Judge dismisses positive discrimination lawsuit against UT Austin

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit accusing the University of Texas at Austin of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions, ending a lengthy legal battle that was both anticipated and preempted by the Supreme Court’s decision last year banning minority advancement.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2019 by Students for Fair Admissions—the same group that won similar cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—had already been dismissed once in 2021. But SFFA appealed the decision. Two years later, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last June and UT Austin changed its admissions policy accordingly, SFFA requested that the appeal proceed anyway, arguing that the university’s new race-neutral policies still violated the decision.

Critics of the appeal said it was an attempt to expand the scope of the SFFA vs. Harvard and UNC rulings beyond the wording of the decisions — an effort conservatives have made over the past year to influence everything from hiring practices to scholarship criteria. David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a member of the UT Austin defense team, praised the dismissal as a rejection of that movement.

“Despite their efforts to expand the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling and further restrict diversity on campus, their strategy backfired,” he wrote in a statement.

The lawsuit against UT Austin was one of two SFFA lawsuits that remained unresolved after the Supreme Court ruling against Harvard and UNC. The other, against Yale University, was settled out of court after both sides agreed to a change in the institution’s admissions policies. As Inside Higher Ed When the university reached out to UT Austin last September for comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. However, experts predicted that the university would resist a settlement and seek to dismiss the lawsuit entirely.

UT Austin has been at the center of legal challenges to race-conscious admissions practices since the early 2010s, when the long-running Fisher v. University of Texas cases upheld minority advancement twice in the university’s favor—once by a district court and the Supreme Court in 2013 and again by the Supreme Court in 2016.