The Center for Equal Opportunity’s office looks out over racial and ethnic diversity. The restaurants in the local strip malls serve the cuisines of El Salvador, Korea, and Vietnam, a reflection of the large immigrant populations in the sprawling suburbs of Washington. The faces in the parking lots are white, black, and a thousand shades of brown.
Linda Chavez, the center’s founder and president, says she welcomes all of this diversity—with certain conditions. Immigrants who don’t speak English need to learn it as quickly as possible. People should think of themselves as Americans, and not let their nationality or skin color determine their identity. And no one should expect colleges or government institutions to treat them better than anyone else based on their ethnicity or race.
“We’re one nation, and one people, and we shouldn’t be divided into racial and ethnic groups,” says Ms. Chavez, whose father came to the United States from Mexico.
Hers is a worldview that—in addition to leading her to become a high-profile critic of bilingual education, multicultural education, and Hispanic advocacy groups—has thrust the Center for Equal Opportunity into the front lines in the fight over affirmative action in college admissions.
The center’s chief tactic has been to use state freedom-of-information laws to prod public colleges into releasing admissions data, which the center has analyzed for evidence that applicants of certain races or ethnicities stand a better chance than others of being accepted. From the outset, the effort has been helped by the National Association of Scholars, a faculty organization that believes race-conscious college-admissions policies are divisive and hurt educational quality, and has enlisted its members to send out freedom-of-information requests.
Unwrapping Admissions
In the summer of 1996, when the first round of letters went out, few public colleges acknowledged the extent to which they considered race or ethnicity in admissions. “The intent was publicizing what universities have kept under their hats for a long time,” says Bradford P. Wilson, the executive director of the scholars’ association.
In the following years, the center successfully sued the University of Washington system and the University of Wisconsin System to get them to give up all of their admissions data.
So far, the center has issued 15 reports covering 56 public colleges, two-thirds of which it has accused of using racial or ethnic preferences. Several of the reports covered all of the public universities in particular states, such as Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Virginia. Others focused on particular institutions, including the University of California at Berkeley, the U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy, or looked at the admissions data for particular law or medical schools.
The reports have typically backed their claims of admissions bias by showing differences in the standardized-test scores, grades, and graduation rates of applicants of different races and ethnicities. The group’s report on the University of North Carolina, for example, said that the white students admitted in 1995 to the Chapel Hill campus had a median grade-point average of 3.99, compared with 3.6 for the admitted black students, and a median SAT mathematics score of 630, compared with 530 for the black students. Some reports have used odds ratios to prove their point: One dealing with law schools in Virginia, for example, contended that black applicants were 731 times as likely as white applicants with similar grades and test scores to gain acceptance to the University of Virginia’s law school in 1999.
Nearly always, the reports have been denounced by the institutions studied as misleading and overly simplistic in their reliance on grades and test scores to compare applicants.
“Substantively, it is hard to take them seriously,” says Barmak Nassirian, a policy analyst for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “This crazy, simplistic, mechanical notion that there is one objective measure by which every applicant ought to be measured is just false on its face, and a very uninspired view of what the business of admissions is all about.”
‘Blunt Findings’
Robert Lerner is the president of the company that has performed all of the center’s data analyses, Lerner and Nagai Quantitative Consulting, of Rockville, Md. He stands by his company’s work, and says that the center’s reports have accurately presented his results. “They are pretty brutally blunt findings. It is hard to spin them,” he says.
And Clint Bolick, the vice president of the Washington-based Institute for Justice, and a leading libertarian legal advocate, says the center “has played the enormously important and difficult role of ferreting out the racial-preference policies that proliferate among postsecondary institutions.”
In addition to studying college admissions, the center routinely contacts state attorneys general and other government officials to urge them to take a hard line against racial and ethnic preferences in higher education. More recently, the center’s general counsel, Roger B. Clegg, has helped mount an effort to pressure private and public colleges into abandoning programs that are open only to members of minority groups.
The center is a fairly small outfit. Its advocacy work is handled by Ms. Chavez, who was staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President Ronald Reagan, and Mr. Clegg, who had been deputy assistant attorney general under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Two of Ms. Chavez’s sons serve as its executive director and director of operations.
“We are not a huge organization, and the nice thing about that is that we are very flexible about what we do,” Mr. Clegg says. He says the Supreme Court’s rulings in two pending cases involving race-conscious admissions policies “will determine what needs to be done next.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 49, Issue 30, Page A25