(Published May 26, 1999)

Some of the heaviest hitters in the fight to preserve racial preferences in college admissions got together at Stanford last week to find ways to persuade skeptical courts and voters of the value of ethnic diversity on campus, and thus allow universities to continue to consider race in choosing students.

Among them were Bill Lan Lee, President Clinton's embattled acting assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights; Ted Shaw, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; William L. Taylor, vice-chair of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights; plus some 150 others -- activists, lawyers, academics.

All of them are keenly aware that what they call affirmative action in college admissions is in trouble in the public universities, threatened by adoption of measures such as Proposition 209 in California and Proposition 200 in Washington state; with adverse federal court decisions in Texas and Boston; and with impending court battles in Michigan and Washington state. Some fear that if the drift doesn't change, even private institutions will no longer be able to give special consideration to blacks and Latinos in their admissions decisions.

Their new weapon? Social science research, including studies and surveys indicating that diversity is educationally important; that those admitted through affirmative action do well in college; that students in racially mixed institutions learn a lot from each other; that they are more likely to live in racially mixed communities after they graduate, and are thus the best hope the country has for developing a genuinely integrated society.

With a few notable exceptions, the studies, like a lot of other educational research reports, are squishy. Some confirm what's already self-evident -- that students (for example) learn more from fellow students who are not just like themselves in background and experience. Or they rely on surveys in which students and graduates provide predictable answers about how they benefited from their (racially mixed) campus experience. And they take little notice of the campuses where race preferences have generated friction, resentment and repressive speech codes.

Still, a major issue was raised that, for the most part, has been ignored in the public debate: What is merit in choosing applicants? Plainly it's not just grades and scores on standardized tests, where blacks generally score lower than whites. But how should it be judged? Should minority applicants from lousy schools get special consideration? And should students just be chosen because they "deserve" admission, or should they be chosen for their potential value to the college and society?

More broadly, should the admissions process sharply de-emphasize tests in favor of more diffuse criteria and thus open another avenue to the admission of worthy minority students on the basis of something other than overt consideration of race? How can the courts and public be persuaded about that?

At this moment, a group of civil-rights organizations is suing UC Berkeley for giving extra weight in its admissions process to grades in Advanced Placement courses -- courses that are much scarcer in schools attended by poor and minority students.

At the same time, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education is preparing guidelines warning colleges and universities that "the use of any ... test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin or sex is discriminatory (and a violation of federal law) unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practicable alternative form of assessment." In other words, you better be able to justify your use of such tests or you're in trouble with the feds.

That's hardly a way to win the hearts and minds of the public, especially at a time when much of the country has gone berserk with high stakes educational testing. There are even suggestions that the social activists at OCR are issuing their decree primarily to reinforce suits such as the one against Berkeley.

Still, the OCR guidelines make clear what may have been inevitable. As racially based formulas are jeopardized or abolished altogether, either by federal judges or by voter initiatives, educators and civil-rights activists will seek other criteria to maintain ethnic diversity on campus.

It's not a trivial issue for universities or the nation's future. As was pointed out by John Payton, the lead lawyer in defending the University of Michigan in a pair of reverse discrimination suits, in the Detroit area nearly all students attend de facto segregated schools. The best chance they have to learn about people from different backgrounds is in college.

The key question is what will happen to the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision, which allows colleges to use race as one "plus factor" in college admissions. Bakke has already been declared invalid by a three-judge appellate panel in Texas. The worry at Stanford was that if the Supreme Court were to follow that ruling, there could be widespread resegregation of American higher education.

That wouldn't affect the hundreds of nonselective U.S. colleges and universities that admit almost all comers with little need of affirmative action. But it would clobber the selective, prestige institutions that have defined merit in those broad social terms and that, as William E. Bowen and Derek Bok, the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, pointed out last year, have in recent decades educated a large proportion of the black leadership class in this country. At least half of those blacks would not have been admitted without ethnic preferences.

If Bakke were to go, the threat would thus be not just to the admission of minorities, but also to the core beliefs and practices of the nation's most selective colleges. And when it comes to enlarging the pool of highly qualified minority applicants for those institutions without racial preferences, social science still has far too little to offer.

PETER SCHRAG's column appears in The Bee on Wednesday. He can be reached by fax at 321-1996; or by letter at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA, 95852-0779.

Copyright © 1999 by The Sacramento Bee