Affirmative Reaction
Affirmative Reaction
The Washington Post
Friday, April 6, 2001; Page A36
ONLY THREE months ago, a federal court in Detroit upheld the University of Michigan's race-conscious undergraduate admissions policy. Last week a different judge on the same court struck down a similar policy at the university's law school. The core question the two cases pose is the same: Is ensuring a diverse student body an adequate reason for a state university to give preferential consideration to minority applicants?
The starkly different rulings highlight how the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action decisions have left university admissions in a state of flux. The problem has arisen because, in rolling back racial preferences, the court has not specifically tackled the problem of university education. Lower courts therefore are left to try to apply the court's 1978 case of University of California Regents v. Bakke, in which a splintered court permitted race to be a factor in admissions so long as race-consciousness did not prevent all candidates from receiving full consideration.
The trouble is that Bakke itself is something of a muddle, and the court's subsequent pronouncements leave room to wonder if its logic has been superseded altogether. The uncertainty has allowed certain courts to okay well-designed preference programs while others consider them all constitutionally deficient. In the decision last week, which was stayed yesterday by an appeals panel, Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that cultivating a diverse student body was not the sort of compelling state interest that the Supreme Court's recent cases demand before distinctions by race become acceptable. This seems wrong. Diversity is admittedly a diffuse kind of interest, one whose benefits are long term and not easy to measure.
Yet in a complex, multiethnic society whose universities function as training grounds, a diverse student body improves the educational function of the university and its ability to serve as a center of civic dialogue. Nobody should be comfortable with government's making distinctions according to race, even for laudable purposes, and affirmative action programs have to be carefully designed and implemented. But for the courts to deny universities the ability to ensure diversity reflects a simplistic notion of equal protection.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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