Alamo in Ann Arbor

PANIC may be setting in. The legal conflict over race- based admissions at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor may become “the Alamo of affirmative action,” warned Time magazine columnist Jack E. White recently.

The Michigan suits, which will soon go to trial, have been brought by the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington- based public-interest law firm. At issue are preferential admissions at the university’s College of Literature, Science and Arts and its Law School. No matter how the district court rules, the decision is sure to be appealed all the way to the top. In 1996, the Supreme Court refused to review the Fifth Circuit’s Hopwood decision that ended racial preferences at the University of Texas Law School, and it may duck the issue again. But it cannot forever ignore the incoherence and ambiguity of its decades-old decision in the Bakke case. And it cannot indefinitely close its eyes to the fact that schools like Michigan have long been operating a “dual admissions” program difficult to distinguish from that found unconstitutional in Bakke.

PANIC may be setting in. The legal conflict over race- based admissions at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor may become “the Alamo of affirmative action,” warned Time magazine columnist Jack E. White recently.

The Michigan suits, which will soon go to trial, have been brought by the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington- based public-interest law firm. At issue are preferential admissions at the university’s College of Literature, Science and Arts and its Law School. No matter how the district court rules, the decision is sure to be appealed all the way to the top. In 1996, the Supreme Court refused to review the Fifth Circuit’s Hopwood decision that ended racial preferences at the University of Texas Law School, and it may duck the issue again. But it cannot forever ignore the incoherence and ambiguity of its decades-old decision in the Bakke case. And it cannot indefinitely close its eyes to the fact that schools like Michigan have long been operating a “dual admissions” program difficult to distinguish from that found unconstitutional in Bakke.