Top Businesses Back Univ. Of Michigan In Fight To Keep Its Affirmative Action Admissions Policies.. Medical Center vs. Allan Bakke

Jet, Nov 6, 2000

Twenty Fortune 500 companies recently filed a legal brief in support of affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The policies are being challenged in a federal lawsuit in Detroit.

The filing comes three months before the start of the trial of one of two 1997 lawsuits claiming the university's admissions policies unconstitutionally discriminate against Whites in favor of less-qualified minorities.

The 20 companies in the brief are 3M, Abbott Laboratories, Bank One Corp., DuPont De Nemours & Co., Dow Chemical Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Eli Lilly and Co., General Mills, Intel Corp., Johnson and Johnson, Kellogg Co., KPMG International, Lucent Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp., PPG Industries Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., Sara Lee Corp., Steelcase Inc., Texaco and TRW Inc. They follow the lead of General Motors Corp., which filed a brief supporting the institution in July.

"Without a strong commitment to diversity from the world's leading academic institutions, it will become more and more difficult for multinational corporations to compete at the global level," said James Hackett, chief executive of office furniture-maker Steelcase Inc., commenting on the corporate support for the university in the lawsuits.

The two lawsuits were filed by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Individual Rights (CIR) in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan.

The first suit, filed in October 1997, challenges the University's use of race in its admissions process to its largest undergraduate college, the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, on behalf of two White students, Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, unsuccessful applicants for the fall terms of 1995 and 1997 respectively. No trial date has been set, but oral arguments are slated for November.

The second suit, filed in December 1997, challenges the University's use of race in its admissions at the Law School on behalf of Barbara Grutter, an unsuccessful applicant for the 1997 fall-entering class. It is slated for trial in January.

The University's position is that the Constitution and civil rights statutes, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke decision, permit it to take race and ethnicity into account in its admissions program in order to achieve the educational benefits of a diverse student body.

In the Regents of the University of California vs. Allan Bakke case, Bakke, a White engineer, was refused admission to the University's medical school. After learning his grades and test scores were higher than other applicants admitted to the school under a special program for minorities, he sued the university claiming his application was rejected only because he was White. Bakke was admitted, but the Supreme Court ruled race could be a factor in university admissions in order to attain the educational benefit of diversity.

Minorities account for close to 25 percent of the University of Michigan's 36,000 students, making it among the most diverse major universities in the Midwest.

And recent research at the University on college students in relation to diversity has shown all students learn better in a racially and ethnically diverse environment and "patterns of racial segregation and separation historically rooted in our national life can be broken by diversity experiences in higher education."

"If not permitted to consider race as a factor in the university's admissions process, it will have a devastating effect on the institution's ability to assemble a diverse student body," University President Lee C. Bollinger told JET. "It would likely result in a sharp decline in the number of minority students enrolled at the University," he added.

Bollinger cited the drop in minority admissions at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles in the wake of Proposition 209, the 1996 California voter initiative that banned the use of race in university admissions. And he noted the fall in minority student enrollment at the University of Texas Law School, where a Federal appeals court overturned an admissions policy the court ruled granted illegal advantages to Blacks and Hispanics.