Posted on 01/17/2003 2:50:33 PM PST by RCW2001
Jan. 17
— By Patricia Wilson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the highest ranking African-American in the White House, said on Friday that race could play a role in college admission policies, putting her partly at odds with President Bush in a politically charged legal case.
Acting on orders from Bush, who consulted at length with Rice, a former provost at Stanford University, political adviser Karl Rove, White House counsel Al Gonzales and others, Justice Department lawyers have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a University of Michigan program that favors minorities.
Their brief took the side of three white students who are challenging the university's system of racial preferences as unconstitutional discrimination. It has sparked a storm of criticism from Democrats in Congress and civil rights leaders.
In an effort to strike a moderate balance, Bush tried to walk a fine line between his broad denunciation of "quotas" and his commitment to addressing racial prejudice. The legal brief applies only to the Michigan program.
"I agree with the president's position, which emphasizes the need for diversity and recognizes the continued legacy of racial prejudice and the need to fight it," Rice said in a written statement.
But, she added: "I believe that while race-neutral means are preferable, it is appropriate to use race as one factor among others in achieving a diverse student body."
In an interview later with American Urban Radio Networks, Rice sought to further clarify her personal view, saying there were circumstances "in which it is necessary to consider race as a factor among many factors" in diversifying colleges.
"And so, I have been a supporter of affirmative action that is not quota-based and that does not seek to make race the only factor but considers race one among many factors," she said.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer sidestepped the crucial question of whether Bush himself believed that race should ever be a factor at all in the college admissions process.
'A VISION AND A GOAL'
"What the president is saying is, he as president is setting a vision and a goal for the country, and that is that diversity on our college campuses is an important goal to achieve," Fleischer told reporters.
"He is saying the manner in which the University of Michigan, by giving students 20 points on the basis of the color of their skin and only 12 points, for example, on having a perfect SAT score, is the incorrect way to achieve the goal of diversity."
Bush did not mind Rice coming forward with her personal opinion.
"The president welcomes the views of his staff and appreciates her efforts to promote diversity and aggressively reach out to people from all walks of life," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
With his denunciation of two Michigan admission programs, Bush is appealing to his conservative supporters, who fiercely oppose race-based preferences. And, by backing the general principle of diversity, the president and his Republican party are hoping not to alienate the minority voters they have been courting in advance of Bush's re-election effort in 2004.
In the landmark 1978 "Bakke v. Board of Regents" decision, the Supreme Court allowed race to be used by public universities in deciding which students to accept. In another part of the Bakke decision the high court struck down racial quotas in school admissions.
The White House brief did not ask the court to overturn the Bakke ruling.
"The president's judgment was that because he wants to promote diversity as a goal without quotas, the president made the decision to file a narrowly tailored brief that would not test the outer edges of constitutionality," Fleischer said.
The University of Michigan said its law school's admission policy had drawn support from such Republican figures as Secretary of State Colin Powell and former President Gerald Ford as well as from more than 30 corporations, including General Motors Corp.
Screw the race pimps. Sinlge white guy, about the right age, Condi fan, keep dreamin.
My thoughts exactly ... there is not enough space between Rice and Bush to let a gnat breathe on this issue. Nice try, Reuters.
Hear, hear. Let's stop defining people by the color of their skin.
Bush's Stance on U-M Damages Race Relations
By The Detroit News
Is the Bush administration wrong to oppose the University of Michigan's admissions process?
President George W. Bush's statement this week urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the University of Michigan's affirmative action program is wrong -- wrong in its facts, wrong in its analysis and wrong in the signal it sends about race relations, diversity and equal opportunity.
The president's statement was made as his administration prepared to file a legal argument in a case challenging Michigan's admission process.
The brief is only advisory. But it is seen as an important statement on the issue of affirmative action.
In his remarks denouncing the University of Michigan's program to ensure diversity, the president used the word "quotas" no less than three times and "numerical targets" once. But neither Michigan's law school admissions process nor its undergraduate approach is a quota system. By using the code word "quota," the president was either intentionally deceptive or purposely inflammatory.
Michigan's process of undergraduate admissions involves a complex grid that takes in many factors. African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans receive 20 points on this grid. But as the university's president, Mary Sue Coleman, noted this week, 110 points on the grid are based on academics -- and 20 points are also awarded to economically disadvantaged students.
Other points are awarded to outstanding athletes and students from underrepresented parts of the state. The university's goal is to create a diverse student body with different strengths that will reflect the real world that students will encounter when they leave the university. That should be the point of public higher education.
The law school admissions program, also under challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court, doesn't have a grid process but instead looks for a "critical mass" of minority students.
The university's admissions process is little different from programs adopted throughout corporate America, which has realized that a diverse workforce is needed to compete effectively and fairly in a nation of many races, religions and ethnic backgrounds.
Indeed, many of America's largest companies argue that the U-M's approaches are right and necessary, and they have made their points in their own briefs submitted to the court.
The University of Michigan receives many more applications from students who meet the minimum qualifications for admission than it can place. It has to have some rational process to balance its student body. Diversity is an admirable goal, and the university's approaches are legitimate tactics to achieve that goal.
Its admissions process works to help underrepresented minority students -- whose parents and grandparents and ancestors suffered decades of official discrimination that ended less than 40 years ago -- have a shot at one of the nation's best public universities.
Fortunately, this state has many fine public universities in addition to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor -- from Michigan State to Oakland University to Wayne State to Western Michigan -- to name a few. Qualified students who aren't admitted to U-M at Ann Arbor still have access to a quality publicly funded institution of higher education in this state. So it's not as though U-M's admissions program slams the door on educational opportunity to anyone.
The president made progress for himself and his party when he last month publicly denounced Mississippi GOP Sen. Trent Lott's recent gushing statements about a long-ago segregationist presidential campaign and helped engineer Lott's removal as Senate majority leader.
But his stance on U-M's admission's process is a setback for himself and for his party. If he wants to succeed in attracting people of color to the GOP, he'll have to do better.
And if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against U-M, it will have dealt a blow to all Americans and turned back the clock for many of them.
By the way, if teaching students to operate in the "real world" is a goal of a university (I'm not saying it is---I have a different view, but it DOES appear to be the goal of most major universities), would it not be an educational requirement that students interact with people of different backgrounds and ethnicities? Just curious.
It seems to me that the two main arguments used by the administration in this case are that Michigan's policy is 1) unconstitutional and 2) immoral. Now, I understand that you think they are being dishonest by trying to appease their "true conservative" supporters while leaving some kind of wiggle room, but I think that they have persuasively made the constitutional and moral from a truly conservative point of view. What more do you want? I mean, they are politicians. It is in their nature to leave wiggle room. George Bush ain't George Washington.
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