Think Tank Targets Texas Schools' Race-Based Admission Policies
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
December 8, 2003
(AgapePress) - A conservative group is criticizing a new proposal at the University of Texas to reintroduce race as a factor in admissions.Under the UT-Austin affirmative action plan, black students and Hispanic students would be given an edge over non-minority applicants in the admissions process. This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that some consideration of race and ethnicity is legally permissible.
But according to Roger Clegg, vice president and general counsel of the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, the high court did not say that kind of discrimination is required. He says even if what the school is proposing is legal, it should not be doing it.
"I think it's a very bad idea for any institution, and particularly any state institution, to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, and to treat some students better and other students worse because of their skin color or because of what country their ancestors came from," the attorney says.
Clegg is convinced that the planned revisions to the UT admissions policy are illegal. "The Supreme Court [in Grutter v. Bollinger] said that you could consider race and ethnicity, but only if it was necessary to achieve diversity -- and only if you had given consideration to other non-discriminatory ways of achieving diversity," he says. "And of course Texas, for years now, has been able to achieve diversity and has been bragging about how successful it's been in achieving diversity, without using racial and ethnic admissions preferences."
Clegg says the Center for Equal Opportunity will likely sue the University of Texas if it begins implementing the policy in the fall of 2005. The Center has also promised similar action against Rice University if it reinstates "racially discriminatory" admission policies.
In an October letter (PDF) to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), Clegg noted that another Texas college -- Texas Tech University -- had used "non-preferential means" to achieve ethnic diversity in its student body that exceeds the representation of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians) called for in the Grutter decision. Yet Texas Tech, despite the success of race-neutral alternatives, plans to resume race and ethnicity in its admissions policy. Clegg's group has urged the DOE to address the issue before Texas Tech implements the policy change.
