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Wades into fight over Michigan's program

Thursday, January 16, 2003

By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau

WASHINGTON -- In a decision with major political ramifications, President Bush yesterday called the University of Michigan's affirmative action efforts unconstitutional and said the administration would petition the Supreme Court to strike them down.

	President Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House yesterday. He said he plans to challenge a University of Michigan program that gives admission preference to minority students. (Rick Bowmer, Associated Press)

Bush said that while he supports diversity, he strongly opposes the university's policy of awarding points to minority applicants in an effort to achieve targets for the number of minority students. Today is the deadline to file briefs in the case.

Bush declined to answer questions about his decision. But he said it is not fair that at the undergraduate level, African American students as well as some Hispanic and Native American students applying to the University of Michigan "receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African American, Hispanic or Native American.

"To put this in perspective, a perfect SAT score is worth only 12 points in the Michigan system. Students who accumulate 100 points are generally admitted, so those 20 points awarded solely based on race are often the decisive factor," he said.

Bush added that he thinks the university's motivation for its admissions policy may have been good, but that it was "fundamentally flawed."

"At their core," he said, "the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race."

The president's decision comes at a time when the Republican Party is making highly visible efforts to increase African-American and Hispanic support. In 2000, Bush won fewer than one in 10 votes cast by African Americans and only one in three Hispanic votes.

Moreover, Bush's announcement came on what would have been the 74th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader. The nation commemorates King's birthday Monday as a national holiday.

The administration and Bush's Republican Party have been under a spotlight regarding racial issues because Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who was to have become the new Senate majority leader, publicly remarked recently that he thought the country would have been better off if retired Sen. Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 presidential election, when he championed segregationist policies. The ensuing furor forced Lott to resign as majority leader.

Bush promptly denounced Lott's comment but did not urge him to step down from the leadership post or the Senate. Asked at a news conference last year to answer criticism that he was not doing enough for black Americans, the president responded that he had appointed blacks to two top administration jobs: Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Bush's announcement yesterday ignited immediate criticism. The Congressional Black Caucus said it would file a brief in support of the University of Michigan's current policies. The caucus leader, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said those who oppose such policies "want to re-establish a glass floor, and shatter that glass floor from beneath our feet. ... Actions speak louder than words, Mr. President. That is our message to you today."

African-Americans attend college at half the proportion of white Americans, Cummings said, "and without affirmative action, the percentage of African-American students on many campuses would drop below 2 percent. Less than 10 percent of Hispanic-Americans go on to higher education, and only 6 percent of Hispanic-Americans ages 25 through 29 have bachelor's degrees."

The University of Michigan's enrollment is 15 percent minority. Without its efforts to increase minority enrollment, its minority makeup would be only 4 percent, campus officials assert.

"The University of Michigan is trying to be inclusive to citizens who have been excluded in the past and citizens who continue to be under-represented today," Cummings said. "The issue addressed by our highest court is whether the state may do what is right. And the opponents are arguing that the University of Michigan may not."

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said that for 40 years "we have worked together to make sure that we were going to have a fair process of inclusion for all Americans -- for blacks and browns and women, for the disabled -- for all Americans to be included in diversity. There is a compelling interest in this.

"The administration has walked away from that commitment, from that promise, from that guarantee," Kennedy said. "And if we were to follow the administration's position, we'd be a lesser society, a lesser country in the future."

In a briefing with reporters yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., strongly criticized the administration's announcement: "They have to decide whether they're for civil rights and diversity or not."

In one indication that Bush's decision could be an issue in next year's presidential election, Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., the former House minority leader who is a University of Michigan Law School graduate and intends to be a 2004 presidential candidate, announced that he also would file a brief today to the Supreme Court supporting the university policies because affirmative action is the best way to give certain minorities equal access to education.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader and onetime presidential candidate himself, said Bush was denouncing the very policies that had made it possible for people such as Powell to succeed.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president, in deciding his stance, did not consider its political implications "because it's a very important, substantive matter dealing with race. And the president approaches his job as one where the most important, substantive matters rise to the top."

Bush argues that policies in place in certain states -- California, Florida and Texas, for instance -- ensure diversity in their colleges and universities by guaranteeing admissions of top students from schools statewide, including low-income neighborhoods, regardless of racial or ethnic background. When he was governor of Texas, Bush decreed that all students in the top 10 percent of every high school were eligible for admission to the state's public universities.

Opponents counter that such policies continue to promote de facto segregation based on housing patterns and the fact that top students in one school may be academically far inferior to the top 10 percent in another.

The Supreme Court ruled on the issue of affirmative action in 1978, in the University of California v. Bakke case, when a white man applying to medical school in California charged that his rejection was the result of reverse discrimination. The court outlawed racial quotas but did not issue an outright ban on weighing race as a factor in admissions, which has confused universities ever since.

The Michigan cases have been brought by students who say race should have no place at all in university admissions. The university defends its policies as strictly avoiding racial quotas but says that by giving minority applicants an edge, the university has been able to increase minority enrollment.

Bush has been heavily lobbied by conservative groups to urge the Supreme Court to knock down the University of Michigan policies on grounds that racial preferences of any kind are unconstitutional.

Yesterday, the president acknowledged the nation's dilemma: "Racial prejudice is a reality in America. It hurts many of our citizens. As a nation, as a government, as individuals, we must be vigilant in responding to prejudice wherever we find it.

"Yet as we work to address the wrong of racial prejudice, we must not use means that create another wrong and thus perpetuate our divisions," Bush said.

The Supreme Court is likely to rule by July.

Ann McFeatters can be reached at amcfeatters @nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7071.