Jessica Perlo arrived at Northwestern University two weeks early, one of 32 freshmen eager to get a jump-start on college by participating in writing workshops, campus tours and meetings with student organizations.
Launched during the Civil Rights movement, the orientation program was long reserved for minority students–not for whites such as Perlo, 18, who said she was lucky to get a chance to attend.
“Any other year, I wouldn’t be here,” said Perlo of Woodland Hills, Calif., one of the first non-minority students to participate in the 38-year-old Summer Academic Workshop. “You get to know the campus early, so when school starts, I’m not lost.”
Throughout the country, schools such as Northwestern are opening up minority scholarships, fellowships, academic support programs and summer enrichment classes to students of any race.
The change follows last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that race can be considered in college admissions but only among other factors and that each candidate must be evaluated individually. That landmark 5-4 decision, hailed as a victory by college and university officials, preserved affirmative action in admissions, but found unconstitutional a University of Michigan program that automatically gave extra points to African-American, Latino and American Indian applicants.
In what some now say is an unexpected erosion of affirmative action, colleges are interpreting the ruling to mean they can no longer offer race-exclusive programs designed specifically to help minority students.
Critics of the trend to eliminate such programs argue that they remain constitutional because the court decision only addressed admissions. But some college officials, worried about potential lawsuits, are taking a different stance.
At Yale University in New Haven, Conn., for example, an orientation program for minority freshmen, along with two research fellowships, has been opened to all students. Two undergraduate scholarships once restricted to minority students at the University of Michigan are offered to anyone who adds to “the overall excellence and diversity of the university community.”
And at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a program for minority engineering students that provided internships, scholarships and tutoring was renamed and broadened to include non-minority students.
“Everybody has seen pretty clearly that the court is frowning on programs that are
100 percent race-based,” said Stephen Fischer, Northwestern’s associate provost for undergraduate education. Of the students who participated in the university’s early orientation program this year, five were white or Asian.
There is concern that including other groups in orientation programs will make it harder to create an early comfort zone for minority students, an original goal of the program, Fischer said. “There is a little bit of a loss in terms of social networking that can be accomplished,” he said.
Elise Boddie, education director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, disagrees that the court ruling requires universities to abandon minority-only programs. She worries that schools have begun to relinquish their support of affirmative action programs despite a shortage of minority students at many of the nation’s campuses.
“These programs have been critical to opening up doors of opportunity for students of color,” said Boddie, who is concerned that schools “may be sending unwelcoming signals to minority students.”
Sharon Jones, president of the Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago, said universities are unnecessarily caving in to legal threats.
“Nothing requires the schools to get rid of those programs,” said Jones, who wrote a legal brief to the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan. “However, you have to be willing to be sued, litigate it and spend a lot of money to win. And a lot of institutions aren’t willing to.”
All of this is being hailed as good news by affirmative action critics such as the Center for Equal Opportunity in Virginia. Early last year, the conservative advocacy group began sending letters to about 100 colleges, threatening to file complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights if their race-exclusive programs weren’t changed.
“The point the court emphasized was individualized consideration,” said Roger Clegg, the center’s vice president and general counsel. “A program where a student is not allowed to participate for no other reason than skin color is not providing individualized consideration.”
