Eye on diversity
President Trump’s Justice Department is taking aim at college admissions policies that discriminate against white applicants, the New York Times reported. It’s difficult to imagine a more misdirected focus by the department’s civil rights division.
The internal Justice Department document sought lawyers to work on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” The White House deplored what it called “uncorroborated inferences” from the leaked document cited by the Times.
Such a move would play to racial resentments based on the fear that certain minorities enjoy an unfair advantage in higher education — a perception belied by the numbers that show African Americans and Latinos remain underrepresented in the nation’s colleges.
It also undercuts efforts by the nation’s more selective schools — which have the challenge and luxury of choosing among a surplus of qualified candidates — to take into account more than a student’s standardized test scores and grade point average. It defies the notion that the academic atmosphere is enhanced by a student body from a diversity of backgrounds — including race and ethnicity.
This is not about quotas, which are an affront to the ideal of equal opportunity. It is about taking a “holistic” approach to evaluating applicants and reaching out to recruit promising students who might not have otherwise had certain top-notch schools on their radar. The U.S. Supreme Court last year upheld such an affirmative action program at the University of Texas.
In California, the UC and CSU systems have had to navigate recruitment around a 1996 initiative (Prop. 209) that banned preferences based on race, sex, skin color, ethnicity or national origin. Admissions of black, Latino and Native American students to UC Berkeley abruptly dropped 50 percent after Prop. 209 took effect. The UC system has since made progress — underrepresented minorities accounted for 38 percent of incoming students last fall — but still fails to reflect the state’s diversity.
The danger of an effort against “reverse discrimination” is that, like Prop. 209, it could have a chilling effect on schools’ commitment to address the very real and enduring opportunity gaps in American society.