Surveying the Combat Zone

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 19, 1999

The legislative, public policy, and legal battlefield over increasing opportunity

In 1984, the birth year of Black, Issues In Higher Education, incumbent President Ronald Reagan scored a landslide victory over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale. The victory signaled the high mark of conservative political ascendance in the United States. Throughout Reagan's eight-year tenure, conservative policymakers took aim and fired at policies designed to widen access to higher education, especially for minorities. The reduction in student grant programs, a decline in non-defense federal support of higher education, and the appointment of conservatives as senior policy officials and judges created a chilling climate for higher education's fledgling commitment to diversity and access.

During the 1980s, conservatives declared war on affirmative action, the chief mechanism that higher education institutions adopted in the 1960s and 1970s to remedy past discrimination and ensure diversity in student, faculty, and administrative ranks.

Fifteen years later, the war continues and affirmative action remains one of the biggest stories in higher education.

While the mid-1980s represented a time of outright hostility to affirmative action and the slashing of social investment by the government, a growing sense of the rapid demographic changes in this country and economic anxiety reawakened Americans' desire for compassionate leadership and government-led stewardship.

That reawakening played a decisive factor in President Bill Clinton's victory over former President George Bush. Yet, even with the higher education access picture brightening considerably with Clinton's victory, the legacy of the Reagan/Bush years has loomed large over the 1990s. The federal judiciary, heavily populated with Reagan/Bush appointees, has narrowed the use and scope of affirmative action programs through their rulings -- whether in higher education or in business.

Conservative activists have eagerly brought lawsuits against colleges and universities, challenging race-conscious affirmative action programs in numerous states. Ironically, the desegregation of southern public university systems, a movement begun in the 1960s, still proceeds, and schools in this region often have been attacked by conservatives for their affirmative action policies.

Clinton's 1995 speech defending affirmative action before the American people represented a watershed event for its continuation. Had he stated opposition to or voiced limited support for affirmative action, race-conscious admission and employment policies might have been swept away by referendums and congressional action.

Nevertheless, in the past three years, voter referendums in California, Houston, and Washington state on affirmative action have provided a new and challenging twist to the ongoing saga. How long race-conscious affirmative action policies remain in place has begun to depend upon direct voter perception of the fairness of affirmative action rather than solely on judicial and congressional attitudes.

While all of this activity has occurred at the national and state level, it triggered a symbiotic regressive conservative movement in on-campus policies as well.

One such trend has been the movement away from programs directly addressing the needs of African American students to those targeting all students. Campuses which in the mid-1980s had Black student affairs offices -- many of which included remediation components -- later transformed them into minority student affairs programs -- some of which embraced outcomes-based retention models. In recent years, the trend has been toward retention models that avoid targeting students on the basis of race altogether.

Another trend fueled by the nation's political conservatism was the movement to malign all programs designed to help underrepresented groups with the unflattering label of political correctness. Such rhetoric set the stage for situations like the overtly racist Dartmouth Review articles, debates over campus speech codes, and the emergence of scholarship questioning multiculturalism. Groups like the National Academy of Scholars were among the leaders of the intellectual backlash against ethnic studies, women's studies, and all things outside of the mainstream.

Another on-campus development born out of the conservative movement is the struggle over post-tenure review. This movement opened the door to attacks on tenure and fueled a renewed debate over academic freedom, a pillar of the academy which had served as a protective shield for many nontraditional scholars whose scholarship challenged the mainstream during the '60s and '70s.

Preferences for student loans over grants, and the resurgence of questions about whether historically Black and minority-serving institutions were really needed are just a few of the other developments occurring during this 15-year period that have affected minority access and can be traced back to the nation's political conservatism.