Truth and consequences: in the Michigan aftermath, the real fight begins as local institutions work to apply the Supreme Court ruling to meet their campuses' individual needs and/or restrictions - Special reports: focus on diversity

Black Issues in Higher Education, Sept 25, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

Published reports say upward of a dozen schools have been cast into similar turmoil over their admissions and outreach policies. Some have made program adjustments; other institutions have been defiant. The University of Missouri-Columbia and St. Louis University, for example, told the Associated Press that their programs are "consistent with current law" (see Black Issues, March 13).

The great danger as I see it for institutions will be the impulse to look at other schools--say, looking to Princeton or MIT--for cues on what you should be doing on your campus. Schools cannot assume their programs are inadequate nor can they assume they're adequate because other schools have or have not phased their programs out," Ledbetter says. And the costs--both of performing the program review and adding staff to ensure individualized applicant review--are likely to be substantial.

The CEO's Chavez agrees that institutions are facing a serious challenge. "We say beware of any Supreme Court decision that uses words like 'holistic' or 'penumbra' or any of these pseudo-scientific terms. Our view is that undergraduate schools are going to have a very tough time. The standard (set by the high court) is one that's very tough to meet."

Tough or not, college officials claim they welcome the task--and they're grateful for what guidance the high court did offer. "The Supreme Court has actually reaffirmed--at least fur Virginia Tech--the direction we should be pursuing," says Dr. Benjamin Dixon, vice president of multicultural affairs.

"The court has clearly said there is a benefit that accrues directly from having a population that's diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, disability," Dixon adds, and that's been helpful to Tech officials in their own internal review. Indeed, thus far, he says, "no more than a half dozen" or so of the 60 programs the CEO alleged to be discriminatory have been found to have problem areas.

The review, of course, is ongoing, he says, and "we continue to respond to the attorney general's office and to the Office for Civil Rights." But Dixon adds, "I'm coming around to the notion that, whatever the public view of the problem is, however it develops, we're not going to solve anything as a society simply by looking to the courts."

Dixon believes that higher education has to take the lead in sponsoring a broad-based public conversation on "best practices" in diversity.

"We in higher education know intuitively that some practices are more effective than others. And we know some (race-neutral) initiatives offered around the country have not been proven to be as effective as what we've been doing in the past."

Thus, universities need to start doing what they do best, Dixon says. "Let's sponsor research on the concept of race neutral"--that is to say, double-blind studies directly comparing race-neutral and race-affirmative alternatives--"because, if you don't, you're buying the notion that affirmative action done in a focused, targeted way is automatically wrong from a legal point of view and race neutral is automatically right. And these are things that have not been proven."