Next month,  the U.S Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin,a case involving a white applicant to the undergraduate program who is challenging the constitutionality of using race in admission decisions.

In preparation for this case, Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports on “research wars” between proponents and opponents of race-based admittance policies:

The Brookings Institute showcased several studies that were positive toward an affirmative action approach.

One of the studies explored the impact on the yield rate — the proportion of admitted students who enroll — of black, Latino and Native American students to the University of California after the state barred the consideration of race in admissions. Minority enrollments fell after voters adopted the ban, in part because greater proportions of white and Asian applicants, on average, have the academic and other credentials required for admission.

But the paper focused on a subset of minority students: those who gained admission after the ban on affirmative action. Many observers at the time predicted that these students would be less likely to enroll, as they would perceive the system to be hostile, and news articles quoted minority students to this effect.

But a paper by Kate Antonovics, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, and Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that the ban on affirmative action didn’t produce “chilling effects,” but actually produced “warming effects” on the likelihood of minority students’ accepting offers of admission.

However, Jaschik noted that some attendees considered that the institute’s presentations were lopsided:

In the question period after those two presentations, Richard O. Lempert, an emeritus professor of law and sociology at the University of Michigan, criticized not only those papers, but the entire way the program at Brooking was organized. “All of the papers are on one side of the debate,” Lempert said. He questioned why “first rate” scholars who support affirmative action were not presenting work, and said that the papers presented had “serious methodological” issues. He also said that the papers were not peer-reviewed. Antonovics responded by saying that she had mixed feelings about affirmative action and did not do this research with any outcome in mind. Further, she said that the paper she presented has just been accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed economics journal.