College Diversity Nears Its Last Stand - Adam Liptak, New York Times

Diversity is the last man standing, the sole remaining legal justification for racial preferences in deciding who can study at public universities. Should the Supreme Court disavow it, the student body at the University of Texas and many other public colleges and universities would almost instantly become whiter and more Asian, and less black and Hispanic. There is little question that diversity as a legal justification for preferences is at risk. The author of the majority decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, announced her retirement in 2005. Her replacement, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., has consistently voted with the court’s more conservative justices in major decisions hostile to the use of racial classifications by the government. “There thus seem five votes — Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito — to overrule Grutter and hold that affirmative action programs are unconstitutional,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in “The Conservative Assault on the Constitution,” published last year.