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Report Urges Colleges to Retain Affirmative Action to Offset Racial Inequities

Monday, May 24, 1999

By PETER SCHMIDT

Colleges need to retain their affirmative-action policies to respond to persistent racial inequities in society, a panel of social scientists and legal experts concludes in a report released Friday.

The report, based on the 15-member panel's review of relevant social-science literature, represents the latest of several recent efforts by academics to use research to justify affirmative-action policies in higher education.

"There is clear evidence of continuing inequities in educational opportunity along racial categories," the report says. It describes race as "a major psychological factor that structures American consciousness and social behavior," and adds that efforts to redress the past and present effects of racial discrimination "are still needed to achieve equality of opportunity for all."

Although a news release accompanying the report said it tries to "bring objective, research-based evidence into the debate," leaders of the panel acknowledged last week that all of the participants supported affirmative action, and that they had set out to pull together research that made a case for it.

"Facts matter in the debate, and we are trying to present a bunch of findings that, in aggregate, support the use of race-conscious policies," said the panel's co-chairman, Kenji Hakuta, a professor of education at Stanford University. He and others on the panel asserted, however, that there was little or no empirical research to dispute their findings.

That assertion was challenged Friday by scholars who have found fault with the past work of some of the panel's members or published their own studies critical of racial preferences.

"If there is not much research done by critics of these policies, it is because no one has let us in to have the evidence," said Stephan Thernstrom, a professor of history at Harvard University and a co-author of America In Black and White (Simon & Schuster, 1997), a history and analysis of race relations.

"Research on this whole issue has been inhibited by the fact that colleges and universities won't provide the data," he said. "They have been extremely defensive about protecting the confidentiality of their records and, quite frankly, trying to keep the truth from being known."

The panel focused on research pertaining to the status of members of racial minority groups and their access to education, the limitations of standardized tests in measuring the merits of college applicants, and the educational benefits of diversity.

Among the panel's conclusions:

Research shows that standardized tests "are neither fair nor are they comprehensive measures of merit." Moreover, the comparatively poor scores of members of racial and ethnic minority groups are "attributable to environmental and societal factors" and do not reflect a student's level of achievement or capacity to achieve.
The need for affirmative action is demonstrated by research on the impact of race on social perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. That includes "studies conducted on unintentional racial biases, group identity processes, group competition, and group dominance motives.
Research on college students and graduates shows that "racially diverse environments, when properly nurtured, can lead to quantitative gains as well as qualitative gains in educational outcomes for all students."
Children who live and attend elementary and secondary schools in concentrated pockets of poverty are almost exclusively black, Hispanic, or American Indian. They generally attend inferior schools and are tracked into lower-level classes that limit their opportunity, and it is unrealistic to expect those disadvantages to be remedied by the intervention of Head Start, the TRIO programs, and campus-based support programs.

"Based on the evidence, Americans are mistaken if they believe that only colorblindness will achieve true equality," Mr. Hakuta said.

But Roger B. Clegg, the general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington-based research center that opposes racial preferences, said such assertions were "beside the point." The key issue, he said, was whether preferences were being used and amounted to illegal discrimination.

The report issued Friday was financed by the American Educational Research Association, in Washington, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, at Stanford. Neither has formally endorsed the panel's findings.

Copies of the report, "Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education," can be ordered by calling the Stanford center at (650) 725-8411. The full text of a draft of the report is available on line at http://www.stanford.edu/~hakuta/racial_dynamics/conference.html (It is a large file that must be viewed with an Adobe Acrobat reader.)