UGA Playing with Racial Preference Fire, Legal Group Warns
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
December 9, 2004
(AgapePress) - The University of Georgia is being threatened with a lawsuit over its plan to increase the number of black freshmen on campus. Two years ago, a federal court found the university's preference program for undergraduate minority applicants unconstitutional and discriminatory. Nevertheless, UGA officials are now about to reinstate an admissions policy that gives special preferences based on race.The UGA Faculty Admission Committee has recommended that the school create an office of diversity recruitment and hire an image consultant to address the school's reputation among members of the black community, as well as to reinstate race and ethnicity as factors in admission consideration. However, UGA's president, Michael Adams, has been warned by the Atlanta-based Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) that reinstating the use of racial preferences in the admissions process could create "a grave constitutional risk" for the school.
The SLF was involved in the 2003 University of Michigan affirmative action cases (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger), as well as the successful 2002 federal lawsuit against UGA's race-based admissions policy. In that case, an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel unanimously struck down the Georgia university's admission program.
As SLF executive director Shannon Goessling notes, the courts have made it clear in these previous cases involving racial preferences in university admissions that such preferences are dangerous. She says even though the Supreme Court's Grutter decision allowed for narrowly prescribed uses of race in college admissions, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor made it clear in that case that universities have to walk a fine line when it comes to using racial preferences.
Goessling contends that these earlier court decisions have clearly communicated to university officials that using such race-based tools as quotas or quota-like programs is dangerous. "That's why Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker's office made it clear that UGA was playing with fire when the committee recommended reinstating racial and ethnic considerations," she says.
Todd Young of the SLF agrees that UGA's newly proposed admissions policy is dangerous, and he believes it may well prove to be illegal. "We will be reviewing the University of Georgia's new program, and we'll make that determination. It's going to be a very, very close call," Young says, "and the context in which race can be used is extremely limited. Anything outside that box created by the Constitution and the civil rights laws will be looked at very, very carefully, and we may wind up in court."
The SLF spokesman feels the method the university is planning to implement in order to recruit more black students could easily draw a discrimination lawsuit against the school. He feels the system UGA is implementing may be of the sort designed by what he calls "some of the more sort of pointy-headed liberal types."
Young says he makes this observation "with all due respect to academics out there," but he feels that "this is really the last bastion, the last environment in which this type of special preference is accepted." In fact, he notes that since a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1989, policy has been in place requiring that government programs for contracting, hiring and employment be "race neutral."
According to Goessling, the SLF will be reviewing any new admissions program adopted by UGA that grants special preference or consideration for non-merit-based admissions. If the organization finds the university's new policies to be in violation of the constitution, she says the SLF may take legal action against the school.
