Living in a post-affirmative action world; ruling against Michigan could boost minority achievement, says one scholar. But others are not so optimistic - Ruling On Affirmative Action - University of Michigan

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 27, 2003 by Ronald Roach

A great deal of attention is being paid to university systems in California, Florida and Texas where admissions have been guaranteed to the top students from every public high school. "In these states, race-neutral admissions policies have resulted in levels of minority attendance for incoming students that are close to, and in some instances slightly surpass, those under the old race-based approach," President Bush has said.

Dr. Shelby Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is among those conservatives who say that President Bush did not go far enough with his opposition to the Michigan affirmative action plan. Like many conservatives, Steele derides percentage and other diversity plans as corrupt "social engineering schemes." What especially galls Steele is that Bush's endorsement of racial diversity represents an example of the "White guilt" he claims has compromised Black American initiative and development since the 1960s.

"Affirmative action from the very beginning has always been a policy manifestation of White guilt. White guilt takes our problems away from (Black Americans), and the larger society says it's going to solve problems for us," Steele says.

For Steele, a ruling against the University of Michigan will not result in an unambiguous message being sent to the Black community that individual Blacks should be competing at the same level of Whites and Asian Americans to gain admission to elite institutions. In his writings and speeches, Steele, who is a well-known Black conservative, blames White guilt for compromising the call for excellence to which he believes Blacks will respond on their own. In Steele's view, adopting percentage plans is precisely the wrong policy because it fails to enforce a common standard of admissions for all students.

THE RICE UNIVERSITY MODEL AND OTHERS

In addition to percentage plans, higher education officials have talked a great deal about adopting college admissions practices that carefully scrutinize individual applicants. For years, private elite schools have been known to devote considerable resources toward careful evaluation of individuals for consideration of his or her unique talents and diverse background. This practice contrasts with that of the undergraduate admissions process at the University of Michigan, which relied upon numerically weighted formulas. The case against the undergraduate admissions process has been largely based around the fact that Michigan used an admissions formula that awarded racial and ethnic bonus points to Black and Latino applicants.

That admissions tradition of individual scrutiny, however, has served at least one institution well. Rice University in Houston, a private school which bowed to the 1996 Hopwood decision that banned race in Texas college admissions, has found that meaningful representation of Blacks and Latinos is achieved when admissions staff learn how applicants overcame obstacles, and the details of their family and community lives. By considering a wide range of life experiences without discussing race among themselves, Rice admissions officials have admitted and enrolled freshman classes that have been racially diverse.