University diversity: Earlier this year, the University of Michigan Law School's admissions policies were ruled unconstitutionaly by a federal judge who said they were "practically indistinguishable from a quota system." - both sides

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001

This month, matrix uses the diversity debate to introduce a new series of articles. Each issue will offer dissenting views on a topic that is important to higher education officials. Jeffrey Lehman, dean of the UM Law School, has said the judge's ruling was a "complete misreading of our admissions policy." Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes affirmative action, has called the ruling "solid and correct."

Earlier this year, the University of Michigan Law School's admissions policies were ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge who said they were "practically indistinguishable from a quota system."

choosing Integration for Higher Education

by Jeffrey S. Lehman
Dean of the Law School, University of Michigan

The psychological literature on cognitive dissonance is familiar and occasionally startling. Experimental subjects who discover an inconsistency between two beliefs will feel tension. They will sometimes alter those beliefs, disregarding evidence, if necessary, to relieve that tension.

The debate about affirmative action triggers cognitive dissonance for many people, forcing them to confront an inconsistency between the following beliefs:

* The very finest institutions of higher education should have more than token levels of racial integration.

* The very finest institutions of higher education should make admissions decisions in a rigidly color-blind manner. Tension arises because today, at the start of the twenty-first century in the United States of America, it is not possible to achieve more than token levels of racial integration at the very finest institutions of higher education by making admissions decisions in a rigidly color-blind manner.

Why is that? One among the many important reasons is that people of different races still tend to grow up in separate worlds. For hundreds of years, American culture, and often American law, required children of different races to live separately; only during the past 40 years has integration been legally permissible everywhere. During the past four decades behavioral change has been slow. Ours is not yet a society where integration happens accidentally.

Nor can we yet say that opportunity is distributed in a color-blind manner. It is not yet true that newborns of all races can be expected to receive equal investments in their preschool, elementary and secondary education. It therefore should not surprise us that the applicant pool at the highest levels of academic competition is not as diverse as the census shows our nation to be.

It is natural to wish that things were different. To wish that we could be color-blind and integrated, if only universities would try harder, or be more creative, or ... But if it were possible, we would have done those things long ago. In truth, teachers and admissions officers and regents do not like the choices that reality imposes any more than ordinary citizens or judges do.

And so we must choose: integration or color-blindness.

At the University of Michigan Law School, we have chosen integration. We have chosen less integration, to be sure, than many would like to see. A smaller percentage of our student body identifies with historically underrepresented racial minority groups than the percentage one would find among the nation's youth. We continue to reject a higher percentage of minority applicants than majority applicants.

We have opted for a conservative form of affirmative action. Following the guidelines established by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision, we consider integration as only one of many values in our admissions process. We admit only students whom we are confident can succeed in one of the most intellectually challenging academic programs in the world of higher education. We carefully analyze every component of applicants' admissions files, including their undergraduate grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, where they have studied and what they have studied. We pursue all kinds of diversity, not just racial diversity. We aim for a comprehensive diversity that will enrich everyone's education and will thereby improve our legal profession and its ability to serve our citizenry.

In 1978, five justices of the Supreme Court--Justices Blackmun, Brennan, Marshall, Powell and White--rejected the argument (one that had been accepted by the lower court) that rigid color-blindness must always prevail. Those five justices affirmed that our nation's finest institutions of higher education may design their admissions policies in the way that Michigan has, so as to offer our students the educational benefits of racial integration.

Those benefits are palpable. A half century ago, speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court, Chief Justice Vinson observed:

   "The law school ... cannot be effective in isolation from
   the individuals and institutions with which the law interacts.
   Few students and no one who has practiced law
   would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed
   from the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views with
   which the law is concerned."