Affirmative Action Losing Ground Moves To End College Programs Springing Up Across Nation

While race-based affirmative action programs at two of the nation’s largest public universities, Texas and California, have been scuttled under an intense national spotlight, movements are quietly bubbling up in more than a dozen other states to curtail or end affirmative action in determining college admission and financial aid.

None has the political dimension of last summer’s measure by the University of California’s governing board of regents, which abandoned the use of race alone to give admission preference to one candidate over another.

And none would convey the potentially sweeping precedent of last week’s U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the University of Texas’s affirmative action program was unconstitutional.

But in state legislatures, in the meetings of the governing boards of public university systems and in governor’s offices, various proposals to end affirmative action are getting a serious hearing.

The opposition is manifest in three ways. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Arizona, are trying to enact legislation to outlaw the practice. In others, like South Carolina, campaigns are under way to amend the state constitution or collect enough signatures for a ballot initiative in November.

And in Colorado, the governing board of the university system has curtailed affirmative action programs.

Though public sentiment appears to remain in favor of affirmative action, opponents say the practice has denied college and graduate school admission, financial aid and university jobs to whites who have better qualifications. In the Texas case, four whites with higher grades and test scores lost admission to black and Hispanic candidates under the law school’s system of minority preferences.

Within university systems, Colorado recently joined California and Texas in rescinding affirmative action policies after the state attorney general declared them unlawful. Programs like a scholarship financed by Hispanic alumni and available only to Hispanic students were eliminated.

There have been more than a dozen campaigns to amend state constitutions to reverse or make illegal current state affirmative action programs. All are unsuccessful so far but the movement is gaining strength, according to representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations that support affirmative action.

In the state of Washington, a real estate developer named Ron Taber last year organized a campaign to put an initiative to rescind state affirmative action programs on the November ballot.

Like efforts in several other states, it was modeled on the California Civil Rights Initiative, a voter-led referendum on the November ballot that would ban affirmative action in state government and state colleges and universities.

In Washington, the measure is stalled for now. “We got about a third of the necessary 182,000 signatures and then ran out of money,” Taber said.