Following the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday that upholds the legality of affirmative action in college admissions, Twitter users showcased their glee by using a hashtag calling out the case's plaintiff.
Abigail Fisher, a native of Sugar Land, Texas, sued the University of Texas for denying her admission to its Austin flagship campus in 2008. High school seniors in Texas who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are granted admission to any state university, and Fisher did not make that cut.
After allocating slots reserved for the Top Ten program, UT then scores and considers applicants based on an Academic Index and a Personal Achievement Index. These measurements -- which consider such things as class rank, standardized test scores, socioeconomic status and race -- are commonly used in higher education admissions.
Fisher had an AI of 3.1 and a PAI score of less than 6. UT stated in court filings that "due to the stiff competition in 2008 and [Fisher's] relatively low AI score -- [Fisher] would not have been admitted to the Fall 2008 freshman class even if she had received 'a "perfect" PAI score of 6.'"
In other words, her grades simply weren't good enough.
But Fisher believed she wasn't admitted because of affirmative action, and argued that black and Hispanic students with lower grades had been accepted to the university instead of her.
One black and four Hispanic applicants with test scores and grades lower than Fisher's were admitted in 2008, UT said in court filings. However, so were 42 white applicants. Additionally, 168 black and Hispanic applicants "in this pool who had combined AI/PAI scores identical to or higher than [Fisher's] were denied admission" that year, UT said.
The university added that it had offered Fisher the chance to participate in its Coordinated Admissions Program, which admits Texas residents to the school for their sophomore year if they finish 30 credits at another UT System campus and keep up a 3.2 GPA. Fisher declined that, and went on to attend and graduate from Louisiana State University.
The Fisher case was larger than one white woman applying to a competitive state university. The lawsuit argued that affirmative action was violating the constitutional rights of white Americans under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause when government officials consider race in a way that might help blacks and Latinos, ProPublica reported in 2013.
People on Twitter used the hashtag #StayMadAbby in 2015 when the Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggested black students should attend "lesser schools." They resurrected it Thursday immediately after news broke that the Supreme Court had ruled in a 4-3 decision that UT's program does not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.