symposium

Comments | Insight on the News, May 14, 2001 | by Shirley Strum Kenny, | Ward Connerly

At issue are conflicting interpretations of the 1978 case of the Board of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in which the Supreme Court offered only a muddled answer to the question of whether the pursuit of "diversity" in school admissions justifies racial preferences. In Bakke, a sharply divided court struck down a California medical school's admission quota for minority students. However, Justice Lewis Powell's separate opinion declared that the pursuit of a "diverse student body" was a valid reason rouse race as a "plus" factor. Even though no other justice concurred with that opinion -- some in the legal community have said this case gave a ruling without a decision -- it has been interpreted by most of the education establishment as controlling legal doctrine.

While nearly every college-admissions officer in the country has interpreted Bakke to permit them to use racial classifications and preferences, the courts have been less uniform in their understanding. Late last year in a case challenging the undergraduate-admissions policies at the University of Michigan, a federal judge ruled that achieving racial diversity in the freshman class was so important -- the legal term is "compelling" -- that the school was justified in using race as an admission criterion. However, in a parallel lawsuit decided March 27, another federal judge examined the diversity rationale for admissions to the University of Michigan Law School and reached the opposite conclusion. Most legal observers now agree that, during the next year or so, it is likely the Supreme Court will revisit Bakke and sort out the conflicting legal opinions in Michigan and throughout the country.

Regardless of how the legality of racial diversity is settled by the courts in the future, race remains a polarizing social issue constantly debated in the public square, and no place more than in our nation's schools. It is there that "diversity" has become a new creed, driving everything from student admissions to faculty hiring to promotion to curriculum. Yet, according to the results of a massive "diversity" poll commissioned by the Ford Foundation a few years ago, most Americans are unsure of diversity's real meaning, let alone how it is to be implemented and achieved by our institutions of higher learning. If diversity means racial integration, then most Americans support it; but if it means a system of racial classifications and preferences that must be recalibrated periodically to reach a target goal, then most American are opposed.

Regardless of what the professional diversity retailers try to sell the public and the courts, diversity as practiced by our nation's colleges and universities is little more than a Potemkin village of strict racial proportionality. In this respect, diversity has become untethered from integration and has assumed a life of its own. For the racial-advocacy groups and their allies on the left, diversity now is integration's rival.

The University of Michigan's legal defense of racial preferences in both cases went a step further by adding the stamp of social science to its justification. A mammoth study was produced by Patricia Gurin, a University of Michigan psychology professor, that purported to prove the compelling benefits of a diverse student body. Her methodology centered on interviews with students admitted under the school's preference regime. The judge in the undergraduate case cited the study as "solid evidence" that students "who experience the most racial and ethnic diversity" exhibit superior cognitive skills.