Law Commons^™

What Once Was Lost Must Now Be Found: Rediscovering An Affirmative Action Jurisprudence Informed By The Reality Of Race In America, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

This academic year has seen college and university students across America calling on their institutions to do more to create campus cultures supportive of African American students and other underrepresented minorities. There have been demands to increase faculty and student diversity, change curricular requirements, and adopt mandatory cultural sensitivity trainings. There have been efforts to rename buildings, remove images, and abandon symbols associating schools with major historic figures who were also proponents of slavery, segregation, or other forms of racism. As in all tumultuous periods for higher education, these events have provoked useful discussions about fundamental principles and brought to …

Affirmative Action In Higher Education Symposium: Comment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

This issue – affirmative action in higher education – is an issue of enormous significance for the country. So I don't for a second treat this as just another conversation about an important legal question. I think this is one of those issues that define the country.

I'll tell you what I did as President of the University of Michigan, and in the course of that I'll try to explain the ways in which we formulated the cases that went to the Supreme Court and resulted in very important clarifications to the Fourteenth Amendment and affirmative action. Then I want …

A Comment On Grutter And Gratz V. Bollinger, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Now that the Supreme Court has definitively resolved (at least for a generation) the issue of the constitutionality of affirmative action in American higher education, thereby continuing without major adjustment what has been the practice in our selective colleges and universities for more or less the last thirty years, it is easy to forget how different the United States would have looked in the years ahead if only one vote had shifted to the dissenting side. Just how precipitous and long-lasting the decline in racial and ethnic diversity would have been is a complicated matter, but that it would have …