Colleges have been unnecessarily scaling back their affirmative-action programs in response to threats of litigation and pressure from Bush-administration officials, a report released on Monday by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles argues.
The Civil Rights Project, which long had been based at Harvard University but moved to the University of California at Los Angeles (and appended its name) this year, says that the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan’s law school should have been seen as a green light to colleges to continue considering students’ race and ethnicity for the sake of promoting diversity.
Instead, the report argues, critics of affirmative action — including many conservative advocacy groups and officials in the Bush administration — have “attempted to interpret the law as if they had won the case” and have managed to pressure many colleges to quietly abandon policies and programs that were within the bounds of the law. The report echoes comments about colleges’ cautious reaction to the case that began not long after the court ruled.
The report assails such timidity. “Colleges and state policy makers have much more discretion than they are led to believe by those trying to roll back civil-rights policy,” it says.
The report’s editor, Gary A. Orfield, a director of the Civil Rights Project, said in a written statement accompanying the report that “we can expect ongoing controversy” over affirmative action because “it is unreasonable to expect a deeply divided country to come up with a clear and simple, lasting answer” to the controversy.
The report, written by more than a dozen scholars at colleges around the nation, includes chapters saying that bans on race-conscious admissions policies have greatly hurt diversity at law schools; that black and Hispanic students are falling behind in terms of college access when demographic changes are taken into account; and that California colleges would benefit from duplicating many of the policies developed in Texas for the sake of promoting diversity in college enrollments. —Peter Schmidt
