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On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies FOLEY, L. S. 2023. NEW YORK: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS. 224 PP.
In the wake of the June 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down the ability for institutions to consider race as a qualifying factor for college admission, author Lauren S. Foley provides readers with a series of case studies from across the country to contextualize the theme of "resistant compliance," or a reluctant commitment to exercise practices within the bounds of the law.
Foley greets her readers with an analysis of national affirmative action bans and their roots in the 1960s. In response to protesting Jim Crow segregation in the United States, we become witness to the first institutions to implement the use of race-conscious recruitment and admissions programs in the University of Michigan and UCLA. Foley discusses the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke as a significant turning point in 1978, when affirmative action choices for colleges and universities were tightened. In addition, the book looks at various other court cases including the very recent Students for Fair Admissions cases at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and the slightly older Grutter у. Bollinger to set the stage to where the landscape of this topic sits today. Foley then provides analyses from four states, Oklahoma, Texas, California, and Michigan, and shares the tactics used to circumvent lawful requirements through legitimate yet creative means.
Readers are introduced to the case of the Oklahoma City Public Schools, where Foley walks us through a chronological history of the school district's resistance to desegregation that began with Brown v. Board of Education (1955) and lasted for decades, ending at the Supreme Court with Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell (1991). She takes readers through the district court's three separate desegregation orders (1963, 1965, and 1972), each of which the board met with rudimentary requests for delays and appeals that resulted in years of resistant compliance, culminating with a judicial takeover from 1972 to 1977 to implement...