Today, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas — again. The case is back because the Fifth Circuit paid no attention to the Court’s admonition that it do some strict scrutiny of the university’s racial preference policy and just rubber stamped it OK on its second try with the case.

Strict scrutiny ought to entail a careful examination of the plusses (if there are any, which I think is not so) and minuses of trying to get a “diverse” student body by lowering standards for students from certain groups. The claim that Texas makes is that all kinds of educational benefits flow from its diversity efforts, but it says nothing at all about the educational harm that it does to students who are mismatched. Defenders of racial preferences like to pooh-pooh the mismatch argument, saying that it is not supported by any research.

Ah, but that is absolutely false, argues UCLA law professor Richard Sander in today’s Pope Center Clarion Call.

Sander, who co-authored the 2012 book Mismatch with Stuart Taylor, Jr. takes us through three different kinds of mismatch problems students can encounter: learning, competition, and social. All can and do cause some students to perform less well at the supposedly better colleges and universities where racial preferences put them. Then he cites quite a few scholarly studies that support the argument that preferences do harm deleterious effects.

Sander closes with the observation that university officials, rather than trying to find out if their preference policies actually have the positive results they assume, have actually tried to block researchers from getting at the information they need to study preferences. (He encountered that same opposition in California from the State Bar when he sought the data on bar passage rates.) That leads him to write, “All of this should give the Supreme Court pause in assessing racial preferences. Past Court decisions have invoked a traditional deference to the independence of educational institutions. But colleges and universities have demonstrated that they are politically incapable of acting as good fiduciaries for their most vulnerable students.”

He’s absolutely right. No higher education leader (at least to my knowledge) has had the nerve to say, “Racial preferences seem to be a mistake and we should stop and consider the case against them.”