I thought this was interesting. The court is wrestling with the concept of 'diversity' in college admissions.
August 29, 2001
NEWS ANALYSIS
Georgia Ruling May Force Colleges to See
Individual in Group
By JACQUES STEINBERG
In ruling on Monday that an affirmative
action policy at the University of Georgia
was unconstitutional, a federal appeals court
panel in Atlanta called on the university and
other colleges to expand their thinking about
what it means to be diverse.
The panel suggested that diversity cannot be
defined by race alone but needs to take into
account students' talents, life experiences
and other factors that can apply to white
students as well as nonwhite ones.
For many institutions, that rationale, if upheld by the United States Supreme
Court, would require major adjustments in how they admit students. Over
the last four decades, many colleges and universities, particularly public ones,
have sought to diversify their campuses simply by admitting substantial
concentrations of black, Hispanic and Asian-American students, often by
awarding them racial bonus points in admissions calculations.
The universities have argued that they need to emphasize diversity to redress
the long period when blacks and other minority students were virtually
excluded from many college classrooms and to enhance the educational
experiences of minority and nonminority students alike.
But the federal court in Georgia said firmly that diversity could not be
confined to race. While lawyers arguing against affirmative action in a flurry
of recent federal cases have made similar arguments, the ruling by the
three-judge panel in Atlanta was perhaps the strongest endorsement by a
federal court for a wider definition of diversity on campuses.
"While we can assume that racial diversity may be one component of a
diverse student body, it is not the only component," wrote the panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. "If the goal in creating a
diverse student body is to develop a university community where students
are exposed to persons of different cultures, outlooks, and experiences, a
white applicant in some circumstances may make a greater contribution than
a nonwhite applicant."
Other federal courts have struck down affirmative action policies that were
as blunt and systematic as Georgia's, most notably at the University of Texas
School of Law in 1996 and at the University of Michigan Law School this
year.
In the Texas case, the court ruled that promoting diversity was not an interest
the state should be espousing, not grappling with the definition, said Terence
Pell, chief executive for the Center for Individual Rights, which challenged the
Michigan and Texas admissions policies.
In the Georgia case, the judges waded into the very definition of diversity.
The University of Georgia, which barred blacks until 1961, began in 1996 to
award extra points to nonwhite applicants. The panel said it should have
taken a more nuanced approach and argued that if a university "wants to
ensure diversity through its admissions decisions, and wants race to be part
of that calculus, then it must be prepared to shoulder the burden of fully and
fairly analyzing applicants as individuals." They considered the awarding of
bonus points to all minority applicants to be "rigid or mechanical."
If the case reaches the Supreme Court and the decision is upheld, the judges'
rationale could prove debilitating to many public universities, which process
most applications by compressing students' SAT scores and grade point
averages into numerical formulas that often account for race. Those
institutions usually receive far too many applications for their small admissions
staffs to consider each applicant individually.
But should the ruling against the University of Georgia hold, the practices of
elite private colleges may be on firmer ground than before. That is because
they have the resources to follow a model much closer to an ideal offered by
Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in 1978 and amplified by the federal panel on
Monday.
In announcing the Supreme Court's decision in the landmark case of
University of California Regents v. Bakke, Justice Powell argued that "ethnic
diversity" was "only one element in a range of factors a university properly
may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous student body."
At highly selective private colleges, at least two admissions officers usually
review a candidate's file and are then charged with making the case for
admission or rejection. Those officers can argue, for example, that an SAT
score of 1200 should be considered low for a white student from a suburban
private high school but high for a black student whose parents did not attend
college.
Moreover, the elite private colleges long ago expanded their definition of
diversity to include bassoonists, second basemen and residents of Wyoming,
as well as blacks and Hispanics. That would seem to satisfy Justice Powell's
standard.
The private colleges, though, may one day have to respond to a twist that the
federal panel in Georgia seemed to add to the Powell opinion. The panel said
that a "race-conscious admissions policy" must be "flexible enough to ensure
that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that looks
to her membership in a favored or disfavored racial group as a defining
feature of her candidacy."
Robin Mamlet, the dean of admission and financial aid at Stanford, said there
were white students in the applicant pool each year who were categorized
internally as "diversity students." They include "kids from rural backgrounds,
kids from Appalachia and kids who are white and are recent immigrants."
The definition of diversity as described by the federal court panel and Justice
Powell, Ms. Mamlet said, "is exactly what we use."
Mr. Pell warned that a college that does not factor race into a point system
might still be admitting minority students to achieve "a certain threshold."
Many private colleges, for example, are intent on preventing the
concentration of minority students from dipping one year to the next. "That,"
he said, "is functionally equivalent to a quota system." |
