ALITO, J., dissenting
engineering.” Powers, Why Schools Still Need Affirmative Action, National L. J., Aug. 4, 2014, p. 22 (editorial by Bill Powers, President of UT from 2006–2015) (“Opponents accuse defenders of race-conscious admissions of being in favor of ‘social engineering,’ to which I believe we should reply, ‘Guilty as charged’ ”).
Notwithstanding the omnipresence of racial classifications, UT claims that it keeps no record of how those classifications affect its process. “The university doesn’t keep any statistics on how many students are affected by the consideration of race in admissions decisions,” and it “does not know how many minority students are affected in a positive manner by the consideration of race.” App. 337a. According to UT, it has no way of making these determinations. See id., at 320a–322a. UT says that it does not tell its admissions officers how much weight to give to race. See Deposition of Gary Lavergne 43–45, Record in No. 1:08–CV–00263 (WD Tex.), Doc. 94–9 (Lavergne Deposition). And because the influence of race is always “contextual,” UT claims, it cannot provide even a single example of an instance in which race impacted a student’s odds of admission. See App. 220a (“Q. Could you give me an example where race would have some impact on an applicant’s personal achievement score? A. To be honest, not really . . . . [I]t’s impossible to say—to give you an example of a particular student because it’s all contextual”). Accordingly, UT asserts that it has no idea which students were admitted as a result of its race-conscious system and which students would have been admitted under a race-neutral process. UT thus makes no effort to assess how the individual characteristics of students admitted as the result of racial preferences differ (or do not differ) from those of students who would have been admitted without them.
