Eyeing Campus Diversity

By John Gehring

When state lawmakers and faculty members from the University of Texas gathered in downtown Austin on a hot, spring afternoon for a strategy session five years ago, anger mingled uneasily with an urgent need to get to work.

Just a month earlier, a federal appeals court had ruled that race could no longer be used as a factor in admissions decisions at one of the nation's largest public universities. The ruling also ultimately ended the use of race and ethnicity in financial-aid and scholarship decisions.

Few legal decisions in the past decade have rocked the higher education world quite like Hopwood v. Texas . Students demonstrated en masse. Professors penned protest letters. Critics warned the decision would lead to the...