The sound of a gateway closing - how anti-affirmative action was organized for national debate - Special Report Top 100 Degree Producers

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 30, 1996 by B. Denise Hawkins

In America, education remains the gateway to upward social mobility, to opportunity, to self-sufficiency, successful families and political participation. That's the reality.

But the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1995 ruling in a Kansas City school desegregation case made it clear that it was out of the business of managing public school systems to protect African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minority students from the lingering effects of legal segregation.

Many observers say the courts, including the nation's high court, in college desegregation and affirmative action rulings -- for example, Hopwood vs. State of Texas and Podberesky vs. Kirwan -- are signaling a willingness to strike down affirmative action programs and chip away at educational access for students of color.

Fueling the firestorm of legal debates is the "perception of the loss of majority privilege," says Dr. Reginald Wilson, senior scholar at the Washington DC-based American Council on Education. But gains for students of color have been moderate at best, he adds.

Unfortunately, Wilson says, that hasn't stopped politicians from seizing upon this perception and "irresponsibly heightening" it.

But the charge is not just being led by politicians. Howard University law professor Kenneth Tollett points to pockets of "white supremacist Blacks" and "angry" whites in the academy for sparking the fractious national debate on affirmative action.

"Neo-conservative Blacks," says Tollett have helped advance and "sanitize attacks on affirmative action." Among them, he says, are talk show host Armstrong Williams, author and scholar Shelby Steele, professor Walter Williams and former NAACP official Michael Meyers.

Meyers says he is used to ending up on lists like Tollett's. With more humor than hostility, Meyers capsulizes his life of Blackness.

"I was raised poor and Black in Harlem. I went to ghetto schools up until I went to college and graduate school, but I'm not regarded as really Black," says Meyers emphasizing "really Black" at least twice in his remarks to a reporter recently.

While Meyers wants the world to know he's Black, he says race-based affirmative action programs and set-asides based on "skin color" have no place in higher education.

Designating "special [faculty] hires," says Meyers, "help run the game of ghettoizing the greenery of Ivy Leagues. Affirmative action works to raise and clarify standards, but on too many campuses, the picture hasn't been pretty." College administrators, Meyers adds, are the ones who "have pandered to Black nationalists and tenured faculty by creating such nebulous descriptions as ethnic studies ... and perpetuating paternalism."

Among the newest allies of the anti-affirmative movement are public interest law firms and think tanks.

Waging legal battles for the principles held dear by the political right wing is the business of these law groups, observers say.

One recent case involved the University of Maryland. The Washington Legal Foundation won a victory in the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals case, Podberesky vs. Kirwan. The court ruling barred the University of Maryland from awarding race-based scholarships, despite evidence of past racial discrimination.

According to Richard Samp, WLF chief counsel, the law firm went looking for a case like the one at the University of Maryland to make its point about minority programs.

"We have long felt that we were looking for cases in the higher-education environment to assert the principle that racial classifications are wrong," said Samp in a recent interview.

Vulnerable campus affirmative action programs have been easy legal targets for groups like the Center for Individual Rights and the Washington Legal Foundation, says Roger Wilkins, the Clarence J. Robinson professor of history and American culture at George Mason University.

Money Talks

No group has managed to seize more of the academy's attention on affirmative action than the predominantly white National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative academic group made up of 4,000 college professors and graduate students in 50 states.

NAS president Stephen Balch attributes the visibility of the organization to strength in numbers and savvy leaders among its chapters across the U.S. and now in Canada.

A handful of foundation grants and a fast-growing membership have also helped anchor them in the academy, says Balch. More than 70 percent of the organization's funds come from conservative foundations. Key among them, says Balch, are the John M. Olin Foundation (New York), the Sarah Scaife Foundation (Pittsburgh), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (Milwaukee) and the Smith Richardson Foundation (Washington, DC.).

Three NAS supporters -- Scaife, Olin and Bradley -- were among a group of conservative foundations that the liberal, public interest legal organization, Alliance for justice, accused of buying access to judges, lawyers and law students through all-expense-paid judicial seminars and law school programs

The Alliance for justice report issued in 1991 said 376 judges had been schooled in economic theory through George Mason University's law and economic center, funded by Olin, Bradley and Scaife Foundations.