- Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education December 17, 2004
Copyright 2004 The Chronicle of Higher Education
By: PETER SCHMIDT
The
Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is investigating a
complaint that the University of Virginia discriminates against white
applicants for undergraduate admission, and has been asked to look into
similar allegations involving North Carolina State University's
undergraduate program, the University of Maryland at Baltimore's School
of Medicine, and the law schools at the University of Virginia and the
College of William and Mary.
The
investigation of Virginia's undergraduate policies is the office's
first such examination of race-conscious college admissions since the
U.S. Supreme Court's June 2003 rulings in two cases involving affirmative action
at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The Virginia complaint
actually was filed in May 2003, one month before the Supreme Court
rendered those decisions, but the civil-rights office did not notify
the university that it was undertaking an investigation until early
August 2003, after the court had ruled.
The
investigation was not made public until last week, when Kenneth L.
Marcus, who oversees the civil-rights office, mentioned it in an
interview with The Chronicle.
Mr. Marcus
said the Office for Civil Rights opened the investigation after
evaluating the complaint and taking it seriously enough to seek
information and a resolution from the university.
The
civil-rights office is also looking into the use of race-conscious
admissions by the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, but that
investigation dates back to 1999, and the civil-rights office appears
to have put it on a back burner. In the last two years, the office has
focused much less on reviewing race-conscious admissions policies than
on pressing colleges and public agencies to abandon policies that limit
certain scholarships and programs to members of particular races. Most
recently, it persuaded the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
to agree last month to open a statewide scholarship program to
nonminority students.
The investigation of
Virginia's undergraduate admissions policies stems from a complaint
filed by the father of a young man who was denied a seat in the 2003
entering freshman class. In its letter to UVa's president, John T.
Casteen III, the civil-rights office said that the father alleges that
the university has admissions policies that discriminate against white
males and refused to admit his son "because he was not a minority or
female student."
In a letter to the
civil-rights office, the rejected applicant's father, a New York
resident, said his son, a graduating high-school senior, "had been
passed over in the name of diversity." He said he decided to file the
complaint after the university failed to return both his calls and
those of U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, whom he had
recruited to help press his case.
The
civil-rights office has a policy of not disclosing the identity of
people filing such complaints. University officials declined last week
to comment on the matter.
The federal
civil-rights office also would not comment on the complaints involving
the law schools at Virginia and William and Mary, the Maryland medical
school, and North Carolina State. Roger B. Clegg, who filed those
complaints last fall as general counsel for the Center for Equal
Opportunity, a group opposed to racial preferences, said the
civil-rights agency was still evaluating the complaints and had not
decided whether to undertake formal investigations.
Because
the complaints remain under evaluation, the higher-education
institutions themselves have not been notified and given a chance to
respond. For that reason, officials at North Carolina State, the
University of Maryland at Baltimore, and the University of Virginia
declined last week to comment.
"There are
no students at the College of William and Mary who do not belong here,"
William T. Walker, a spokesman for the college, said last week.
Mr.
Clegg argued that the institutions' admissions policies consider race
and ethnicity "to such a heavy extent" that they violate the guidelines
set forth in the Michigan decisions. In those rulings, the Supreme
Court held that college admissions offices could give some
consideration to race and ethnicity, but must consider race-neutral
alternatives, refrain from using formulaic admissions systems that
automatically treat students differently based on their race, and give
no more weight to applicants' race than necessary to achieve the
institutions' educational goals.
Mr. Clegg
said that his organization has sought, in recent months, to buttress
its complaints by providing the civil-rights office with information
gathered from colleges by the National Association of Scholars and its
various state affiliates. The national association has been working in
tandem with Mr. Clegg's group and the Center for Individual Rights,
another leading group opposed to race-conscious admissions, to use
state freedom-of-information laws to force selective colleges to
disclose exactly how much weight they give to race. Last week the
national scholars' group released an analysis of admissions data from
the fall of 2003 that concluded that black applicants received "very
strong preference" over equally qualified white applicants in
undergraduate admissions at the University of Virginia and law-school
admissions at William and Mary, and "moderate preference" over white
applicants in undergraduate admissions at North Carolina State.
Although
the Center for Equal Opportunity has also filed several complaints with
the civil-rights office regarding minority-only programs at colleges, a
private citizen was the source of the discrimination complaint, filed
in the fall of 2001, that prompted Wisconsin officials to agree last
month to make changes in the state's Minority Precollege Scholarship
Program.
Under the terms of an agreement
negotiated with the civil-rights office, the state agreed to rename the
scholarship program "the DPI Pre-College Scholarship Program" and
declare white students eligible when the next round of scholarships is
awarded, in the coming year. The agreement requires the state agency to
alter its Web sites and promotional materials to reflect the changes,
and to ensure that all colleges and school districts involved with the
program follow suit. The department said that the scholarships would
henceforth be awarded to needy students, based on the same eligibility
standards used by school districts to determine whether students are
eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches.
The
agreement leaves the door open for the department to consider at least
taking account of applicants' race if the program fails to help enough
minority students under the new, income-based eligibility criteria. The
department must apprise the federal civil-rights agency of any such
changes, however.
Established in 1985, the
program had annually been providing 4,000 black, Hispanic, American
Indian, and Asian-American students in grades 6 through 12 with money
to attend various precollege programs at institutions throughout the
state.