In rejecting claims that the University of Michigan had violated a student’s property interest or due process rights, in University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214 (1985), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the university’s rights to academic freedom in deciding to dismiss a student from an academic program for poor performance.
The case arose after Scott Ewing, a student in the university’s six-year “Interflex” program that awarded degrees to students in a combined undergraduate and medical program, received a very low score on the written NBME Part I exam. The exam was used to gauge suitability for the last two years of the program, and the university accordingly dismissed him from it. The student argued that the university’s actions violated his property interest in the Interflex program and claimed that he had been denied his rights of substantive due process.
The U.S. district court upheld the student’s dismissal, but the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals had reversed.
Court saw a need to safeguard university’s academic freedom
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion, which reversed the Court of Appeals and upheld the student’s dismissal..
Stevens observed that the university’s promotion and review board had voted unanimously to drop Ewing from the Interflex program after he failed five of seven subject areas on the test. His score wad 235, which was far short of the passing score of 345. The board also rejected his appeal to retake the test, likely in part because Ewing’s prior academic record in the program had been weak.
Noting that the court had assumed in Board of Curators, Univ. of Mo. v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), that courts had authority to “review an academic decision of a public educational institution under a substantive due process standard,” Stevens found that even if Ewing could establish a property interest in the degree program, there was no evidence that the university had arbitrarily breached it in this case.
Opinion stressed ‘academic judgment’ of college
Concluding that “the faculty’s decision was made conscientiously and with careful deliberation, based on an evaluation of the entirety of Ewing’s academic career,” the court thought that it was proper to defer to such a decision. Stevens cited the lack of judicial standards by which to second-guess such a decision, his “reluctance to trench on the prerogatives of state and local educational institutions,” and the need “to safeguard their academic freedom, ‘a special concern of the First Amendment,’” that the Court had recognized in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967).
Recognizing that one might question the wisdom of the decision not to offer Ewing a second chance to take the test, Stevens stressed that this was “an academic judgment that is not beyond the pale of reasoned decisionmaking when viewed against the background of his [Ewing’s] entire career.”
Justice Powell’s concurred on deference to University of Michigan
In a brief concurrence, Justice Lewis Powell thought that Ewing’s property rights claim was dubious and would require further expansion of the idea of substantive due process, which was largely a judicial creation.
He fully concurred, however “with the Court’s emphasis on the respect and deference that courts should accord academic decisions made by the appropriate university authorities.”
John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.