“This suit was filed in 2008, and since then it has been on everybody’s watch list,’’ said Laurie Pohl, vice president for enrollment and student affairs at Boston University.
The court ruled nine years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger, which involved the University of Michigan, that the Constitution does not prohibit some limited uses of race in admissions. But justices who have joined the court since then may be inclined to nullify their predecessors’ decision.
“The court now has five justices who are quite starkly committed to the view that no attention to an individual’s race is ever justifiable in a public setting,’’ wrote Laurence Tribe, a prominent professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, in an e-mail. A decision against the University of Texas’s affirmative action policy, he said, “wouldn’t surprise me at all.’’
The uncertainty is unsettling for college administrators, who had expected that decision would endure at least 25 years.
After 2003, some schools had to abolish policies that awarded “points’’ for race - which were deemed unconstitutional - and all had to review their procedures to ensure compliance.
“The thing that has most disconcerted me is that it’s only nine years since the last ruling, and it’s taken us time to adjust to that,’’ said Tom Parker, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College. “I’ve never seen this kind of zigzagging. What happens if the swing vote changes in six or seven years? Do we revisit it again? This is not a way to establish law.’’
Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, a national college advocacy group, said her organization would likely lay out its legal opinion on the new case by filing an amicus brief with the court, as it did in 2003.
