This page contains a chronological record of major news items related to Affirmative Action. The news section is subdivided by year: 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006. Please e-mail your suggestions.
This page was last revised August 3, 2006. (AAD Home Page)
A Chronological Record of News and Events Related to Affirmative Action
News and Announcements: 1998
December 21, 1998: The Screen Actors Guild, the 95,000 member union representing performers nationwide, today issued a commissioned report showing that prime time and daytime television significantly underrepresented large segments of the United States population, including women, Latino/Hispanics, Asian Pacific Americans, Native American Indians, the disabled and seniors.
December 15, 1998: The National Science Foundation announces that it will award $13.7-million in grants to more than 200 women in science and engineering through its Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education program. The grants range in size from $13,000 to $150,000.
December 14, 1998: The Federal Communications Commission will not push the Supreme Court to revive the agency's affirmative action rules encouraging radio and television stations to hire more women and minorities, FCC officials said Monday.
December 13, 1998: According to a new report from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the number of women applying to the nation's medical schools has reached a plateau, after two decades of steady growth.
December 11, 1998: Racial tensions have been exposed at the University of Rhode Island after a cartoon about affirmative action in the student newspaper led to protests and a cutoff of the paper's funding.
December 9, 1998: A report issued today by the Pew Health Professions Commission suggets that medical schools in the United States should take steps to admit more minority applicants, notwithstanding recent setbacks for affirmative action.
December 3, 1998: A ban on racial and gender preferences goes into effect for Washington State's public colleges and government agencies, with state officials announcing an end to several contracting and hiring policies while encouraging colleges to find new ways to maintain diversity among students, professors, and staff members.
December 2, 1998: A California judge rejects Governor Pete Wilson's bid to invalidate a state law that its critics say requires community colleges to give employment preferences to women and members of certain minority groups.
December 1, 1998: Miami-Dade County Commission votes to ban discrimination against lesbians and gays in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Miami Herald Article
November-December 1998: The SAT, a test of dubious validity, has contributed to the racial disparities in college admissions, writes Brian Doherty, a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Now that Proposition 209 has ended affirmative action at public colleges in California, writes Mr. Doherty, some critics of the SAT blame the test for the growing racial gap at the University of California. Even the Educational Testing Service, which earns $41-million a year developing and administering the SAT and other tests, now admits that the SAT measures "developed reasoning skills" in mathematics and verbal areas, not scholastic aptitude. Furthermore, writes Mr. Doherty, the Princeton Review, a test-preparation company, raises students' scores by teaching them tricks, such as how to guess effectively. But quantitative standardized tests have a meritocratic appeal, and the SAT is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. "State universities and public schools are inherently creatures of politics, so the issues that concern them, such as the SAT, are doomed to be perpetual political battlegrounds," the author concludes.
November 1998: A federal appeals court found a race-based admissions policy used by an elite public high school in Boston to be unconstitutional.
November 9, 1998: Nine white Chicago firefighters who say they unlawfully were passed over for promotion in favor of blacks and Hispanics lost a Supreme Court appeal today.Reverse Discrimination Case Refused (Associated Press)
November 6, 1998: The passage of Initiative 200 in Washington state this week threatens to weaken diversity efforts nationwide and cries out for the need to educate the public about affirmative action, says a national alliance of minority journalists who are hosting the UNITY `99 convention in Seattle next July.
November 5, 1998: Civil rights advocates who unsuccessfully fought an anti-affirmative action proposal in Washington state are rethinking their strategy and bracing for new battles elsewhere. Meanwhile, foes of affirmative action are planning their next campaigns. Associated Press Article
November 3, 1998: To the disappointment of many college leaders around the United States, Washington State voters on Tuesday approved a measure to bar their public universities from using racial preferences to admit students, hire employees, or award contracts. Washington was one of 19 states where voters decided ballot measures of interest to academe.
November 1998: The University of the Witwatersrand sets out to help change South Africa -- and to change itself from within -- by increasing the number of its high-ranking black faculty members.
October 23, 1998: About 35 students end their occupation of the University of Texas Tower, in Austin, where they spent the night to protest a lack of commitment by university officials to affirmative action.
Week of October 23, 1998: A white male college student sues the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education in federal court, challenging the legality of a scholarship program that sets different test-score requirements for members of different racial groups and for men and women.
October 21, 1998: Students and professors at some 25 colleges nationwide hold a series of teach-ins, walkouts, and rallies to defend affirmative action, but the events attract only small crowds, even on some of the campuses where debate over the issue has recently attracted the most attention.
October 18-20, 1998: The University of Minnesota sponsors a symposium, "Keeping Our Faculties: Addressing the Recruitment and Retention of Faculty of Color in Higher Education," Sunday through Tuesday at the Radisson Hotel-Metrodome, in Minneapolis.
October 13, 1998: In one of the first applications of a 1996 decision banning the use of racial preferences by Texas universities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit revives a lawsuit charging that the University of Texas at Austin had discriminated against white applicants.
October 8, 1998: South Africa is poised to institute an affirmative action plan similar to ones employed in the United States. CNN News Story
September 1998: William G. Bowen and Derek C. Bok publish The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton UP). Bowen and Bok present what is essentially the first statistical analysis of the long-term effects of affirmative action policies at academically selective universities--their data was compiled by surveying more than 60,000 white and African American students from the classes of 1976 and 1989. Their conclusion is that race-based criteria have in fact increased job opportunities and all-around quality of life for African Americans. Also important, they dispute the "fit" hypothesis--that which holds that affirmative action has historically brought African Americans to colleges for which they were unfit.
September 22, 1998: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors votes unanimously to extend and expand a program giving preference to women and minorities in city contracting. The board gave the city's contracting program, which is set to expire at the end of October, new life by extending it until 2003 and including Native Americans and Arab Americans under the protections for women, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
September 21, 1998: Hispanic voters haven't forgiven Republican Gov. Pete Wilson for supporting Proposition 187, the bitterly contested ballot measure that cut off most state services to illegal aliens. Now Dan Lungren, the Republican nominee to succeed Wilson, may pay the price. Unless Lungren can win them back, Hispanic voters may provide his margin of defeat this year. Hispanic Anger at Calif. Governor Threatens Would-Be Successor (The Associated Press)
September 17, 1998: A majority of Washington State's business leaders in a recent poll believe American society is growing apart, but also that college courses about diversity can help pull it together. Most expect their work forces will be more diverse in 20 years and that the ability to work in diverse teams will be critical. Business Poll Stresses Need for Diversity Education (Marsha King, Seattle Times)
September 16, 1998: In defiance of state law banning affirmative action, a San Francisco supervisors panel voted yesterday to expand the city's program of race and gender preferences in contracting to cover companies owned by Arab Americans and American Indians. If passed by the Board as a whole, the ordinance, sponsored by Supervisor Amos Brown, would also extend existing preferences to companies owned by other minority groups and by women until 2003. It is now set to expire October 31. Panel OKs Expansion of Preferences: S.F. Action Flies in Face of Affirmative Action Law (Jason B. Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle)
September 1998: A major new study of the records and experiences of tens of thousands of students over 20 years at the some of the nation's top colleges and universities concludes that their affirmative action policies created the backbone of the black middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration. Study of Affirmative Action at Top Schools Cites Far-Reaching Benefits (Ethan Bronner, New York Times)
July 8, 1998: In an hourlong debate with eight panelists (taped and aired by PBS), President Clinton called for a new approach to affirmative action. See the report of the debate here and at the PBS site as well: A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton (July 8, 1998).
May 14, 1998: A sit-in by as many as 150 black Ohio State University students is in its fourth day in a lounge near Interim President Richard Sisson's office. An OSU spokesman, Malcolm Baroway, told UPI today that Sisson agreed to one demand -- an end to restructuring in the Office of Minority Affairs -- but refused to accede to other students' demands. Baroway said the students put a banner outside the building, but most other students are oblivious to the on-going sit-in protest inside the non-academic building. The demonstration, which started Monday, was organized by the Afrikan Student Union and OSU's chapter of the NAACP. OSU's permanent president, William Kirwan, assumes office July 1 and Sisson said two public forums concerning the protestors' concerns will be held this month and scheduled so Kirwan and school trustees could attend. OSU's black undergraduate enrollment of 2,703 comprises 7.59 percent of the university's total enrollment.
May 1, 1998: The Oakland teachers union (Oakland Education Association), the Associated Students of UC-Berkeley (ASUC), Professors Ron Takaki and Bill Banks, BAMN, and UC-Berkeley Black Student Union, sponsor a rally at the UC Office of the President in Oakland in order to call for the immediate admission of the 800 underrepresented minority applicants with 4.0+ GPAs who were denied admission to UC-Berkeley because of the repeal of affirmative action.
April 12, 1998: A press release announces that the ballot drive will continue for the Equal Educational Opportunity Initiative. EEOI organizers will continue to collect signatures through June 20.
April 1998:
UC Berkeley announces that the number of African Americans
admitted as part of the freshman class have dropped by 66% since 1997, while
the number of Latinos has dropped by 53%. At UCLA, the numbers fell by
43% and 33% respectively. UC Santa Cruz offered spots to 7.4% more Latinos
than last year and UC Riverside extended offers to 42% more African Americans,
which has fueled fears that the UC will develop into a two-tier and racially
segregated system. The number of African Americans and Latinos accepted by at
least one University of California campus dropped this year, as officials picked
the first freshman class in the post-affirmative action era. The number of Asian
Americans and whites actually grew, but that growth was masked by a surge of
applicants who declined to state their ethnicity. Officials say at least 80%
who offered no ethnic data are whites or Asian Americans. See also the
1998 reports of confirmed
enrollments for the UC campuses.
| 1997 | 1998 | % Change | |
| AmericanIndian | 336 | 318 | -5.4% |
| African American | 1,509 | 1,243 | -17.6% |
| Latino | 5,685 | 5,294 | -6.9% |
| Asian American | 14,421 | 14,427 | 0.0% |
| White | 17,680 | 16,109 | -8.9% |
| Declined to state | 2,181 | 6,846 | 214% |
| Other | 1,051 | 656 | -37.5% |
| Total | 42,863 | 44,393 | 3.6% |
March 26, 1998: Today 41 black, Latino, Asian-American, Filipino and white students -- a majority of whom are women -- along with three Michigan pro-affirmative action coalitions, filed a motion to intervene as defendants in a historic case brought to challenge affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. The case, entitled Grutter vs. Bollinger, was brought against the Law School by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), a right-wing legal organization in Washington, D.C. that acts as the national clearing house for legal attacks on affirmative action at state universities. The students from this nationally coordinated intervention to stop resegregation in higher education hail from Michigan, Texas and California, and are enrolled in high school, college, graduate school and law school. They are joined by three coalitions: United for Equality and Affirmative Action, The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary, and Law Students for Affirmative Action.
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