Three organizations opposed to affirmative action in college admissions have mounted efforts to force selective colleges throughout the nation to disclose exactly how much weight they give to the race and ethnicity of applicants.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of race-conscious admissions policies to promote campus diversity last June, in two rulings involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But it also placed limits on colleges’ use of affirmative action, requiring, for example, that they consider race-neutral alternatives, refrain from using formulaic admissions systems that automatically treat students differently based on their race, and give no more weight to applicants’ race than necessary to achieve the institutions’ educational goals.
The efforts to force the disclosure of race-conscious admissions policies have two objectives: to determine whether colleges are operating outside the Supreme Court’s guidelines, and to place colleges under public and political pressure to abandon race-conscious policies even if they are operating within the law.
Farthest along is the campaign of the National Association of Scholars, announced last week, to use state open-records laws to require selective public colleges to divulge their race-conscious admissions policies. Twenty of the association’s state affiliates have already sent requests for such information.
The requests, in letters addressed to each college’s president, ask for all data relevant to the institutions’ consideration of race and ethnicity in undergraduate, graduate, and professional-school admissions. The letters also ask questions that appear designed to ascertain the legality of the admissions policies -- for example, whether the colleges have considered race-neutral alternatives, how much weight they give to ethnicity and race, and how often they consider whether they still need race-conscious admissions policies to maintain diversity on their campuses.
“Our purpose is to bring this information into the light of public scrutiny,” said Bradford P. Wilson, executive director of the scholars’ association, which opposes race-conscious college-admissions policies as divisive and harmful to educational quality.
New Lawsuits?
The organization is conducting the campaign in tandem with two groups that have been at the forefront of opposition to race-conscious admissions policies: the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Center for Individual Rights.
The Center for Individual Rights, a Washington-based advocacy group, provided legal representation to the plaintiffs in the Michigan cases and participated in several other lawsuits challenging colleges’ affirmative-action policies. Curt A. Levey, director of legal and public affairs, said it may use the information gathered by members of the scholars’ association as the basis for new lawsuits against public colleges.
The information-gathering campaign “gives us a great way to watch” whether colleges are giving more weight to the race and ethnicity of applicants than the law allows, he said.
“The best weapon for us at this point is transparency,” Mr. Levey said. “Schools do fight pretty hard not to disclose this data. That tells you, obviously, that they have something to hide.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity, which has published several reports analyzing colleges’ admissions data and criticizing race-conscious admissions policies, expects to publicize the information now being gathered, as a way of putting colleges under public and political pressure to abandon race-conscious admissions policies, said its general counsel, Roger B. Clegg.
The group may also file discrimination complaints with the U.S. Justice Department or the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights against colleges that it believes to be operating outside the law, Mr. Clegg said. It has used similar tactics over the past year to pressure dozens of private and public colleges into opening minority scholarships, fellowships, and programs to white students.
The National Association of Scholars plans to enlist many of its 46 state affiliates and more than 4,000 individual members as foot soldiers in its campaign, by asking them to request information from selective public colleges and keep after the colleges until they release the information.
Mr. Wilson, the group’s executive director, said state taxpayers and their elected representatives “have every right to know precisely how applicants are being treated by publicly funded institutions, and whether or not these institutions discriminate on the grounds of ancestry or skin color.” If colleges refuse to provide such information, he said, “we intend to persevere,” suing them under freedom-of-information laws if necessary.
‘Nothing to Hide’
Travis J. Reindl, director of state-policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, described the campaign last week as “no surprise,” given the faculty association’s past opposition to affirmative action.
He said colleges “have nothing to hide” and will comply with open-records laws, but he lamented that the three advocacy groups were taking a confrontational approach to getting the information from public colleges, rather than seeking to work cooperatively with them.
“We could actually be in dialogue,” Mr. Reindl said, but instead the campaign “seems to be more about pointing fingers or trying to find smoking guns about unqualified minorities somehow getting into the system.”
‘Senseless Harassment’
Sheldon E. Steinbach, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group of higher-education associations, called the campaign “patent, senseless harassment” of colleges that are doing everything possible to ensure that their admissions policies comply with the law.
The 20 states in which public colleges have been sent letters are Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
On its own, the Center for Equal Opportunity has been trying to promote the passage of federal and state laws requiring colleges to reveal whether and how they grant preferences to students on the basis of race. It is working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of conservative state legislators, to distribute among council members model legislation with that goal.
It also has drafted model federal legislation, which it has submitted to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the U.S. Senate. The committee’s members have not taken any action on the proposed bill.
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 50, Issue 30, Page A26