Texas Returns to Affirmative Action Can Athletics and Academics

NATIONAL Vol. 12 No. 1 Winter 2004 Published by The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education Texas Returns to FOR CROSSTALK JANA BIRCHUM, BLACK STAR, Affirmative Action Readjustment and confusion in the aftermath of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions By Carl Irving classes had one or no whites, who are ex- pected to become a minority of the state’s AUSTIN, TEXAS population next year. HE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS’ UT-Austin officials believe this discov- flagship campus here plans to re- ery vividly illustrates a problem that the Tstore affirmative action in under- Supreme Court majority wants the na- graduate admissions in the fall of 2005, us- tion’s campuses to address—the lack of a ing guidelines the campus administration believes to be consistent with last sum- Restoring affirmative mer’s 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. action will require This year’s freshman class at the University of Texas-Austin is 16 percent Hispanic, To support this change, the admissions four percent African American. Returning to affirmative action should increase office has gathered evidence that white changes in Texas’ those numbers. students dominate most smaller, discus- seven-year-old, race- University of Michigan undergraduate ad- dents to admit. sion-sized classes, which have few if any missions policies, which had involved “The court itself didn’t define ‘critical African American or Hispanic students. neutral admissions law. racial quotas. But in directly addressing mass’ but it means having more than one A recent month-long survey of 3,600 the issue of affirmative action in higher student (in a class),” said UT-Austin current undergraduate classes, each with “critical mass” of underrepresented mi- education admissions for the first time in Director of Admissions and Vice Provost five to 24 students enrolled, found that 90 nority students, enough so that they “do 25 years, the court said racial and ethnic Bruce Walker. But he added, “We won’t percent had one or no African Ame- not feel isolated or like spokespersons for backgrounds for underrepresented mi- return to the affirmative action of 1996, ricans, and 43 percent had one or no their race.” norities could be used as one positive fac- because [selecting students] has to be indi- Hispanics. Less than two percent of the The decision agreed with challenges to tor among others in deciding which stu- continued on page 15 ROBIN NELSON, BLACK STAR, FOR CROSSTALK ROBIN NELSON, BLACK STAR, Can Athletics and In This Issue Academics Coexist? FOR CROSSTALK PETER ENSENBERGER, BLACK STAR, Colleges and universities wrestle with big-time sports By Don Campbell sweetened iced tea, and in the sky-suite ATHENS, GEORGIA foyer, dessert tables T’S HALFTIME here in Bulldog overflow with delec- Nation, where the University of table sweets. I Georgia football team is hosting the Suddenly, a buzz University of Alabama-Birmingham. sweeps the crowd as What was supposed to be a cakewalk an elevator door for the Bulldogs—it’s homecoming, for opens and out bounds Pete’s sake—is deadlocked at 10 to 10. In Uga VI, Georgia’s the 50 plush sky suites that hover over beloved snow-white 92,000 fans in Sanford Stadium, there are English bulldog mas- 92,000 fans pack the University of Georgia’s Sanford cot, trailed by a ret- Stadium for most football games. The university fields inue that includes University of Georgia winning teams and graduates a high percentage of its athletes. several photogra- prides itself on being phers and a beefy, uniformed police offi- lice officer. an institution that cer. At 55 pounds and sporting a 36-13 For football fanatics and social gadflies record after four years of prowling the alike, it doesn’t get much better than this. increasingly excels in sidelines, Uga (pronounced Ugg-ah) is the No matter that the "Dogs" will only manage sixth of his family called to duty—all five a meager three-point victory, or that down both academics and on the field, UGA President Michael of his mascot ancestors are buried in mar- n less than two years as president of Adams is getting booed by fans upset that athletics. ble vaults on a hillside outside the stadium. Arizona State University, Michael he is forcing Georgia’s legendary athletic I Straining at his leash, the red-sweat- Crow has won wide support on nervous looks and muted grumbling. But director and football coach, Vince Dooley, ered Uga paws and snuffles his way to- campus and in the state for what he the mood brightens as the elite of Bulldog to retire at the end of this school year. ward the UGA Alumni Association suite, calls “A New American University.” boosters turn their attention to chafing The Saturday afternoon scene in where he dutifully poses for dozens of pic- (See page 6.) dishes piled high with catered delicacies. tures under the watchful eyes of his han- Athens is a quintessential snapshot of how Wine is flowing almost as freely as the dlers and the Athens-Clarke County po- continued on page 8 Page 2 CROSSTALK NEWS FROM THE CENTER lark Kerr and Howard “Pete” Rawlings, who died in recent weeks, were founding directors of the CNational Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The tribute to Kerr that appears below was written by Sheldon Rothblatt, professor emeritus of history and former director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at UC Berkeley. The article about Rawlings was written by Tim Maloney, a lawyer and former colleague of Rawlings in the Maryland legislature. It is reprinted with permission of the author and of the Washington Post, where the article first appeared. poetry, but it was an “historical necessity.” It was new, it was different, and it was not to be dismissed but understood. Clark Kerr Yet this was said with a keen sense of loss, the Quaker and puritan at war with the real- NDOWED with an enviable constitution, ist. The philosopher John Stuart Mill might have made Kerr into a cross between the two Clark Kerr, President Emeritus of the Uni- great thinkers of his own age, the poet-metaphysician Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the le- Eversity of California, died at age 92 about gal reformer and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Like Bentham, Kerr wanted universities to midday on the first of December 2003. He had be “useful”; and like Coleridge he wanted to preserve and advance their integrity. always appeared indestructible, his intellectual The fact is that the fundamental thrust of Kerr’s entire life was to make certain that uni- powers invariably on automatic pilot. He survived versities retained principles to which he himself was permanently loyal. The celebrated nasty attacks from the political left and right, and State of California Master Plan for Higher overcame the humiliation of an abrupt dismissal Education of 1960, for example, was more from office by the Board of Regents. than a “treaty” or set of compromises be- The fundamental thrust At his death, his renown was never greater. He tween contending systems. It was also a blue- of Kerr’s entire life was had been ailing for a year, his vision impaired, and print for expressing basic national values of yet until the end he worried perhaps as much about the first order. to make certain that the promise of America as he worried about him- He defined them in an essay first pub- universities retained self. Alexander the Great is said to have wept be- lished in 1992. They were drawn from cause he had no more worlds to conquer. Clark Jefferson’s conceptions of democracy and tal- principles to which he Kerr wept, literally, because his ability to carry out ent, from Franklin’s Enlightenment program himself was a lifetime’s dedication to promoting a moral America through a moral higher education of useful knowledge and from Keynes’ ideas system was finally being taken from him. about mixed social objectives. A later thinker, permanently loyal. Some readers may be startled by the characterization of Kerr as a “moralist.” John Rawls, focused Kerr on theories of jus- Detractors associate him with a managerial ethos, an economist’s preoccupation with re- tice. In the Godkin Lectures he wondered out loud whether the unparalleled wealth and source allocation, a policy analyst’s passion for problem-solving. One well-known journal- success of the modern university would lead to unbridled institutional aggrandizement. ist has disparaged him as an “elitist,” a word certain to raise hackles in a rancorous age. His Money, he once wrote, was not the root of all evil, but it was the root of some. neologism “multiversity” strikes some as a semantic barbarism. Kerr certainly enjoyed attention, but never for its own sake. As he grew older, he liked None of these criticisms comes near to capturing his essence. But let us acknowledge to talk, but he was fundamentally a shy man who declined to write a conventional autobi- that a careless reader of the Godkin Lectures given at Harvard in the spring of 1963 might ography. In his recently-published memoirs, he made the University of California the pro- be misled into suspecting his motives. The Federal Grant University, he said then, had no continued next page often was. As governors and fiscal leaders came and went, he became the institutional memory on the budget, lending the reassuring sense that the state’s finances were under Howard “Pete” Rawlings adult supervision. ARYLANDERS have just witnessed his- Rawlings’ values were shaped in the Poe Homes, a public housing project in Baltimore, tory, the conclusion of a public life truly where he grew up.

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