Here is the other very famous Ted Olson case involving equal protection: the Hopwood case ending affirmative action in Texas. What this article does not mention is the role of the Center for Individual Rights (www.cir-usa.org), large corporations backing CIR, and Bush lead attorney Ted Olson in waging this legal war against claims of race and gender bias. It is important to look at this issue now because a different circuit court just upheld affirmative action in a case involving U of Michigan. So it may soon be up to Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and co. to resolve the conflict between the 2 lower courts. If anyone wants the other article from Uncovering the Right on Campus involving affirmative action, I can email it to you. It is an analysis by Nicole Newton of the 5-page "issue brief" on affirmative action distributed to thousands of conservative student activists in the past 10 years. -rich cowan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) P.S. for an analysis of the Bush v. Gore case and affirmative action, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The analysis is in the archives and will be updated soon. [Excerpted from Uncovering the Right on Campus, copyright 1997 by the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO) ISBN 0-945210-07-8. For ordering information (this is a complete bound paperback book, 134 pages, illustrated, with a color cover, $8) please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]; if you need it fast, try [EMAIL PROTECTED]] http://www.cco.org/right/hopwood.html Turning Back the Clock on Affirmative Action: the University of California and Hopwood by Nari Rhee and Sonya Huber ...the use of race in admissions for diversity in higher education contradicts, rather than furthers, the aims of equal protection. Diversity fosters, rather than minimizes, the use of race. It treats minorities as a group, rather than as individuals. It may further remedial purposes but, just as likely, may promote improper racial stereotypes, thus fueling racial hostility. - Judge Jerry E. Smith, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Hopwood v. State of Texas. Like an army marching in lockstep across the national political landscape, the assault on affirmative action policies -- particularly in higher education -- is gathering momentum state by state. Recent events in California and Texas bear tremendous symbolic and legal significance for the future of university policies that attempt to provide equitable access to women and students of color, or to foster gender and racial equity in hiring and promotion. Corruption of Governance: the UC Regent Decision In California, the initiative came from the Governor's office. Regent Ward Connerly, an African American appointed to the twenty-six member UC Board of Regents by Governor Pete Wilson, introduced resolutions SP-1 and SP-2 in Spring 1995. The two proposals attempted to ban the use of race and sex criteria in admissions and hiring, respectively. According to Connerly, a majority of Regents had assured him that they opposed any use of racial preferences. On July 20, over 1000 students converged at the UC San Francisco Laurel Heights campus to make their voices heard in favor of affirmative action, along with 100 elected officials, UC faculty, and community leaders, and 300 media representatives. Public comments were limited to an appalling 30 seconds per person. Democratic process was, at most, symbolic, since most of the votes had been secured beforehand. Seventeen out of eighteen appointed seats had been filled by Republican governors, and Wilson himself had hand-picked seven. According to Irma Munoz of UC Student Association (UCSA), "Regents get appointed in reward for campaign contributions. Most of the recent appointees have donated over $200,000 to Wilson's campaign funds." At the end of the day, SP-1 and SP-2 narrowly passed. In passing these resolutions, UC Board of Regents contradicted the will of the Chancellors and the majority of students and faculty at all nine UC campuses. In addition to intense lobbying by the UCSA and the various student assemblies, thousands of students vocalized their support for affirmative action at demonstrations on every campus, comprising as much as 20% of the student body on some campuses. The Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1 and SP-2 collected 7000 signatures for a petition calling on the Regents to rescind their decision. Between October 1995 and January 1996, all nine UC Faculty senates echoed this demand. Despite this opposition, SP-1 and SP-2 were not revoked. Instead, the debate was soon intensified due to the introduction of Proposition 209 (the California Civil Rights Initiative), a referendum initiative to bar affirmative action in all state business. Hopwood vs. State of Texas The Fifth US Court of Appeals ruled that University of Texas law school admissions policies, which considered applicants in separate ethnic pools with different LSAT score criteria, violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law by giving preference to blacks and Hispanics over whites. The litigants were four white students, led by Cheryl Hopwood, who claimed that they had been denied admission to the UT Law School because of their race. Hopwood had put herself through school, was married to a military officer, and had a severely handicapped child. Judge Jerry E. Smith concluded that her experiences would have been a contribution to the school, and that she had been discriminated against because her test scores would have qualified her for admission if she had been black or Hispanic. The UT Law School defended its system on the basis of the 1978 University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court ruling that universities' "compelling interest" in diversity justified racial preferences. In addition, their target goals were rather modest: 10% Mexican-Americans and 5% blacks. However, the Fifth Circuit marshaled a much narrower definition of "compelling interest" as remedy for specific past wrongs. The UT Law School failed the "strict-scrutiny" test because it hadn't had an explicitly disciminatory policy against blacks in more than 30 years, and had never barred Mexican-Americans. Notably, all three Fifth Circuit judges were Reagan and Bush appointees. The Fifth Circuit covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. UT appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in July 1996, on the basis that the UT Law School policy of considering applicants in separate pools was clearly illegal. The ruling signals a defeat for the principle of affirmative action, and could jeopardize diversity targets at US professional schools. The Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education has been considering whether to launch a formal investigation of UT; OCR has threatened to withhold $2 billion in education funding because UT may be violating The Texas Plan, and agreement to de-segregate reached by the OCR and the Texas state government in the early 1980s. A group of students at the University of Texas organized the Committee on Post-Hopwood Political Strategies in Spring of 1997 to draw attention to the continued decrease in application. At the University of Texas, applications among African-American students have decreased 21%; Latino student applications are down 17%, and Native American applications are down 50%. UT's law school reported that it admitted only 10 African American students, down from 65 in 1996, and only 29 Latinos, down from 69 in 1996. Any financial aid that ethnic minority students receive is threatened until the legislature reaches a decision on whether any preference based on race is legal in Texas. The Impact of SP-1 and SP-2 The effects of the UC Board of Regents folly are already being felt: systemwide applications from students of color have dropped by over 10%, according to the Student Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Program office at UC Santa Cruz. Furthermore, the implementation of SP-1 and SP-2 will have a devastating impact on the admission, hiring, and promotion of women in math and science programs, many of which currently have severe problems of discrimination. UC's new colorblind admissions policy has had immediate effects. In the spring of 1997, UC Law Schools reported a drastic decrease in the numbers of African American and Latino students accepted, and not all of these students will choose to attend these schools, making the final numbers even smaller. UCLA School of Law accepted only 21 African American applicants, down 80% from 1996. At UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall Law School accepted half the number of Latinos accepted in 1996. UC officials expect a similar pattern to emerge at UC's 600 other graduate schools this summer. The university's ban on considering race, ethnicity or gender in admissions will be extended to undergraduates in 1998. A study by Linda Wightman of the University of North Carolina determined that of the 3,435 African-American applicants accepted to at least one law school in 1990-1991, only 20% would have been admitted on the basis of only grade point averages and LSAT scores. However, African-American students showed no significant differences in rates of graduation from law school or passing the bar. Thomas Kane, an economist at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government said the new method will not produce the same diversity, leaving African- Americans and Latinos badly underrepresented. The political assault against affirmative action has gained momentum during a time of economic uncertainty, when higher education is increasingly necessary for survival in the labor market, and people -- particularly the white working and "middle" classes -- are anxious about "getting theirs." The message is clear to the hundreds of thousands of students who get second-rate preparation for college because of institutionalized racism and sexism: They don't deserve higher education and the opportunity to overcome barriers they themselves had no hand in setting up. Their full participation in society is not a priority. The Future of Affirmative Action There are clear connections between the attack on support for affirmative action on campus and beyond the university. The Proposition 209 ballot question was co-authored by Ward Connerly, the Regent who helped to destroy affirmative action at UC, Proposition 209 was worded to sounded like it supported civil rights, when in fact it would eliminate affirmative action. Conservative supporters of the measure brought in $6.2 million, and outspent their opponents by a ratio of 2:1. Paid petition circulators collected 1 million of the 1.2 million signatures, at a rate of up to $1 per signature. On the side of affirmative action, Californians for Justice (CFJ, a statewide PAC) working in conjunction with community- based and labor organizations, geared up to get out the anti-209 vote in marginalized communities. The Feminist Majority organized a "Freedom Summer" to help register voters in areas with traditionally low voter turnout. During the campaign, the approval rating for Prop. 209 dropped from 75-80% to 54%, but ultimately it passed narrowly. Legal action was taken immediately by the Coalition for Economic Opportunity, a broad-based coalition led by ACLU and including California Federation of Labor, NAACP, NOW, Asian- Indian Association of America, which had filed a lawsuit on November 6 to challenge the constitutionality of Prop 209. Despite a court ruling in November which delayed implementation, a federal appeals court upheld the legality of Prop. 209 in April of 1997. Majority judges based their ruling on the 14th Amendment, arguing that the U.S. aims to create a political system in which race no longer matters. They argue that affirmative action is not race blind and is therefore unfair. The majority decision, not coincidentally, was produced by two Reagan appointees and one judge appointed by Bush. This decision opens the way for similar anti-affirmative action campaigns around the country. Proposition 209 co-author Ward Connerly has begun a new organization called the American Civil Rights Institute, which plans to launch similiar initiatives in states including Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Ohio, and Michigan. Tom Wood, a co-author of Proposition 209, is the executive director of the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Assocation of Scholars (NAS). The NAS is a conservative group of faculty and administrators that oppose multi-culturalism and may spearhead attacks to affirmative action in the form of ballot initiatives in other states. A national poll found that though people may react negatively to the politically charged phrase "affirmative action," these same people say that they believe in measures to ensure ethnic and gender diversity in universities and workplaces. Grassroots mobilization and education, coalition building, and a carefully planned and executed strategy are key factors to successfully fighting heavily funded campaigns to turn back the clock on social justice. |- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This message was sent via RWWATCH, a low-traffic forum that responds to right-wing campaigns (coming from any party) to misrepresent the truth in order to undermine democracy. info page www.topica.com/lists/rwwatch subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (send a blank email) unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Please support our efforts to foster online communication and resource sharing by social change groups by joining OC at http://organizenow.net ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A http://www.topica.com/t/17 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
