Grutter v. Bollinger

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), was a landmark case of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning affirmative action in student admissions. The Court held that a student admissions process that favors "underrepresented minority groups" does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause so long as it takes into account other factors evaluated on an individual basis for every applicant.

Quotes

• Because the United States is still such a deeply segregated nation, universities have become an important site on which battles over the future racial formation of the country are being fought. ... The significance of this has been recognized by the right as well as by liberals, as confirmed by the timing of President George W. Bush's direct intervention in support of the white plaintiffs in the University of Michigan's affirmative action case on January 15, 2003, Martin Luther King's birthday. I would argue that this case is not really about the white students who claim that their admission to the university was unfairly rejected, but that the suit is actually about halting in its tracks any potential for imagining the radical transformation of the racial formation of the United States.
  • Hazel V. Carby, "The New Auction Block: Blackness and the Marketplace," in A Companion to African-American Studies (2008), p. 121

• The Law School’s claim of a compelling interest is further bolstered by its amici, who point to the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity.… Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and “better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.” These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints. What is more, high-ranking retired officers and civilian leaders of the United States military assert that, “[b]ased on [their] decades of experience,” a “highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps … is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principal mission to provide national security.”
  • Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306 (2003), as cited in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Duke University Press, 2018, p. 22

• For the court, diversity’s value lies not in its capacity to remedy past and ongoing racism and exclusion but in its ability to produce student-citizens prepared for an increasingly global workforce and for military global security service. The work of diversity, then, is not meant to transform social institutions but to insert bodies into existing structures. ... The shifting logic of affirmative action from redress to diversity has led many scholars, including Sara Ahmed and Roderick Ferguson, to imagine diversity as a kind of “non-performative” ... “benign variation” that “bypasses power as well as history to suggest a harmonious empty pluralism.”
  • Jennifer Christine Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Duke University Press, 2018, p. 22