JUDGE: UNC CAN KEEP AFFIRMATIVE ACTION POLICY

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may continue using race as a factor in its admissions process, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting the argument of a conservative nonprofit legal group that is trying to dismantle college affirmative action policies across the country.

In her ruling, which came down decidedly against the plaintiff, Judge Loretta C. Biggs said that the university’s use of race in deciding which students to admit was narrowly tailored, and that the university had made an effort to consider race-neutral alternatives.

“While no student can or should be admitted to this university, or any other, based solely on race,” she wrote, “because race is so interwoven in every aspect of the lived experience of minority students, to ignore it, reduce its importance and measure it only by statistical models,” as she said the plaintiff had done, “misses important context.”

The plaintiff, a group called Students for Fair Admissions, vowed to appeal if necessary all the way to the Supreme Court, where it would “ask the justices to end these unfair and unconstitutional race-based admissions policies,” the group’s founder, Edward Blum, said.

The organization is banking on a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority and is considering whether to hear a similar case against Harvard.

The legal standard governing racial considerations in admissions was established in 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled that a University of Michigan Law School admissions program did not violate the Constitution by giving special consideration to racial minorities, so long as it took into account other factors.

“This decision makes clear that the university’s holistic admissions approach is lawful,” Beth Keith, an associate vice chancellor at UNC, said in a statement about Biggs’ ruling.

Students for Fair Admissions had argued that UNC considered race in an unlawful way, tilting the scales in favor of underrepresented minorities, so much so that a mathematical model was able to predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a student would be admitted.

The school acknowledged using race as a criterion in admissions decisions — but not racial quotas — in order to increase campus diversity.