Experts review data on affirmative action in higher education

BY JAMES ROBINSON

A group of some 200 scholars, lawyers and journalists met at Stanford last week to review social scientific evidence that may be brought to bear to defend affirmative action in higher education, during a period in which it has been under attack on multiple fronts.

While some participants said such evidence may be too little and too late in coming, others expressed hope that the meeting would serve to broaden the options at the disposal of those who support diversity in admissions decisions.

"When colleges and universities marshal solid social science evidence on the benefits of diversity . . . it is likely to bolster substantially the anecdotal evidence we've relied on in the past," said Bill Lann Lee, the acting assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights.

He called on educational institutions to promote the benefits of affirmative action policies. "If diversity admissions programs to our colleges and universities are to survive, we must all do our part to defend the programs now under attack," he said.

"We've not done a great job of doing the social science research that allows us to make the arguments that are out there," Lee said. "The fact that we are having this conference at this late date is a sign of that."

The conference, titled "Facing the Courts of Law and Public Opinion: Social Science Evidence on Diversity in Higher Education," was sponsored by the American Educational Research Association and the Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE). It was timed with the release of a prepublication draft of a book sponsored by the two groups titled Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education.

The book and conference project, launched in the summer of 1997, is aimed at examining social science literature addressing the intersection of race and higher education. Members of the project panel from Stanford include Kenji Hakuta, professor of education; Claude Steele and Ewart Thomas, professors of psychology; and Shirley Brice Heath, professor of English. The associate director of the project is Daria Witt of CSRE.

The project's two co-chairs are Hakuta and James Jones, professor of psychology at the University of Delaware.

While the conference highlighted the social science research that can be used to defend affirmative action as it faces new challenges, it also gave light to the different perspectives held by social scientists, lawyers and journalists.

The book, the editors say in a summary, is a "review of a broad array of the social science literature that addresses the intersection of race and higher education" and focuses on three major areas of debate: fairness, merit and the benefits of diversity.

In an effort to dispel the common notion that only colorblindness will achieve true equality, the book looks "at the extent to which racism in various forms is still prevalent among individuals and institutions in the United States, and at how race-conscious policies address racial disparities more effectively than race-neutral ones."

The book also argues that the definition of merit needs to be redefined and broadened to go "beyond using only students' test scores and grades as indicators of their capacity for academic success," by taking into account qualities such as leadership, perseverance and citizenship.

Finally, the book pulls together empirical evidence that the benefits of diversity on college campuses extends to the college or university as a whole and to its non-minority students.

At the conference, Lee outlined recent court cases that have chipped away at the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke, which held that colleges could use race and ethnicity in admissions so long as no quotas were set.

As a result of Proposition 209, the initiative passed by California voters in 1996, the University of California has barred the use of racial or gender preferences in admissions. And in Texas, such preferences have been banned after the 1996 federal court decision in the Hopwood case.

The University of Michigan's admissions point system, which gives some added weight to minority applicants, is now the subject of two lawsuits. But that university, unlike those defending other cases against affirmative action, is using as part of its defense statistical social science research on the benefits of a diverse student body.

Spreading the word about such research was a main goal of last week's conference.

Shana Levin, assistant professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, presented a review of literature that shows that racism still exists in the United States, even if it is manifested in more subtle ways than it once was and, she said, is based more on "fear and discomfort than on bigotry and hatred."

"Most whites still harbor unconscious biases," she said, describing "aversive racism" that has been shown to be present in so-called colorblind college admissions decisions. She described the findings of one study, for example, that manipulated credentials of applicants to produce poorly, moderately or highly qualified applicants. Reviewers of the applications showed the most pronounced bias when they were evaluating applications from the most highly qualified black students.

She also discussed a study by Steele that proposes a "theory of stereotype threat" showing that minority students' performance is affected by the fear they will confirm stereotypes of their group. His research shows that minority students scored lower on a test than whites when instructions indicated it was intended to diagnose intellectual ability, while they scored no differently from whites when the instructions said the test was not intended to demonstrate intellectual ability.

Ignoring race in admissions, Levin argued, is to put minorities at an unfair disadvantage. "Racial colorblindness ignores the status quo," she said.

Theresa Fay-Bustillos, vice president of legal programs at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), responded to Levin's presentation by suggesting that some of the research on subtle discrimination could be useful in the courtroom.

But she said that many judges find the notion of subtle discrimination to be "too amorphous. . . . So one way we need to open the judges' minds is to understand that it exists, that it can be measured and identified and on that basis that [discrimination] is at work," she said.

This will be no easy task, Fay-Bustillos said, since some judges "don't think discrimination exists anywhere in this country. To convince them that subtle discrimination is at work, you're really going uphill."

She challenged social science researchers to "step up to the bat and work for us" and be willing to endure depositions "and yes, be beat up but still walk out with [your] head high."

Cheryl Fields, executive editor of Black Issues in Higher Education, said she was concerned that social science evidence may have come too late in the process, since many believe that the end of affirmative action is "a done deal."

"Until you find real persuasive ways to present your case to laypeople, in ways that people can really understand and say to themselves 'oh yeah, that's there,'" you have a real difficult challenge on your hands," she said.

Later, in a session on the educational benefits of diversity, Eric Schnapper, a professor of law at the University of Washington, sounded a similar theme on the use of such research in defending affirmative action. "I'm not sure this issue has a lot of traction with the public and the courts," he said.

One of the livelier discussions was on the increasing use of and reliance on standardized tests. Ethan Bronner, a reporter with the New York Times, described the benefits that secondary school students in Texas have reaped from a new system of statewide achievement testing.

"Testing doesn't have to be the problem. It could be the solution," he said, describing a culture of encouragement in Texas schools coming from the fact that a school's test results will determine if it is categorized as "exemplary." He predicted that as a result of the new testing regimen Texas students will go on to perform better on the SAT.

But Linda Wightman, professor and chair of the Department of Educational Research Methodology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said that such testing systems were "seductive, but also very dangerous."

She said that simply drilling students on certain facts can result in a narrowing of the educational curriculum and a lowering of students' critical reasoning skills.

Wightman also spoke to the broadening reliance on standardized testing in so-called "color-blind" admissions. She said there was a difference between the predictive validity of such tests and their utility. Standardized tests, she said, are now seen as an "impartial indication" of merit but, in fact, were never designed to go that far.

Moreover, misuse of test scores results in a systematic adverse impact on minority applicants in higher education, she said.

Theodore Shaw, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said that while standardized tests can predict future academic achievement to a "limited degree," he noted that admissions officers -- even when evaluating only white applicants -- look at many factors besides such test results.

"If a black student gets in who has a lower score, all of the sudden it's a cause for the white student to sue," he said. "On the other hand, if the white student gets in with a lower score, it's not a cause of action" for the black student, he said.

Such thinking, he said, was the result of history going backward to the point that the assumption now is that whites are being discriminated against.

Finally, Shaw pointed to his "deep-seated belief" that many people perceive an inverse relationship between ability and merit and the darkness of one's skin.

Correcting such a bias "is a matter of simple justice" -- even, he added, if he can't find the empirical evidence for it. SR