I noted on the Corner yesterday that the Obama administration has filed an amicus brief defending the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in undergraduate admissions. The Chronicle of Education now reports that the administration has company: “Fourteen national higher-education associations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to uphold the use of race-conscious admission policies by the University of Texas at Austin,” including “the American Council on Education, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity, by the way, has joined an amicus brief filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation opposing the admissions discrimination. And as I noted in the Corner posting, the case (and the Obama administration’s brief) goes beyond the Grutter case, and is likely headed for the Supreme Court.