Ole Miss:”The resolution adopted by the law faculty Thursday didn’t state a quota because that would be unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions, Davis said.
The resolution expresses the aspiration that a “critical mass” of minority enrollment should be closer to numbers achieved in 2005, rather than 2004. Davis said.”
It would be far more honest (or at least forthright) if Ole Miss Law simply adopted a quota, instead of purportedly not adopting a quota but telling the admissions office what numbers they should achieve. However, honesty and forthrightness in affirmative action in education have been in short supply since Bakke, when the Supreme Court first required universities to dress up policies meant to further “social justice” in the guise of “diversity,.” More recently in Grutter, the Court has required “quotas” to be disguised as “critical mass.” Given Mississippi’s (and Ole Miss’s) history, I’m not one to begrudge some compensatory admissions policies, but that’s a separate issue from whether those policies should be obfuscated by Orwellian language necessitated by Supreme Court decisions that neither allow such policies, nor, in practice, prohibit them so long as they are adequately disguised.
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