Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 20, 1995 TAG: 9507140081
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD A. SAMP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Last Monday, the court placed limits on federal construction contracts for minorities and invalidated a Kansas City, Mo., magnet-schools program designed to attract suburban whites to inner-city schools. In May, the court let stand a ruling striking down a blacks-only scholarship program at the University of Maryland.
Over the years - dating back to the Bakke decision in 1978, which struck down a medical-school admissions program that set aside seats for members of racial minorities - the court majority has repeatedly ruled this way. Racial classifications, the justices have said, are virtually never permitted under the Constitution and will be upheld only under the most compelling circumstances.
The justices have repeated this stance with government contracts and the drawing of congressional districts. So the court position is plain. The question is when will the rest of the country catch up?
Clearly, opponents of racial preferences hoping to end the pervasive use of such preferences in higher education and other contexts must not only prevail on the legal battlefields, but must also win over the hearts and minds of educators and politicians. This will be a challenge: In the blacks-only scholarship case, educators across the country have downplayed the significance of the court action, making clear that they intend to continue to provide preferential assistance to black students. And if those educators are intent on discriminating on the basis of race, they will have little difficulty evading the occasional court decision telling them not to.
Yet until educators come to understand that current practices are educationally unsound and morally bankrupt, little will change on our campuses. Already, educators have managed to turn Bakke on its head, repeatedly citing it for the proposition that the Supreme Court has approved the use of racial preferences in college admissions decisions. So long as courts decline to hold that schools can come up with a rationale sufficiently compelling so as to justify racial preferences, educators so inclined will always have room to argue that their particular preference program is the exception that passes constitutional muster.
The end result is that race plays an important role in admissions-scholarship decisions at hundreds of colleges nationwide. Colleges provide whatever degree of preference is necessary - often very large preferences - to achieve the racial quotas educators have preordained as desirable.
College administrators' infatuation with racial preferences is easy to understand. Every college wants to boast about the large number of high-achieving students, both minority and white, it has attracted. Administrators at state-supported schools are also under pressure from state legislators to ensure that the racial composition of their student bodies matches the state's as a whole. The recourse to racial preferences is a predictable outgrowth of those pressures: Schools are in a bidding war to attract students from among the relatively small pool of black high school seniors with top academic credentials.
But the negative consequences of that bidding war are more and more apparent. Not surprisingly, white students are increasingly resentful at being placed at a disadvantage in admissions and scholarship decisions. Racial relations on college campuses are widely viewed as having deteriorated in the past decade, even as tolerance of racial discrimination against minority groups has been all but eliminated and minority-preference scholarship programs have proliferated.
Moreover, while schools may derive some reputational benefits from recruiting top minority students, racial preferences provide little benefit to the minority community as a whole. Scholarship funds go disproportionately to high-achieving minority students who, not surprisingly, tend to come from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. It is impossible to justify racial preferences as an effort to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination against minorities when the benefits are conferred almost exclusively on those who are least likely to be suffering the effects of past discrimination.
Most important, schools that award benefits on the basis of race are teaching exactly the wrong message to today's students: that the color of one's skin really does make a difference.
The message from the court to colleges and other groups engaged in affirmative action is clear: Racial preferences are wrong, but you'll probably get away with awarding preferences if you do a good enough job at hiding what you're doing. It remains to be seen whether these groups will continue to pay attention only to the second part of the message.
Richard A. Samp is chief counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation, which represented the Hispanic student who successfully challenged the University of Maryland's blacks-only scholarship program.
Newsday
by CNB