Washington
Dozens of private and public colleges around the nation may soon become the targets of federal civil-rights investigations over programs that exclude students who do not belong to certain racial groups.
Three prominent advocacy organizations are working in tandem to find and challenge any college program that serves only members of specified racial and ethnic minority groups. In those cases where the colleges refuse to open up the programs to the excluded groups -- in most cases, white or Asian-American students -- complaints are being filed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
That federal office has already prodded one university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into changing the admissions polices for two summer programs, and signaled Wednesday that other race-exclusive programs will have difficulty passing its legal muster.
“Generally, programs that use race or national origin as sole eligibility criteria are extremely difficult to defend” under the legal standards being applied by the Office for Civil Rights, an Education Department spokesman said in a prepared statement.
Driving the effort are the American Civil Rights Institute, based in Sacramento, Calif., and the Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Sterling, Va. In recent weeks, the groups have jointly sent letters to several colleges that accused them of violating federal civil-rights laws by operating certain race-exclusive programs. All of the letters asked the institutions to open the programs in question to all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, and gave them a deadline to voluntarily comply.
“If we do not receive a satisfactory response by March 7, we will file a formal complaint” with the Office for Civil Rights, one typical letter warns.
The groups refused to name all of the colleges that had been sent letters. But they include Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Indiana, Iowa State, and Saint Louis Universities, and the University of Missouri at Columbia, all of which were given until the end of next week to respond.
The programs in question include scholarships, internships, research fellowships, enrichment programs, and summer camps, mainly in the fields of science, medicine, and engineering.
The National Association of Scholars is aiding the effort by asking its members to report any race-exclusive programs at their colleges or others to the American Civil Rights Institute.
“These institutions should have been called on the carpet years ago,” said Edward J. Blum, director of legal affairs for the American Civil Rights Institute. “We want them to open these programs up to all students based on their merit and need, and not their race and ethnicity,” Mr. Blum said.
Mr. Blum and Roger B. Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, argue that most race-exclusive programs clearly are illegal. They add that the law is much more settled in this area than it is in regard to college admissions policies that give only some consideration to race and ethnicity -- the current focus of two cases from the University of Michigan pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Martin Michaelson, a Washington-based lawyer who advises many colleges and universities, says that it is difficult and unwise to make generalizations about the legality of race-exclusive programs. “There is considerable variation among them,” he said. “One wants to look at their particulars.”
Officials at several of those colleges declined to comment, saying that their lawyers were still reviewing the letters. But Mary Jo Dively, Carnegie Mellon’s general counsel, said, “We believe that what we are doing is legal,” and the institution is likely to continue offering an academic-preparation camp for minority high-school students until the Office for Civil Rights or a court directs it to do otherwise.
“I certainly am not going to take the word of some outside group that presumes to tell Carnegie Mellon what to do,” Ms. Dively said.
Jane M. Jenkowski, a spokeswoman for the Indiana University system, said that lawyers there are consulting with officials of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, which provide funds for the program in question, a summer research fellowship for minority students at the university’s Cancer Center.
Saint Louis University issued a statement that said lawyers there are confident that its scholarship program for black students complies with the law. But the February 13 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted Harold Deuser, the university’s director of financial aid, as saying that the university has been aware for 10 years that the scholarships probably could not pass legal muster, but kept them anyway because they are consistent with the university’s “Catholic Jesuit mission and with the Jesuit tenet of social justice.”
Mr. Blum said that many other colleges are likely to receive letters, because he now believes that “there could be as many as 50 to 70 public institutions, and perhaps as many as 25 private institutions, that have these racially exclusive programs.”
Other officials of public colleges and higher-education associations offered substantially larger estimates of how many such programs exist, and noted that many are supported with federal grants from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. It is hard to find a selective university that does not have at least one race-exclusive program listed on its Web site.
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