Sorting out value of diversity at colleges Sorting out value of diversity at colleges
Friday, April 13, 2001
The pursuit of diversity has become an accepted goal of almost every social, corporate and political institution in this country. There is argument, some of it bitter, about how to get there. But few of us question the worth of the journey. Now a federal judge in Detroit has done just that. The case before Bernard Friedman involved a challenge to the admissions scheme used by the University of Michigan Law School to guarantee that each entering class has a "critical mass" of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.
In his ruling last month, the judge nixed not only the admissions system but also the rationale for it. He rejected the case, made by university officials, that all students are better off for being surrounded by people from varying backgrounds. Striving for diversity might be noble, he wrote, but it was not a "compelling state interest." That concept was central to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's 1978 opinion in the famous Bakke case, the first big test of racial preference in the college admissions process.
In Bakke, a deeply-divided court rejected as unconstitutional a racial-quota system employed by the University of California's medical school at Davis. Powell was the swing vote for that majority. In his opinion, he concluded that diversity was "a constitutionally permissible goal" for a college or university to pursue. Ever since, institutions of higher education have sought to develop quota-free ways to make it happen. Whether the Michigan law school's system meets the Powell standard is not clear.
Over the last nine years, the school's "critical mass" admissions policy has consistently given each entering class 10 to 15 percent minority representation. Friedman found this result virtually indistinguishable from a quota. I'm not sure he's wrong. Far more troubling, though, was his overall conclusion, which he made separate and apart from his consideration of the particulars. He ruled that the stewards of a public university have no right to take race into account in determining the make-up of the student body. If they want diversity, Friedman said, they must come up with some race-neutral method of achieving it.
As an example, he suggested ignoring college grades and scores on entrance tests, or picking students at random. I think he was being serious. If the university wouldn't take that sort of approach, he said, diversity would have to wait until society transformed itself sufficiently to make it happen naturally. University President Lee Bollinger condemned the ruling for calling into question "the ideal of the integrated society" and "the importance of education to that ideal." Officials of the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, which brought the case on the behalf of a rejected white applicant, say the issue is merely "whether a school can use race to achieve the benefits of a diverse student body."
In December, a different Detroit federal judge, hearing a similar challenge to Michigan's admission policies for undergraduates, reached precisely the opposite conclusions. In that case, Judge Patrick Duggan found no constitutional problem with an admissions process that gives applicants specific preference points for being black or Hispanic or Native American. He also accepted the Powell standard as the assumed law of the land, leaving universities free to wrestle with it as they have for the last 23 years.
The irreconcilability of the two rulings virtually guarantees a trip to the Supreme Court sometime in the next few years - and a potential landmark decision. Regardless of what the high court decides about Michigan's various procedures, it's vital that the justices reaffirm the value of diversity in higher education - both for what it does for academia and for what it does for the nation.
Responding to the needs of a changing society ought to be central to the purpose of any public university. It should be something the institution is obliged to do, not barred from attempting. Once that's established, we can continue the argument over how best to achieve diversity. But if universities are told the goal is not their concern, then we're all in a heap of trouble.
Larry Eichel's column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. His e-mail address is leichel@phillynews.com.
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