Bad News For OMAS
[Via Hit & Run]
The 9th Circuit ruled against a Hawaiian school’s preference toward ethnic Hawaiians.
A 117-year-old policy of admitting only Native Hawaiians to the exclusive Kamehameha Schools amounts to unlawful racial discrimination, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Overturning a lower court, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the practice at the private school violates federal civil rights law even though the institution receives no federal funding….
Read the whole H&R post for a discussion of the principles involved.
There is no functional difference between the OMAS classes at University of Oregon and this Hawaiian policy. However, the UO does receive federal money whereas the Kamehameha Schools do not: Meaning, I think, that the case against the preferential OMAS classes could hold up in the 9th circuit even if the Kamehameha decision is overturned by a full hearing or by SCOTUS. Dan probably has smarter things to say about this.
Oh, I wish you would.
Dan is still on vacation, mostly, but he has one possibly smarter thing to say about this.
Timothy writes:
There is no functional difference between the OMAS classes at University of Oregon and this Hawaiian policy.
Actually, I can think of at least one pretty significant difference. The OMAS policy is reserved to a single, alternative mathematics class, whereas the Hawaii policy is a barrier to an entire educational system. Therefore, denial of entry into an OMAS class does not close off a student’s ability even to study math, let alone any other subject, at UO, in the same way that the Hawaiian barrier precludes getting an entire K-12 education from the Kamehameha Schools.
In principle, yes, the two policies and the intellectual arguments against them are the same. But when we start discussing how the competing legal claims might shake out before “balance-test” happy courts, it’s time to look practically at how a policy’s supposed harms stack up against its supposed benefits, and admit it when we’ve got ourselves a molehill.