 . . . Summer 1998
University President Lee Bollinger and Provost Nancy Cantor published an op-ed essay, "The Educational Importance of Race," in the April 28 issue of the Washington Post.
Bollinger and Cantor stated that the nation's long history of enforced separation of Americans categorized as belonging to white and black races had resulted in members of both groups' tending to learn about each other "by relying on unfounded images and stereotypes."
"Demeaning and hurtful images proliferated in the media, in textbooks, in movies and on radio and television," they said. "There were no countervailing institutions to perform the function of education and understanding. By design, we did not know each other."
The 1954 Supreme Court ruling (Brown v. Board of Education) outlawing school segregation opened the society to changes that saw "African Americans at first and then other underrepresented minority students" increase their presence in higher education.
Nearly 14 percent of U-M students are African American, Hispanic and Native American today, Bollinger and Cantor noted, but the University is "the target of a lawsuit that seeks to prohibit us from ensuring a racially diverse student body by using race as one factor in admissions."
"The suit by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR)" they said, "is at the center of a great public debate over one of the most important issues of our time: how our governing constitutional principles permit us to use race" to overcome the effects of segregation.
"Virtually all institutions with selective admissions consider race when they choose among applicants who experience shows can thrive in and contribute to a more vital educational environment," the essay said.
Arguing that "a first-class education is one that creates the opportunity for students, expecting differences, to learn instead of similarities" and that "likewise, encountering differences rather than one's mirror image, is an essential part of a good education," the president and provost noted that "our public universities have always cast a wide net in admitting students."
In its publicity campaign, they said, the CIR has offered up "grids that have been used in our undergraduate admissions process. These grids assign different weights to a variety of factors-academic grade-point average, test scores, alumni relationship, race, residency and so on-that help us make an admissions decision. Different outcomes will follow, depending on any variety of factors. CIR's real argument is not with our use of these grids. There are no grids in the law school process, yet CIR challenges our use of race there, too. Rather, to CIR the fact that race is one of these factors at all is what makes the process unacceptable."
Bollinger and Cantor said that "implicit in its [CIR's] claim is a presumption that we admit some students who are not qualified. Let us be clear: All students admitted to the University of Michigan meet threshold requirements establishing that they are fully qualified to do the work of a demanding undergraduate program."
"CIR seeks to eliminate all consideration of race in college admissions," the essay said. "If it is successful, as it was in an earlier lawsuit against the University of Texas, we will in all probability soon return to a largely segregated system-de facto rather than de jure, to be sure, but segregated nonetheless."
Bollinger and Cantor declared in conclusion that "the country cannot afford to deprive institutions of higher education of the ability to educate generations of young Americans--minority and nonminority--in an environment that enables all to flourish, and understand each other, in a truly integrated society."
The entire op ed is on the Web at: http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Admission/washpost.html
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