c. the university could consider race in its admissions process, but it could not have numerical racial quotas for filling slots
In Bakke v. Regents of the University of California (1978), the Supreme Court weighed in on this contentious issue. The justices reviewed the case of a white medical school applicant who believed he had been denied admission to the University of California, Davis, in favor of less deserving minority students. In a complex five-to-four decision, the Court ruled that the university's policy of setting aside a certain number of slots on the basis of race was constitutionally prohibited, though the university was entitled to consider race in its admissions process. Affirmative action was fine, in other words, but numerical quotas were not. The following year, however, the Court ruled differently in a case involving a blue-collar workplace. Brian Weber, a white Louisiana steelworker, challenged a company-union agreement that admitted equal numbers of Black and white unskilled employees into a training program until the proportion of Black skilled workers in the plant corresponded to the overall numbers on the factory floor. United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, which differed from Bakke in several respects (the steel company was private and the affirmative action remedy was transitional), upheld affirmative action in American industrial hiring just at the moment when the United States was deindustrializing.