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Affirmative Action Policies Continue to Be Controversial
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Lawyers for two plaintiffs who brought a successful Supreme Court case against race-conscious undergraduate admissions policies at the University of Michigan were awarded about $700,000 in attor-ney's fees by a district judge in Michigan in January. The attorneys had asked for $2 million, arguing that they were the official victors in the case, Gratz v. Bollinger, because the admissions policy was struck down. The judge, however, reduced the amount, ruling that the victory was not complete since the Court rejected the plaintiff's argument that all affirmative action policies are unconstitutional. Still pending is another motion, which asks a lower court to order the university to pay damages to about thirty thousand white and Asian American applicants who were rejected by the undergraduate college between 1995 and 2003, the period during which the contested admissions policies were in effect. The motion also asks the court to compel the university to refund the $40 application fee paid by each. Gratz v. Bollinger was one of two challenges to Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies ruled on by the Supreme Court in June 2003. In both cases, the Court found that diversity in higher education is a compelling state interest. It struck down the undergraduate admissions policies, however, be-cause they awarded points to applicants based on race. In contrast, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court found that the university's law school admissions program, which considered race in the context of a "highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment," was permissible. The AAUP filed amicus briefs in both cases. For more about this, see "Affirming Diversity at Michigan" in the September-October 2003 issue of Academe.
In Washington state, an appeals court confirmed in December that the University of Washington's law school did not discriminate against three white applicants who were denied admission in the mid-1990s. In this case, Smith v. Univ. of Washington, white students sued the university, claiming that they were denied entry to the university's law school and that less qualified minority applicants were admitted over them because of the university's affirmative action policies.
Lower courts also found that the admissions program was permissible, because achieving diversity is a compelling state interest sufficient to survive constitutional scrutiny, and because the admissions program met the requirement that it be narrowly tailored to meet that compelling interest. The court noted that the law school had made a good faith effort to treat race as one "plus factor" among many. There-fore, the court concluded, the law school's admissions policies during the years in question did not violate federal law. The policies are no longer in effect at the university, however, because they were revised following a 1998 state initiative banning race-conscious affirmative action in the public sector.
According to newspaper reports, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is investigating a complaint, filed by the father of a white man who was rejected by the university after applying for admission in fall 2003, alleging that the admissions policies of the University of Virginia's undergraduate college discriminate against white applicants. The Chronicle of Higher Education also reports that the civil rights office has received similar complaints about North Carolina State University's undergraduate program, the University of Maryland's School of Medicine in Baltimore, and the law schools at the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary. Behind some of the complaints is the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes affirmative action.
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