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A student walks up the steps to UT Austin’s Waggener Hall.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit accusing the University of Texas at Austin of racial discrimination in admissions, bringing an end to a long-running legal battle that both presaged and was pre-empted by last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action.
The lawsuit, initially filed in 2019 by Students for Fair Admissions—the same group that prevailed in similar cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—had been dismissed once before, 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 motioned for the appeal to move forward regardless, arguing that the university’s new race-neutral policies were still in violation of the decision.
Critics of the appeal said it was an attempt to expand the scope of the SFFA v. Harvard and UNC rulings beyond the text of the decisions—an effort that conservatives have taken up 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 UT Austin’s defense team, lauded the dismissal as a rejection of that movement.
“Despite their efforts to extend the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling and aim to further diminish diversity on campuses, their strategy backfired,” he wrote in a statement.
The suit against UT Austin was one of two filed by SFFA that remained unresolved even 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 admissions policies at the institution. When Inside Higher Ed reached out to UT Austin for comment regarding this suit last September, a spokesperson declined to comment on the ongoing litigation, but experts predicted that the university would resist settling and attempt to get the case thrown out entirely.
UT Austin has been at the center of the legal challenges to race-conscious admissions since the early 2010s, when affirmative action was upheld twice in favor of the university—once by a circuit court and the Supreme Court in 2013, and again by the Supreme Court in 2016—in the long-running Fisher v. University of Texas cases.
