RE-AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

N.U.'s unwavering but wary support of race-based admissions

 

BY TIM SANDLER

f ever there was a witness to the ebb and flow of affirmative action at Northeastern, it's Ella Robertson. She arrived on Huntington Avenue on the wings of a Martin Luther King Jr. minority scholarship in the mid-1970s-a decade of racial tumult in Boston, but also a time when programs designed exclusively for African Americans were beginning to add a darker shade to the campus's complexion.

Minority scholarships, special consideration for minority student applicants, minority mentor programs-colleges and universities nationwide were not only opening their doors to black students, they were ushering them in. Though rooted in the apprehension born of generations of discrimination, there was an unprecedented feeling among minorities of genuine possibility, Robertson recalls. Now there was official recognition that measures needed to be taken to adjust the scales of racial equality and atone for past injuries.

Robertson came to Northeastern on that wave of optimism and never left. Having received two N.U. degrees, she is now associate dean of Special Support Services (formerly known as the Office of Minority Student Affairs) and is president of the Northeastern Black Alumni Association.

But times have changed. In recent years, resentment of affirmative action, by some nonminorities and minorities alike, has been brewing. Now, that animosity is boiling over and affirmative action is under assault. Across the country, universities are being sued for admissions practices that opponents contend are tantamount to reverse discrimination. Minority-exclusive scholarship and grant programs are coming under legal scrutiny. It's a trend that reflects a larger backlash against race-based preference programs, at universities and other institutions, be they for hiring or awarding contracts.

Northeastern students share in the backlash, according to an administration poll of undergraduates and graduate students last fall. About forty percent said N.U. should not provide financial incentives to recruit underrepresented ethnic and minority students, about thirty-four percent were in favor of such incentives, and the remaining twenty-six percent were undecided. But support for affirmative action has long been solid among senior administrators-most notably Northeastern's current and past presidents. Minority scholarships and lower admissions standards for some minority students remain the university policy.

Even so, Robertson says the onetime burgeoning African American student population on campus seems to be waning. "There are just fewer and fewer black faces. There are places where you don't see anyone who resembles you," she says.

There's no way to verify her impressions of diminished minority enrollment over the last couple of decades; Northeastern just started compiling data in 1989. Statistics since then actually show a slow rise in the number of minority students on campus. From 1989 to 1995 (the latest year for which data are available), African American student enrollment grew by thirty-one percent, from 1,174 to 1,538. During the same period, the school's white population rose by thirteen percent, from 16,787 to 19,024. Despite the apparent progress, however, the fact remains that white students outnumber blacks by a twelve-to-one ratio.

Black students are the majority at the John D. O'Bryant African American Institute (named after Northeastern's first African American vice president), located in a small, nondescript building on the western edge of campus. Besides a comfort zone, the twenty-nine-year-old institute provides tutorial services, academic advising, workshops, and cultural activities for black students. Operating on a $400,000 annual budget, the institute also administers an undergraduate advisory service and affirmative action program called Ujima Scholars.

Since 1972, Ujima-a Swahili word meaning "collective work and responsibility"-has offered what Associate Dean Lula Petty, director of the O'Bryant institute, calls "access for students who would otherwise not have come to the university." The Ujima program admits up to eighty-five African American students who go through the intensive one-year program to help them adapt to a university's cultural and academic demands. The academic standard for admitting them is lower than that for most other undergraduates. Ujima's criterion is a "potential for success" in applicants, Petty says. Through personal interviews with each candidate, she says, "We try to determine attitudes about persistence and motivation-a spirit. And, whenever possible, a work ethic." She calls the program's success measurable: some seventy-five percent of Ujima scholars successfully complete their freshman year. (Petty's office, which tracks students only for the year they're in the program, could not provide graduation statistics.)

Ujima is the only instance at N.U. of standards that are overtly lowered for minority students. Elsewhere on the campus, affirmative action in admissions is implemented through flexible admissions policies. For instance, the law school, like other graduate programs on campus, takes into account factors beyond test scores and grade point average. "We try to look at the whole package for every applicant," says David Hall, who in 1993 became the first African American dean of the law school. "And certainly individuals who have been excluded from the profession [for reasons of race], we look at even closer. We're trying to recruit people who have values and who are committed to serving the public. We don't believe it's effective to just use scores and not look at anything else. We look to other factors, such as life experience, to determine their ability to succeed as a lawyer."

In addition to fluid admissions standards, Northeastern uses scholarships to pull in minority students. The university admissions office administers two major affirmative action scholarship programs for undergraduates. The Dr. Ralph J. Bunche scholarship (named for a former undersecretary of the United Nations and a Nobel laureate) is N.U.'s top recruitment tool for African American undergrads. It pays full tuition, room, and board-about $23,000 per year-to as many as ten students annually. To qualify, candidates must have SAT scores of at least 1,150 and have placed in the top ten percent of their high school class. To continue receiving the scholarship, they must maintain a B average. The Reggie Lewis Scholarship Program, founded five years ago, is available to all minorities and offers undergrads full tuition and $2,000 toward room and board, which comes to about $17,000 per year. To qualify, students must have SAT scores of at least 1,050 and have placed in the top twenty percent of their high school class. They too must maintain a B average to continue receiving the scholarship. At the graduate student level, the top scholarship is the Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship, which the O'Bryant institute awards annually to ten students, paying their tuition for the length of their studies.

Some of Northeastern's individual schools and colleges operate their own scholarship programs. The law school awards sixteen full minority scholarships annually. The College of Engineering's NUPRIME program (Northeastern University Progress in Minority Engineering) distributes approximately $150,000 annually to minority undergrads in engineering. The money is raised from donors and other outside sources and is given to 175 students on a need basis, says Assistant Dean of Engineering David Blackman, the NUPRIME director.

These scholarships, in particular, are central to fulfilling Northeastern's goal of campus diversity, school administrators say. "The number of those [highly qualified minority] students applying and going to colleges is decreasing," explains Jean Eddy, vice provost for enrollment management. "So institutions that are trying to maintain diversity on their campuses are very active in trying to recruit all persons of color-particularly African American men. And scholarships are usually the way institutions do that. Scholarships are a very significant recruiting tool." Eddy prefers not to use the "A words" and is quick to mention a $10 million Grant Merit Aid program that's open to all students who meet certain financial and academic requirements. But that alone, she acknowledges, isn't enough to compete with other schools also seeking to recruit minority students.

For that reason, recent court rulings are particularly ominous to supporters of affirmative action. These decisions cast uncertainty on the future of both Northeastern's preferential scholarships, such as the MLK, Bunche, and Lewis programs, and race-based admissions, such as the Ujima program.

The California Civil Rights Initiative, passed in November 1996 as Proposition 209 and upheld by a federal court of appeals last month, has garnered the most headlines. The measure bars public colleges and other state agencies in California from granting preferences based on race or gender. But two other court rulings are potentially more far-reaching and damaging to affirmative action. In March 1996, a federal appeals court struck down an affirmative action program of the University of Texas Law School, which had set lower minimum admission standards for African American and Mexican American applicants than for other groups. The court ordered the school to adopt a color-blind admissions process. What was earthshaking about Hopwood v. State of Texas was not the verdict itself-the law school's separate tracks for white and minority applicants were regarded by many legal experts as unconstitutional-but how the appeals court reached out to repudiate the legal bastion of affirmative action, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1978 decision on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

The Bakke ruling banned the use of racial or ethnic quotas in college admissions, but at the same time allowed the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, though not the only one. Justice Lewis Powell Jr., in a pivotal opinion that came to be regarded as the law on affirmative action, also said colleges have a First Amendment right to use racial-preference policies to enroll students from diverse cultures and backgrounds. The decision has been used ever since as the legal justification and guiding principle for campus-based affirmative action programs.

In Hopwood, however, the appeals court ruled that Texas's law school could no longer use "race as a factor" when considering applicants. In July 1996, the Supreme Court stunned the higher education world when it declined to hear an appeal of the Hopwood case. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of only two justices to say why she voted to not hear the case, wrote that, although race as a factor in admissions "is an issue of great national importance," in essence the petitioners failed to challenge the lower court's ruling properly. The appeals court ruling is now the law in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and a debate is still raging throughout the region on its ramifications. The decision is viewed as a landmark by defenders and opponents of affirmative action alike. It has spawned similar lawsuits at Texas universities and the Universities of Georgia, North Carolina, and Washington.

Perhaps even more significant for Northeastern's affirmative action programs, though, is the outcome of Podberesky v. University of Maryland at College Park. In 1994, a federal appeals court ordered that the University of Maryland allow a Hispanic student to be given equal consideration for a blacks-only scholarship. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the ruling in June 1995. Maryland subsequently abolished the scholarship program and issued a check equal to a four-year education to the student who filed the suit. After the ruling, the plaintiff's lawyer declared, "Any school that continues to offer race-based aid after this decision should look seriously at their pocketbooks."

The Podberesky ruling drew a defiant response from former N.U. president John Curry. "Even if we were ordered by a federal appeals court to move in that direction, I'd find a way to provide the scholarships," he said at the time. His successor, President Richard Freeland, is no less emphatic in his support of affirmative action policies. "The university is strongly committed to doing everything that it possibly can to achieve diversity in the student body and the workplace . . . That means an aggressive policy of affirmative action," he says. An affirmative action scholarship program "is indispensable. Financial aid is indispensable to achieve every aspect of our mission and goals, including diversity, but many minority students are also from economically disadvantaged families. And we need to compete with other universities to achieve our goals."

Freeland has followed the recent court decisions closely-and with perplexity, in some cases. "It's my personal belief that some of the court decisions are wrongheaded," he says. "When a court of law says . . . they don't see a need to correct the injustices of the past that live on in the inequities of the present, I say the judges who wrote that opinion don't live in the same world I do."

As a lifelong academic preoccupied with urban education, Freeland has long been engaged in the affirmative action debate. But it hit home for him last fall and spring when his adoptive daughter, Maria, applied to college. A good student and a minority, Maria has unwillingly had to confront the reality of race labels and racial policies. "The application forms asked her to identify herself by race. Well, she doesn't think of herself in those terms," Freeland says. "What she wants is what the critics of affirmative action want: where skin color isn't an issue. [The labeling is] very distasteful. Worse, it's teaching my daughter the opposite of what we want her to learn. We want her to think exactly what she thinks, which is that she is an American; she is not African American, or she is not Hispanic American."

Freeland's daughter's dilemma is his own, to a degree. Intellectually, he sympathizes with those critical of affirmative action, who view it as an excuse for racial favoritism that succeeds only in fueling animosity between ethnic groups and stigmatizing its beneficiaries. "As a matter of moral philosophy abstractly considered, they [opponents] make a very strong case. That is, we're a nation committed to equal treatment of individual people," he says. "There's no way as an abstract philosophical position that I can be comfortable with affirmative action." As a matter of concrete policy, however, Freeland is in the camp of the supporters. Affirmative action is still necessary because inequities are still present in our society. "The great philosophic dilemma is that we're undermining our social ideal. And yet what I say is, 'Show me a better way.' Don't ask me to set aside these concerns, because I can't do it," he says. "My own view is that we need a society that works. I'm prepared to live with some level of philosophical discomfort."

Freeland says Northeastern's current affirmative action policies in student admissions remain lawful, and he is optimistic that future court decisions "will leave enough room for universities to operate"-an opinion echoed by law school dean David Hall. "I don't think the whole court would be willing to get rid of affirmative action altogether," Hall speculates. Furthermore, as a private institution, N.U. has extra latitude to formulate its admissions policies. If a Hopwood-type ruling were to spread to Massachusetts, however, it nevertheless could have a chilling effect on Northeastern's minority-preference programs, to judge from the decision's outcome on University of Texas law school admissions this year. With four-fifths of admissions offers made for the 1996­97 academic year, only five had gone to black students-down from sixty-five last year. Admissions offers to Mexican American students had similarly plummeted, from seventy last year to eighteen thus far this year. School officials blamed the declines entirely on the Hopwood decision.

In the face of an unfavorable court ruling on minority-preference scholarships, Vice Provost Eddy says the university would be forced to become more creative in the way it markets education opportunities to minorities. For example, since many high school students begin leaning toward a college choice in their junior years, Northeastern could begin recruiting minorities in their sophomore years. But that strategy, Eddy notes, is easier said than done. "That takes time to develop and the reality is that many, many, many colleges are trying to ensure the mix of diversity," she says. "So highly qualified students of color have all kinds of options because everyone wants them to come to their campus."

In fact, Northeastern may already be playing catch-up. Two years ago, for example, the University of California, Berkeley announced the "Berkeley Pledge"-a $1 million initiative aimed at creating and expanding programs for all disadvantaged students, many of whom are minorities, to ensure continued campus diversity. Along with recruiting inner-city students to apply to the school, Berkeley is attempting to raise millions in private money for special undergraduate scholarships. Whether Northeastern could mount a similar program is uncertain. "That would be our challenge," Eddy says.

Ultimately, the legal challenges to affirmative action could result in some colleges and universities scrapping their campaigns to enroll minority students, says Alan Kines, N.U.'s director of admissions and chair of the school's multicultural enrollment committee. Although this scenario ironically would result in less competition for Northeastern's minority recruiting efforts, Kines finds it an ominous prospect for the American higher education system as a whole. "I'm concerned that if affirmative action admissions policies as we know them are reversed-and therefore institutions are not compelled by law to reach out to underrepresented populations of students-the issue will lose its urgency on many campuses," he says. "It would send a very strong message that American higher education will no longer be able to be an active participant in providing access."

Even with affirmative action embattled nationally, Kines doesn't see Northeastern's commitment to diversity waning. "The spirit of this university is to reach out," he says. Indeed, whether it's ethical resolve or political correctness, you'd be hard pressed to find an outspoken opponent of affirmative action among N.U.'s administration and faculty.

At least one alumnus, however, is a noted antagonist of preferential policies. Attorney Michael McLaughlin, LA'71, filed a precedent-setting lawsuit in August 1995 on behalf of his daughter, who is white, after the Boston Latin Academy, a prestigious public exam school, had denied her a seat and admitted 103 black or Hispanic students with lower or equal scores on the entrance test. The suit challenged the Boston School Department's twenty-year-old racial quota system that required thirty-five percent of Boston Latin's seats to be filled by blacks or Hispanics. U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity Jr. dismissed the suit last December, saying the point was moot because the school committee had reversed its decision and guaranteed Julia McLaughlin admittance. (Garrity declined to rule on the constitutionality of school department's racial quotas, which derive from his landmark 1974 desegregation order.)

Despite the dismissal, Boston school officials, hoping to ward off similar lawsuits in the future, changed their admissions policies for exam schools. Boston's three public exam schools will now admit half of their students on the basis of test scores and grades, while the rest of qualified applicants will be admitted on the basis of the percentage that their racial group represents in the remaining applicant pool. McLaughlin claimed the policy shift as a victory and a blow against preferential policies. He declined Northeastern University Alumni Magazine's request for comment, saying he abhors N.U.'s pro-affirmative action stance and what he perceives as an atmosphere of political correctness at the school.

Lisa, a sophomore criminal justice major attending Northeastern on an academic scholarship not designated for minorities, believes affirmative action's pervasiveness in American society today-that is, its very success-hampers its defense against critics like McLaughlin. "I don't think they [minority students] realize the full impact it would have on their lives if programs like that didn't exist any longer," says Lisa, an African American who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used. "I don't think they realize the full impact they have on their lives even today."

That ignorance of the policy's weight is highly disconcerting to associate dean Ella Robertson. The gains that race-exclusive programs have brought to Northeastern and other campuses over the last twenty years are not secure, she believes; they could be reversed. If the affirmative-action rug is pulled out from under minority students, they will "begin to see how different it is for African Americans to survive," she predicts.

It would be a great mistake to believe that the United States has advanced so far in racial equality that affirmative action is no longer necessary, echoes Lula Petty, the director of the O'Bryant institute. "We don't like to talk about it, but our country has not matured when it comes to race or gender," says Petty, who grew up in Mississippi when segregation was still legal. "And by maturity, I mean humans have not yet demonstrated the ability to move past issues of superiority or inferiority on the basis of race, gender, nationality. There has been progress-but there has also been, in my view, retrogression."

As evidence, Petty points out that only twenty-seven percent of college-age blacks today are enrolled in colleges and universities-a dismal level. "Everyone's talking about crime by blacks between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. That's the college-age population. If you reduce the opportunity for higher education, what are you increasing the opportunity for?" Petty says. "Education has historically for black people been a major source of uplift."

Northeastern itself, despite its affirmative action record and official prodiversity stance, is far from a model. Enrollment levels of minorities "are acceptable but not outstanding," Freeland says. "To some degree, those statistics are driven by program offerings. Northeastern has historically been in fields that were not attracting minorities." Even so, he says, "We could do better. I think N.U. has made great strides in the last ten to fifteen years. But I think we could do better."

The university's modest matriculation rate is exacerbated by a low graduation rate for minorities. Exact statistics are unavailable-the admissions office doesn't break down graduation by ethnicity-but N.U. has serious difficulty keeping

minorities enrolled after they are admitted, officials say. In part, at least, that reflects a less-than-stellar graduation rate for all Northeastern students-a mere thirty-nine percent, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. There are various theories on why N.U.'s graduation rate is so low, particularly among minorities, but no clear answers, says admissions director Kines. Evidence from across the country suggests that financial aid is the most effective means of increasing the retention rate of minority students, he says. The College of Engineering's NUPRIME program has boosted the retention of minority engineering students to a level slightly above the school average, says program director David Blackman. Still, it covers only 175 undergraduates out of more than 1,500 on campus.

The minority students that arrive and stay on campus find Northeastern no race-relations utopia, according to a report issued last fall by the school's Office of Institutional Research. Overall, the 2,400 faculty, staff, and students surveyed for The Study of the Campus Environment for Diversity had positive responses to questions about the school's receptivity to diversity. However: twenty-two percent of minority undergraduates and eighteen percent of minority graduate students said they believed the general environment on campus is racist; and fifty-five percent of minority undergrads and thirty percent of minority graduate students said they had heard insensitive or disparaging comments about minorities by N.U. students. "If you look at the [report] data, there is significant disagreement on campus about how receptive Northeastern is and what goes on here," says criminal justice professor Jack McDevitt, who helped design the study. "It shows some real problems."

McDevitt, a long-standing member of the campus group SOAR (Society Organized Against Racism), is an ardent defender of the concept of affirmative action. But he believes it's time for Northeastern and other universities to read the writing on the wall. He flatly calls the affirmative action backlash "wrongheaded," but says pragmatism dictates that N.U. should "broaden the base [of affirmative action] or face losing it altogether." One idea being bandied about nationwide that he endorses is changing the criterion of affirmative action so that students' financial condition would replace their racial status as a determining factor in admissions. "There is a need to rethink affirmative action and a need to cut back at the backlash," he says. "Affirmative action must evolve."

Petty disagrees. "We're going to have to wait and see," she says. Rather than retooling, she favors a discourse on the proper use and appropriate role of affirmative action. And in that, Northeastern may have an important role to play, she says. "I really think there needs to be a serious discussion by rational minds that do not have several agendas-some of which may be devious. I choose to remain optimistic that here we will find a way to perhaps lead the rest of the country."

Tim Sandler, MA'92, an associate producer for the Dateline NBC television program in New York, wrote about law professor Richard Daynard in the January 1996 issue.

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