Thursday, June 23, 2005
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/06/2005062304n.htm
Education Department's Actions Contradict Supreme Court's Rulings on
Affirmative Action, Report Says
By PETER SCHMIDT
The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has actively
discouraged colleges from using race-conscious policies that are both
legally permissible and necessary to close the achievement gap
between black and white Americans, according to a report set for
release today by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The report is being issued on the second anniversary of two landmark
decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on race-conscious admissions
policies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In those
rulings, the Supreme Court held that public colleges could give some
consideration to applicants' race or ethnicity for the sake of
promoting diversity, as long as the colleges treated applicants as
individuals.
The NAACP fund, a civil-rights group, argues in its report that the
Supreme Court's decisions endorsed the use of race in admissions and
did not deal with any other aspect of higher-education policy. But,
the group says, the rulings are being interpreted by critics of
affirmative action and by the Office for Civil Rights as severely
restricting the use of race in admissions, outreach, recruitment,
financial aid, and other areas.
The report notes that organizations opposed to affirmative action
have been asking the office, known as OCR, to investigate colleges
over their consideration of applicants' race and their operation of
programs reserved for minority students. Such groups, the report
says, "are trying to achieve through threats and intimidation what
they could not achieve through the courts."
"Because by law OCR must investigate each and every complaint it
receives, the threat to file an OCR complaint can have a chilling
effect on an educational institution, even if there is no merit to
the complaint," the report says. It adds: "In many instances where
OCR has publicly announced an investigation, colleges and
universities have decided not to engage in the time-consuming process
of responding to an OCR investigation, regardless of the legal merits
of their programs."
The report alleges that "anti-affirmative-action groups have an
inside track at OCR," which has hired staff members from those
outside organizations. The report also criticizes the office for
focusing its energies on encouraging educational institutions to
pursue race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, even though
such policies, in themselves, cannot close the gaps between black and
white students in enrollment and graduation rates.
Officials at the Office for Civil Rights had not been given copies of
the report as of Wednesday and could not be reached for comment. The
chief organization that has been filing complaints against colleges
with the office, the Center for Equal Opportunity, has argued that
many colleges' admissions policies, and all race-exclusive college
programs, give more weight to race than the Supreme Court's rulings
allow.
The Legal Defense Fund plans to post the report on its Web site today.
|
