiently interesting by the Law School. 232 The disjunction between the Law School's preference for the race of under-represented minorities and what happened to be those applicants' experiences came through very clearly in an exchange at oral argument. Counsel for the Law School agreed that it was true that Ms. Grutter would have been admitted had she been of a different race, but strongly asserted that she would have then been a different person. Tr. at 38. Of course, in a trivial way, that is true of every change in any of us. Had she grown up in New York or had a mother or father who did or did not work outside the home, she would also have been a different person. However, none of those changes, all of which would have made her diverse in some different fashion, would have enhanced or determined her chances of admission. When I then asked counsel whether, if she were of a different race, she would have been admitted whether she had come of age in inner-city Detroit or in Grosse Pointe, he answered: That's probably right. Id. at 39. 233 When it comes to a choice between admitting a conventionally liberal (or conventionally conservative) black student who is the child of lawyer parents living in Grosse Pointe, just like the previous ten white admittees, the black student will be given a diversity preference that would not be given to a white or Asian student, her unique experiences notwithstanding. 11 Similarly, it is not at all clear how true diversity is served by giving massive preference to a student whose parents or grandparents came from an upper-class suburb of Buenos Aires, over those whose grandparents immigrated from similar areas of Paris, Munich, or Tokyo or, indeed, over a person whose grandparents survived the labor camps of Hitler or Stalin or the conformity regime of Brezhnev's Kazakhstan. Even Justice Powell in his Bakke opinion recognized that an admissions program focused solely on ethnic diversity, would hinder rather than further attainment of genuine diversity. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 315, 98 S.Ct. 2733 (Powell, concurring). 234 Perhaps the one unifying feature of the minority groups that the Law School heavily prefers in admissions is that they all, on average, have had some experience with being the object of racial discrimination. For law students, this might bring an understanding of the purposes behind the anti-discrimination laws that they might study. It is hard, however, to believe that the Law School's admissions scheme is terribly sensitive to this interest. If the Law School were truly interested in those with profound experience with discrimination, it would be sensitive to differences within the affected groups. An African-American applicant who comes to the Law School by way of Choate and Harvard 12 may well have quite a different experience of discrimination than one from a rural public school. Even if one were to believe that the Law School's racial preference were carefully designed to add such experience to the Law School mixing pot, one could wonder why an experience with discrimination would be so much more important than any other experience germane to other legal issues. 235 Indeed, one should wonder why race is at all relevant to the Law School if it only is concerned about the diversity of experience. It is likely that an admissions scheme that sought true experiential diversity, without regard to race, would provide some systematic advantage for racial or ethnic minorities. See also Part II.B.4 (discussing race-neutral means). Under-represented life experiences — primary or secondary education at an under-funded public school, struggling with relative poverty, a childhood spent in urban rather than suburban areas — may correlate to some degree with under-represented racial or ethnic minorities. 13 236 Such a system of seeking experiential diversity would be unlikely to raise significant constitutional problems, unless it were clear that an institution manipulated these factors to admit members of a particular race. However, the Law School certainly does not seek to implement an experientially based admissions system or even to assert that if it did, the preference given for such factors could explain its current results. Instead, it is clear that the only type of diversity that is given more than modest, if any, weight is based on assigned racial categories. The Law School cannot plausibly maintain that the system would be impractical, especially because, as they elsewhere remind us for purposes of distinguishing its preference from a quota, only one admissions officer reads all applications, makes all decisions, and therefore is capable of considering candidates individually. The possibility of an experientially based admissions system and the Law School's apparent disinterest in such a system, indicate that the Law School grants preference to race, not as a proxy for a unique set of experiences, but as a proxy for race itself. 237 Accordingly, even if we were to consider binding on this court Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke that the achievement of some form of diversity in education is a compelling state interest, we would not ipso facto find compelling the type of diversity that the Law School apparently seeks. For Justice Powell in Bakke, race or ethnicity was only one element in a range of factors that an educational institution may consider to develop an experientially heterogeneous environment. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 314, 98 S.Ct. 2733. The Law School's consideration of race, for the sake of race, is not the type of pedagogical diversity thought potentially compelling in Powell's opinion. 238 There are yet more fundamental problems with the broad-brush rationale of diversity. The fundamental premise of our society is that each person is equally diverse exactly because of her equality before God and the law. The very words of the Declaration of Independence are: All men are created equal ... and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Thus, the starting basis is one of equality, not of separately assigned categories that are used to measure diversity. From that starting point, every person's experiences are diverse from those of every other. The very measure of diversity as used by the University is to say that some of those differences do not count. Thus, to the Law School, ten under-represented-minority students, each a child of two-parent lawyer families, are considered to be diverse, while children whose parents are Chinese merchants, Japanese farmers, white steel workers, or any combinations of the above are all considered to be part of a homogeneous (and over-represented) mass. And, of course, that categorization then strongly determines the odds of admission. A child with one parent of Chinese ancestry and one of Chilean would find that his level of diversity depends wholly on whether the Law School chooses to assign him based on one parent or the other. 14 239 The Law School gives no explanation of how it defines the groups to be favored. This means that ultimately it must make, on some basis, a decision on who is, and is not, an African-American, Hispanic, or Native American. See JA at 1957 (discussing the groups to be favored). Such judgments, of course, have a long and sordid history. The classic Southern Rule was that any African ancestry, or one drop of African blood, made one black. 15 The Nazi Nuremberg laws made the fatal decision turn on the number of Jewish grandparents. 16 Hispanic background may, I suppose, depend on which side of a pass in the Pyrenees your great-grandfather came from. This Christmas, my wife and I received a card, containing a lovely picture of a friend and his spouse, their two children and their spouses, and four grandchildren. I asked a sample of people, in and out of my chambers, how many of the ten people in the picture should receive racial preference under Michigan's policy. I received answers ranging from one to ten. 240 A moment's contemplation of these examples shows another serious problem with Michigan's policies. On the one hand, all the evidence is that race and ethnicity are considered on an all or nothing basis. But the actual experience, diverse or otherwise, of a person who is one-half or one-quarter of one ethnicity, is likely to be, on average, different from one whose ancestry is relatively uniform. On the other hand, to apply boldly a system of half-or quarter-credit for assigned status would reveal the racist nature of the system to a degree from which even its proponents would shrink. 241 Thus, even if we give full force to Justice Powell's discussion of the virtues of diversity, the Law School's program provides the linguistic term, but not the substance.
242 We are not completely at sea regarding how to discern a compelling state interest. The Supreme Court has consistently rejected those purposes that lack a logical stopping point. Croson, 488 U.S. at 498, 109 S.Ct. 706; Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Educ., 476 U.S. 267, 275, 106 S.Ct. 1842, 90 L.Ed.2d 260 (1986) (plurality opinion). Such vague and ill-defined purposes, if considered compelling, would eviscerate the constitutional protection that strict scrutiny provides. The two requirements of strict scrutiny — the identification of a compelling state interest and the use of only those means narrowly tailored to serve that interest — are designed to be independently meaningful rather than mere redundancies. Yet it is meaningless to require that a state narrowly tailor its suspect policies to a purpose that itself is poorly defined. 243 Requiring a well-defined purpose to be compelling reflects the Supreme Court's judgment that racial classifications ought to be used sparingly. The Law School's repeated incantation of developing a diverse student body suffers from this vice of vagueness. These same words, together with the discussion of promoting a more intriguing student body, could be used, and indeed have been used not invalidly on their face, to justify ethnic classifications that seem patently unconstitutional. 244 It may be instructive to compare the actual implementation of and articulated rationale behind the Michigan plan with another, possibly well-intentioned, attempt to manipulate admissions criteria to achieve a diverse student body. I refer to the religious-conscious policies, adopted by a number of Ivy League universities of which Harvard was the most notable, to give preference in admissions to Gentiles as opposed to Jews. The policies were also designed to produce a mixture of students in the school that was closer to the proportion that prevailed in society, and a proportion that was thought to be socially and educationally beneficial. 245 The reasons for the policy offered by then-President Lowell of Harvard are hauntingly similar to the rationale given here. As Lowell explained, without the policies Harvard would lose its character as a democratic national university drawing from all classes of the community and promoting a sympathetic understanding among them. Letter from President Lowell, reprinted in Henry Aaron Yeomans, ABBOTT LAWRENCE LOWELL, 1856-1943 209 (Arno 1977). Lowell worried that race feeling would become intense if numbers of students were not more proportional to the general population, and that if the numerical imbalance could be rectified, it would eliminate race feeling among the students, and `as these students passed out into the world, eliminating it in the community.' Nitza Rosovsky, THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE AT HARVARD AND RADCLIFFE 15 & n.2 (Harvard 1986) (quoting A. Lawrence Lowell Papers # 1056). Lowell also believed that his policy would be in the interests of Jews, as well as of everyone else. Ibid. 246 The weighted preference system at Harvard then worked much the same as Michigan's. The Harvard plan of its day also considered each applicant individually. Some Jews were admitted, some were not. Their religion was only one factor among many that were considered. It was perfectly clear, in the words of Justice Powell, that the applicant who loses out on the last available seat to another candidate receiving a `plus' on the basis of ethnic background will not have been foreclosed from all consideration for that seat. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 318, 98 S.Ct. 2733. Those who were not admitted could not be certain that their ethnicity had been decisive. All applicants admitted were certainly qualified, by the same standards as the Michigan plan. 247 Perhaps the crucial distinction comes from the notion that a true plus program would lack a facial intent to discriminate. Ibid. This could only be the case if the plus was in some fashion modest, and calibrated truly in connection with other comparable characteristics. The fact that the Harvard plan of the 1930's basically cut Jewish numbers by half or more would belie the lack of a facial intent to discriminate. See generally Marcia Graham Synnott, THE HALF-OPENED DOOR 96, 108, 110, 115 (Greenwood 1979). The University of Michigan's plan, which by its own calculations inflates the numbers of students from favored groups approximately three-to-four fold, similarly betrays a facial intent to discriminate. See JA at 6047. 248 It is thus important to note that the Michigan policy, though unintentionally, has an effect similar to that of the Harvard plan of old. The effect is similar, in my view, because a significant proportion of those persons who are excluded because of racial discrimination in favor of under-represented minorities are Jews. While no specific numbers have been given, a wide variety of sources indicate that Jewish representation in general in law schools is several multiples of the proportion of Jews in the general population. There is no reason to believe that as a proportion of those excluded by Michigan's policies, the impact would be any different. 249 If policies like the Law School's are permitted, the adverse effect on over-represented minorities will only grow more grave because such policies inexorably drive toward a philosophy in which admissions are parceled out roughly in proportion to representation in the general population. The Law School may deny this, and argue that the policy is only for under-represented minorities. But, if suitably divided, any group can become a minority. If one distinguishes between denominations of Christianity, no religion is a majority in America. Using only the constitutionally protected classes of national origin, no ethnic background is a majority. Thus, by the rationale of Michigan's policy, every group suitably defined could be entitled to a critical mass of its members so that those students, too, should not feel isolated or like spokespersons nor feel uncomfortable discussing issues freely based on their personal experiences. Majority Op. at 15. And then, by the inexorable laws of mathematics, the existence of a critical mass or rough proportionality for each group so considered means that what is left for the remainder of the groups (those formerly over-represented) is no more than its own critical mass of rough proportionality. And there lies the rub. Being relegated to rough proportionality brings Jewish applicants full circle to their chances under Lowell's Harvard Plan, or even worse, as Jews today constitute only 2-3% of the total population. The Law School and the court will certainly deny this, but that is where the figures unavoidably lead us. 250 These prospects for such uninhibited racial and ethnic discrimination are especially important because the Law School has declined to justify its policy as remedying past discrimination. 17 There is no limiting principle preventing the Law School from employing ethnic or religious preferences to arrange its student body by critical mass. In short, the compelling state interest of developing a diverse student body would justify an infinite amount of engineering with respect to every racial, ethnic, and religious class. 18 251