The University of Michigan is mounting an ambitious, research-based defense against two lawsuits that challenge its use of racial preferences in admissions.
The university intends to show, through reports and testimony by a high-powered set of social scientists, that the educational value of racial diversity justifies giving a slight edge to black and Hispanic applicants as a way of increasing their presence on the Ann Arbor campus, according to documents provided to The Chronicle of Higher Education by the university's lawyers last week.
Michigan appears poised to argue, based on its experts' findings, that racially and ethnically diverse educational environments teach students to think in deeper and more-complex ways, and that affirmative action in college admissions helps white and black students alike, both in their college years and later in life.
The university is prepared to call as witnesses such researchers as Claude M. Steele, chairman of Stanford University's psychology department, who says his studies show that the mere existence of racial stereotypes hinders the performance of some black and Hispanic students on standardized college-admissions tests.
How much weight the university's experts will carry in court remains unclear.
"Any evidence or any report that shows, or purports to show, that racial diversity has educational value is beside the point," argues Terence J. Pell, a senior counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington-based, non-profit law group that represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against Michigan.
The center is aiming its own efforts at proving that the university's admissions policies have systematically, and unconstitutionally, discriminated against white applicants. The center's lawyers contend that none of the arguments being put forward by Michigan establish that the government has a compelling interest in allowing discriminatory admissions practices to continue.
"Racial diversity is not a compelling state interest, even if racial diversity has educational value," Mr. Pell said last week.
The university believes, however, that its research-based arguments offer the best hope of defending affirmative-action policies in the courts as well as in the political arena. Some supporters of affirmative action within higher education have blamed the lack of compelling social-science evidence in support of such policies for recent court decisions that undercut them.
At Michigan's request, its lawyers at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a Washington law firm, have compiled the experts' reports in a booklet that is being given to other institutions to help them fend off similar suits.
The booklet's introduction, written by the firm's lawyers, says those involved in the debate over affirmative-action in college admissions "have wrestled with ideology and theory, but have never had the benefit of a comprehensive theoretical framework that has been tested by reliable empirical data."
The booklet says Michigan has drawn on leading scholars in history, sociology, psychology, education, and other fields "to develop such a framework and verify its legitimacy with empirical proof."
In addition to Mr. Steele, Michigan's experts include William G. Bowen and Derek C. Bok, the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard Universities, respectively; Thomas J. Sugrue, an associate professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University.
None of their reports have yet been submitted as evidence in the two cases, pending in federal court, in which the plaintiffs challenge the admissions processes at Michigan's law school and its undergraduate liberal-arts college.
Of the expert opinions being offered on the university's behalf, Mr. Steele's explanations for race-linked gaps in some test scores are among the most novel.
In his report, he describes carefully designed studies of a phenomenon he calls "stereotype threat," under which the performance of minority-group members on standardized tests is hindered by fears that, by failing, they will confirm a negative stereotype.
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education