The silent disposal of minority scholarships

By Courtney Farr

Thursday, April 6, 2006

Legal terrorism has struck colleges across the nation during the past three years. Since 2003, the Center for Equal Opportunity, an anti-Affirmative Action group, has sent 200 letters to colleges warning them of legal action if they didn’t open race and gender based scholarships to everyone, according to a New York Times article last month. An executive of the group claimed that 150 had complied.

Other universities have opened minority based financial aid without the legal threats.

Colleges have not suddenly realized that such aid may be a form of discrimination; nor have they successfully achieved equality on their campuses. Fear drives this movement.

The argument against these scholarships stems from two Supreme Court decisions. In 2003, the Court upheld race-based admissions at the University of Michigan law school, describing the process as “holistic” because it examined cases on an individual basis.

Then the Court struck down Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy that awarded applicants points based on race. Some have interpreted that ruling as a wedge to use against race-and-gender-based financial aid at public universities.

Justifiably, colleges worry that such scholarships will be the next legal battleground for Affirmative Action.

For 18 to 24-year-olds, 41.6 percent of the white population had enrolled in college in 2003, according to the Department of Education. For blacks, enrollment was 32.3 percent. Only 23.5 percent of Hispanics attended some level of higher education. These statistics include two and four year institutions.

Although the percent of each racial population in college has grown virtually every year since 1972, the disparity between them has stayed relatively stable. Most years, the white population sends roughly 9 percent more of its kids to school than the black population. The difference between Hispanics and whites has averaged about 15 percent during the last three decades.

The classic anti-Affirmative Action argument says that race-based preference is a form of discrimination. Others argue that when a policy’s first criterion is race, the goal of true diversity may be missed.

Lisa Kress, director of Admissions and Scholarships, said the University of Kansas offers Endowment Meritorious scholarships that aim to enhance the diversity of the student body. She said a committee evaluates applicants based on academic criteria and looks for ethnic diversity along with other factors, such as the region a student is from, whether he or she is the first student in the family to attend college or if the student would bring unique experience to the University that would add to its diversity.

Nobody wants to be the first test subject for the next lawsuit. Lawsuits cost money, can scare endowment donors and generate potentially bad publicity.

The Times reported, “Firm data on how many institutions have modified their policies is elusive because colleges and institutions are not eager to trumpet the changes.”

Affirmative Action has been a divisive policy since JFK inserted the term into public awareness in 1961. That divisiveness is all the more reason that colleges need to make these decisions in the open and announce them to the public. Equal education for all and the disbursement of millions of dollars of financial aid are matters of the highest public concern.

Those colleges that made changes in the shadows robbed the public of a chance to weigh in on this matter. Quiet changes made at the threat of a legal sword offend not only the spirit of the Constitution, but also the purpose for which our colleges and universities exist. As college students, we learn not only in our classrooms, but from the actions of our institutions.

If race-based scholarships are fair and serve a purpose, then colleges need to defend them. Although lawyers guess Supreme Court outcomes, no one can truly predict what the inhabitants of that bench will do. The ethical path cannot always be the popular and lawsuit-free path.

If colleges believe they have better ways to increase diversity and remedy the inequities of higher education, then they should trumpet their changes to the land. Educate the masses on how you have improved the system. If, that is, you truly believe you have.

-Farr is a Scott City senior in journalism

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