Wrong Message, Wrong Time

By Susan Tifft

Anthony Catanese, president of Florida Atlantic University, called the decision "lunacy." Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, found it "startling." Even Kevin Pritchett, editor in chief of the right-wing Dartmouth Review, considered it "quite disturbing."

It was hard to find anyone last week in the education world who did not express dismay at a Washington bureaucrat's decision to bar federal aid to colleges and universities that offer scholarships restricted to minority students. The amount of money at risk is likely to be small, since need-based aid and minority scholarships established by private organizations like the United Negro College Fund remain legal. Colleges may also continue to take race into account in awarding money so long as it is not the only factor involved -- and financial need rather than race is often the dominant consideration in scholarship aid anyway.

Nonetheless, the symbolism of the decision was potent, and educators reacted accordingly. "This is an example of something that in the abstract looks like good principle but that results in horrible policy," says Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. "It is the wrong message at the wrong time." Even the White House was distancing itself from the policy, pointing out that it came from the bowels of the Education Department. At week's end President Bush called for a review of the decision.

The department's rationale for the ban is Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial or ethnic discrimination by organizations receiving federal funds. "You can't have a whites-only scholarship," says Chester Finn Jr., a Reagan-era education official. "Why should there be scholarships exclusively for minorities?"

The policy decision arose almost by accident, after reports that organizers of Arizona's Fiesta Bowl planned to contribute $100,000 to each of the two colleges fielding teams for the football game. The money would be designated for minority scholarships. Bowl officials hoped the offer would neutralize criticism of Arizona's refusal to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday, which had led to a call for colleges to boycott the game. But in a Dec. 4 letter, Michael Williams, Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, advised Fiesta organizers that such "race exclusive" scholarships were probably illegal.

Once the news spread, colleges took a range of precautions. Dartmouth abruptly put on hold its planned announcement of a $20,000-a-year Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship. Johns Hopkins sought advice from its lawyers. Other institutions were more defiant. The American Council on Education, a lobbying and research organization, told its 1,800 member colleges and universities to ignore the opinion. Declared Florida Atlantic's Catanese: "We are not going to adhere to this directive because we think it is wrong."

The fact is that much of the controversy stems from the fragility of black gains in higher education. According to the most recent statistics, black enrollment at U.S. colleges in 1988 was 8.7% of the national total. That marked a mild gain over the previous two years, but is still low considering that blacks represent about 12.4% of the U.S. population. "If we were color- blind as a nation, then ending these scholarships would be understandable," says Gina Smith, 19, the first recipient of a joint Hope College-University of Michigan scholarship for minority students interested in medicine. "But we're not there yet."

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Houston