Education, Industry Leaders See Legal Threats to Diversity in Higher Ed S&T Programs

The Panel on Adaptive Programs. From left: Isiah Warner, Iris PrettyPaint, Gordon Moore, and Norman Abrams

[All photographs by Harvey Leifert]

Recent U.S. court decisions limiting efforts to recruit underrepresented minority students pose a profound challenge for colleges, universities and science-related industries, educators and business leaders said at a recent forum co-sponsored by AAAS. Still, they said, many effective programs are in place, and others could be put in place, that meet the legal standard of strict scrutiny and result in more diversified student bodies.

Some 35 invited experts, comprising the academic, nonprofit, and business communities, gathered to discuss these issues on 15 January in Washington, D.C., at a roundtable organized by AAAS and NACME, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. The event was organized, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in June 2007, holding that public school districts may not use race as a factor in assigning pupils to particular schools.

"We all wish that special initiatives were unnecessary to produce a diverse STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] workforce, and we certainly want a color-blind society," Shirley Malcom, head of Education and Human Resources at AAAS, told the audience. "But we are not there yet. We can pretend or assume that we are and watch the steady erosion of enrollments of underrepresented students in our major university STEM programs. Or we can acknowledge the reality of unequal education and access, and develop interventions that are thoughtful and defensible. The roundtable helped us think our way through this minefield."

NACME Chief Executive Officer and President John Brooks Slaughter called for "a sense of urgency" in addressing the problems. "I am a strong believer that we have allowed our pursuit of diversity to cloud what we should really be focusing on, and that is equality of opportunity," he said. "There is a lack of will and commitment on many parts, and there is a considerable amount of misunderstanding" about affirmative action issues in the academic leadership of many institutions.

The roundtable followed by a little more than three years a AAAS/NACME conference, organized following the Supreme Court's decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003). The court held in Grutter that the University of Michigan Law School could use race as a factor in seeking a diverse student body, because the school deemed diversity essential to its educational objectives. In Gratz, the court struck down the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program, which automatically gave preference points to underrepresented minority applicants, regardless of academic achievement. That AAAS/NACME conference resulted in a AAAS publication, Standing Our Ground, a guide for educators seeking diverse student bodies, while complying with the requirements of the Grutter and Gratz decisions.

The Supreme Court cases that inspired January's roundtable are Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle (Washington) School District No. 1 et al. and Meredith v. Jefferson County (Kentucky) Board of Education, both decided in June 2007. Applying the doctrine of "strict scrutiny," the court found that programs in these districts did not meet the Grutter test, as they were focused solely on achieving a certain black/white racial balance in these districts' schools.

Michael A. Olivas

Leading off the day-long discussions at the roundtable, Michael A. Olivas, director of the University of Houston's Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance, said that "the law in this area is used as a shield by the left and as a sword by the right." Organizations on the right seek to eliminate any program that aids minority students, in some cases even when those programs aid majority white students even more, he said, citing opposition to the Texas 10% Plan as an example. The plan allows any Texas high school student who graduates in the top 10% of his or her class to attend any public college in Texas.

Liberal groups are not very effective in promoting their views, Olivas added, as compared with what he called "ruthless" restrictionists, and he predicted that the number of groups in the latter category will grow. "You would think that the good guys lost Grutter, instead of having won the case," he said.

The legal situation is becoming more difficult for advocates of affirmative action programs, according to Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He cited recent court decisions involving public school programs in Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky., as well as the replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor by Samuel A. Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court. This, he said was "very, very bad news for supporters of affirmative action," as the court's new swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, has consistently voted against such programs.

Kahlenberg proposed that admissions programs be focused on economic, rather than ethnic, diversity. A study of the most selective colleges found that 74% of the student body came from the top economic quartile, and only 3% from the poorest quartile. In a simulated test case, he reported, a program of economic affirmative action resulted not only in greater economic diversity, but brought in larger numbers of minority students without using any racial criteria in the selection process. The public supports economic affirmative action, he said, which it views differently from race-based programs.

Theodore M. Shaw

Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told the roundtable that economic programs are indeed worth pursuing on their own merits. They might not, however, lead to significantly increased enrollments by blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, he said, "because the majority of poor people in this country are still white. We could easily fill these programs with poor whites and miss people of color." These programs may be worthwhile, but they are not a substitute for race-conscious programs, he said.

Responding to a question, Shaw said that in the 2003 Michigan cases, the U.S. Supreme Court may have been moved more by the briefs provided by universities, corporations, and former military leaders than by the arguments of black and brown students. Therefore, programs constructed so as to improve institutional efficacy by increasing diversity might fare better than those aimed directly at access for minority students.

Community colleges could play a much stronger role in feeding minority students into four-year universities and, eventually, graduate programs, in the view of George R. Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. He cited recent reports that over half of all undergraduates, and the majority of minority undergraduates in the United States, now attend community colleges, and their numbers are steadily increasing. Community college students who transfer to universities tend to succeed there, but "the problem is we don't have enough of them transferring, especially students of color." He urged that community colleges and universities forge stronger agreements to encourage and facilitate transfers.

Industry representatives at the roundtable emphasized the critical importance of increasing the number of engineering students entering the workforce, saying that no segment of society can be excluded. Ronald D. Sugar, chairman and chief executive officer of Northrop Grumman, spoke from the national security perspective, suggesting that the current war on terrorism may be more challenging than World War II or the Cold War, in which the United States achieved victory in part through superior industrial might and intellectual capital.

Now, our efforts have shifted from bombs and bullets to advanced intelligence-gathering, information technology, and space-based systems, Sugar said. "It is a constant battle to inspire youth in our country to undertake these kinds of skills," he said, adding that young people in other countries, China in particular, are doing so in great numbers. Northrop Grumman believes that "we should leave no potential source of talent behind," particularly since the company's defense work requires workers to be American citizens, he said.

Parents are not sufficiently involved, Sugar said in answer to a question, and peer pressure on K-12 youths is often negative with regard to STEM studies. "The expectation that it's OK to do well when you are in school is not universally available around the country," he said.

At IBM, "diversity is far more than a moral imperative; it simply means good business," said Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice president of Innovation and Technology. "A diversity of culture, as well as thought, is what has made our company special." IBM is greatly concerned that the talent pool available to the company—to all companies, in fact—is simply too small. "That is why we need a sharper focus on women and underrepresented minorities in the STEM disciplines," he said.

To help stimulate young Americans to enter the STEM disciplines, IBM has undertaken several programs, notably one called Transition to Teaching that enables IBM staff members nearing retirement to certify as math and science teachers at the K-12 level. The company also is making a special effort to attract members of the Hispanic community to STEM, because Hispanics, as Donofrio said, "do not participate in STEM disciplines anywhere near the percentage of either white or African-American students. There are a number of reasons for that," he said, "and we want to get to those root causes and do what we can to reverse the tide."

Much of the debate over preferential programs for minorities in higher education revolves around the relative scores of whites and minority groups on standardized tests, such as the SAT. Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, said these tests are consistently skewed toward whites.

Potential exam questions are tested in advance, he said, to see which groups do best on each one. Questions in which blacks significantly outscore whites—"black preference questions"—are eliminated from the final version of the test, because of the selection methodology used, Rosner said. He provided the example of the October 1998 and October 2000 SATs, which he had analyzed. On those exams, out of 276 questions, not one was black preference, he said; all 276 were white preference. The selection methodology also affects gender in a similar way, he said. On the math portion of the same tests, 116 questions were male preference, and only one was female preference. (Three other questions were "no preference," meaning males and females scored equally well.)

Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, citing a study on standardized admission tests, said that "on average, SAT scores and ACT scores have a mild positive correlation with success in college, if you're white or Asian. If you are a black or a Hispanic or a Native American Indian, they are much more weakly correlated."

Columnist DeWayne Wickham of USA Today said that as a 35-year observer of the civil rights movement, he urges proponents of affirmative action programs to go on the offensive. "Whoever gets to frame the question always—almost always—wins the debate," he said. Opponents have in fact shaped the nature of the discourse, creating such phrases as "reverse discrimination." A generation ago, he said, "the debate was about 'busing' in Boston, even though they always had busing in Boston."

Wickham predicted that the Supreme Court will continue to tighten race-conscious admission criteria, and governors and state legislatures may go even further than the Court, as they have in Florida. He offered the view that none of the programs discussed at the roundtable might actually work in the long run and that we might slip into "an American apartheid."

In a discussion of lessons learned and university programs adapted to court and legislative restrictions on race-conscious admission programs, Norman Abrams drew upon his experience as acting chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006-2007. In California, "you cannot take race or ethnicity into account at all," he noted, as a result of the statewide Proposition 209 initiative approved by voters in 1996. This may well be the direction in which other states are moving, as well as the Supreme Court, he added.

UCLA was shocked to discover that the 2006 undergraduate entering class included only 100 African-Americans out of some 4,800 total, Abrams reported, the smallest number in memory. UCLA had a long tradition of attracting and enrolling minority students. The school's chancellor had no power to adjust the admissions process. Nevertheless, even within the constraints of Proposition 209, the number of African-Americans entering UCLA doubled one year later.

The steps Abrams took included the creation of an advisory task force of faculty, administrators, and students to look into the situation and make recommendations. A parallel committee organized by African-American community leaders met regularly with university administrators. Abrams was able to persuade a faculty committee responsible for admissions policy to implement a "holistic" process for reading applications and applying the University's admissions criteria of academic achievement, life challenges faced by students, and personal achievements. In addition, a private fund-raising effort was organized, not subject to restraints of Proposition 209, and it raised $1.7 million in scholarship funds that were distributed to qualified African-American students. Finally, students and alumni undertook a strong recruiting effort among African-American high school seniors.

With regard to Native Americans, whose numbers among STEM students at major universities is extremely low, Iris PrettyPaint, co-director of Research Opportunities in Science for Native Americans (ROSNA), based at the University of Montana, noted that the study of science is a hard sell among Indian tribes. She said that it is essential to speak with young people in an effective way, one that recognizes and respects their history and culture.

Still, every Montana Indian reservation has a tribal college. The oldest of the 38 tribal colleges in the U.S. and Canada is less than 40 years old, PrettyPaint said. Ninety percent of the students are the first generation in their families to attend any college, and 85% of them live below the poverty line, she said. Tribal leaders want to know whether STEM studies will result in assimilation of Indian students or bring benefits to their communities.

PrettyPaint told the roundtable that Native Americans are "not a racial group of people; we're a political group of people." As such, she said, the limitations of Proposition 209 in California should not apply, and admissions programs targeted at Native Americans should be legal there. It is not a problem in Montana, she said, where 350 Native Americans attend the University of Montana and 10 Native Americans are members of the state legislature.

Daryl Chubin, director of the AAAS Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity and co-organizer of the roundtable, said: "Resolute leadership, savvy general counsels, and legally-defensible programs are the recipe for excellence in a diverse STEM workforce. The roundtable blended these ingredients to demonstrate strategies of educational opportunity. Now they must be shared and adapted if future students, faculty, and knowledge workers—the people of STEM—are to look like America."

Harvey Leifert

4 February 2008