Affirmative-Action Fight Is Renewed in the States

Attacks on race-conscious admissions planned in Michigan, Colorado, and elsewhere

Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the consideration of race

in admissions, colleges are bracing for a new round of assaults against their affirmative-action policies.

In addition to leaving institutions open to lawsuits over admissions policies that give race too much weight, the Supreme Court’s rulings -- in two cases involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor -- did nothing to prevent opponents of race-conscious admissions policies from seeking to ban them through legislation or voter referendums.

It didn’t take long for the next wave of attacks to begin.

Ward Connerly, who led successful campaigns to ban racial and ethnic preferences in California and Washington State in the 1990s, announced last week at a press conference in Ann Arbor that he and other affirmative-action foes would embark on a similar campaign in Michigan, and might take the battle elsewhere as well.

“Our crusade will not end with the state of Michigan,” he said. “In the weeks and months ahead, we will be exploring the feasibility of undertaking initiatives in other states, cities, and counties across the land.”

In Colorado, Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, said he favored legislation banning race-conscious college admissions in his state.

At the same time, supporters and critics of affirmative action offered markedly different legal interpretations of the Supreme Court’s rulings. Several prominent higher-education organizations, including the American Council on Education, the College Board, and the National Association of College and University Attorneys, have announced plans for national and regional meetings to help colleges make sense of the court’s opinions and make adjustments in their admissions policies to ward off future legal challenges.

New Battlegrounds

Late last month, the Supreme Court upheld the concept of using race-conscious admissions in two cases involving Michigan’s law school and chief undergraduate college, but struck down the undergraduate admissions policy -- a point system that awarded certain minority applicants a 20-point bonus on a 150-point scale -- after concluding that the system was too mechanistic and did not give applicants enough individual consideration.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions, only two public colleges, Ohio State University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, have acknowledged operating undergraduate admissions systems that award points to applicants based on race. The medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago also has said it has an admissions system that awards points to minority applicants. All three institutions have added that their admissions systems are under review.

But Curt A. Levey, director of legal and public affairs for the Center for Individual Rights, which represented the plaintiffs in the Michigan lawsuits, said the Supreme Court’s decision in the undergraduate case prohibited not only point-based affirmative-action policies, but also any admissions system that automatically gives an edge to certain applicants based on race. Before the court’s ruling, he said, “large, selective universities almost certainly were using race in a mechanical way.”

At his press conference last week in Ann Arbor, Mr. Connerly described the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the concept of affirmative action in college admissions as contrary to the principles of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and federal civil-rights law.

Surrounded by the lead plaintiffs from the two Michigan cases and by prominent opponents of affirmative action from Michigan and other states, he said that he and other foes of racial preferences would seek to place on the November 2004 ballot a proposed amendment to Michigan’s Constitution that would prohibit racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in public education, public employment, and public contracting.

“We will develop a cadre of supporters who can carry our message of equal treatment for all and preferences for none throughout the state of Michigan,” said Mr. Connerly, chairman of the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute and its companion political-action committee, the American Civil Rights Coalition.

Edward J. Blum, director of legal affairs for the institute, said Mr. Connerly is considering similar campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oregon, and Utah, with the goal of having the measures on ballots in the fall of 2004.

When interviewed by The Chronicle in March, Mr. Connerly made it clear that he intended to undertake new ballot campaigns against affirmative action if the Supreme Court upheld the use of race-conscious admissions policies in the Michigan cases. While 23 states allow such ballot initiatives, he said, he would initially aim to get measures passed in only “three or four states, strategically located and selected on the basis of demographics and political affiliation.”

“We are thinking of sort of like a package, like Super Tuesday,” Mr. Connerly said, referring to the day on which several states hold their presidential primaries. The goal, he said, would be to “demonstrate to the nation and to Congress” that bans on affirmative action are politically viable.

In Colorado, Governor Owens said in a radio interview last week that he opposed the consideration of race in college admissions and public contracting. “I think it’s dangerous in a democracy, and I respectfully disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision,” he said.

The next day, State Sen. Jim F. Dyer, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would propose a bill eliminating or restricting the consideration of race by public colleges in admissions and in the awarding of scholarships. He said he was still crafting the measure, which he planned to introduce when the state legislature reconvened next year.

Officials of the University of Colorado System declined to respond to the governor’s remarks or to comment on the proposed legislation.

‘More Division Than Unity’

In Michigan, at least, Mr. Connerly and his allies are expected to have a fight on their hands.

Although opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of Michigan voters oppose the use of racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions and elsewhere, several of the state’s political leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, were quick last week to declare their opposition to the proposed ballot measure. Some vowed to block the efforts by Mr. Connerly and his supporters to get the signatures needed to put the measure to a vote.

Betsy DeVos, chairman of the state’s Republican Party, criticized the measure as likely to “result in more division than unity.”

“I fear that this proposed ballot initiative would only serve to further divide people along racial lines, which would be entirely counterproductive,” she said.

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, and Melvin Butch Hollowell, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, also pledged to fight the proposed ballot measure.

“The Democratic Party will firmly take on Ward Connerly and his outside interests and his outside money as they attempt to tell Michigan what to do,” Mr. Hollowell said. “We will be joining with a coalition of groups to not only scrutinize all of the signatures on this ballot proposal, but also to campaign vigorously to make sure it goes down in flames.”

In a separate news conference, two organizations that had intervened to help defend the Michigan law school’s admissions policies before the Supreme Court called for a boycott of any corporation or institution that lends financial support to Mr. Connerly’s campaign.

“We can defeat Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative-action ballot proposition before it gets off the ground, but only if we act decisively now,” said Shanta Driver, a spokeswoman for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.

“Any business, institution, or individual that funds the attack on civil rights will face a consumer boycott and pickets,” warned Ms. Driver, whose group, generally known as BAMN, played a prominent role in opposing the ban on affirmative action in California.

Mr. Connerly and his supporters will need to gather about 320,000 signatures -- an amount equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the 2002 gubernatorial election -- to get their proposed measure on the Michigan ballot.

Steve Mitchell, chairman of Mitchell Research & Communications, a political-consulting firm in East Lansing, Mich., estimated that collecting those signatures would cost $400,000 to $600,000, and that a campaign for the measure itself would be likely to cost at least $4-million.

William S. Ballenger, editor and publisher of the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, said the affirmative-action issue was dangerous for both the Democratic and Republican parties in the state. A substantial share of Michigan’s Democrats fit the profile of “Reagan Democrats,” who tend to have conservative social views and are likely to oppose affirmative action, he noted. Republicans, meanwhile, have to worry that the presence of the measure on the November 2004 ballot would motivate greater-than-normal numbers of black Democrats in Detroit and other major cities to head to the polls, spelling political trouble for President Bush and other Republican candidates.

Many of Michigan’s business leaders submitted legal briefs to the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan. If they lend significant financial backing to the fight against the affirmative-action ban, the measure could be in trouble, Mr. Ballenger added.

http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 49, Issue 45, Page A19