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September 21, 2007 > News > Constitution Day faculty panel addresses affirmative action

Constitution Day faculty panel addresses affirmative action

By Jocelyn Wright | Thresher Editorial Staff

“To sit here and talk about affirmative action at Rice is to fiddle while Rome burns,” Centennial Historian Melissa Kean said Monday at the “Affirmative Action: Past, Present and Future” panel at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Graduate student Marvin Cummings moderated the panel, which in addition to Kean, consisted of Computational and Applied Mathematics professor Richard Tapia, Director of Legal and Public Affairs for the Center for Individual Freedom Timothy Lee and General Counsel Richard Zansitis.

Panelists discussed the history of affirmative action in higher education, the effect of the recently settled Supreme Court case Gratz v. Bollinger on affirmative action policies and the future of affirmative action. The precedent set by the case led to a 2004 civil rights complaint against Rice by the Conservative Center for Equal Opportunity for the use of race in the admissions process.

The panel, which began by discussing the history of desegregation and affirmative action at Rice, concluded that the real problems with underrepresentation of minorities lay in the public school system.

“I think the panel very correctly pointed out that discussing affirmative action at Rice is really missing the point,” Wiess College junior Jeremy Caves said. “It only deals with a few students when the real root of the problem lies in millions of public school students being consigned to oblivion.”

Kean started the discussion with background on the factors leading Rice’s 1964 desegregation. The Board of Trustees that kept most of Rice’s endowment invested in mortgages and bonds and blocked Rice’s aspirations of becoming a research institution. As the research costs skyrocketed in the 1950s, Rice could not purchase much of the equipment necessary to turn the university into a full-fledged research institution in science and mathematics.

Rice had to look to the federal government for grants to receive funding, which more explicitly required that institutions that received federal funding desegregate. To receive this funding, Rice had to start admitting students of color.

“Desegregation was done purely in order to get money to make Rice a full-fledged research institution,” Kean said.

Today, Rice’s federal funding for research still depends on its adherence to certain standards, including that it host a Constitution Day event each year.

“I hear comments every Constitution Day that Constitution Day is unconstitutional. It’s healthy to have these discussions,” graduate student David Splinter said.

After a discussion of legal precedents for affirmative action, including the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. Bollinger, and Gratz v. Bollinger, panelists discussed affirmative action’s future.

The Supreme Court justices replaced by the next U.S. President would be pivotal in determining this, Lee said. States and groups are not required to use affirmative action, and there are ways besides Supreme Court cases to end affirmative action’s use.

He mentioned California’s Proposition 209, which bans the consideration of race in evaluating applications, and a similar law, Proposal 2, that was passed in Michigan in 2006.

The amount of time the panel spent discussing the history of affirmative action surprised some students.

“[The panel] was much more factual than I was expecting. I like how they started with a history of Rice and a history of the court cases and then went on to debate their personal perspectives and opinions,” Splinter said.

The low attendance at the panel also surprised students.

“We would have liked to have seen better attendance at this Constitution Day Event. This is an important issue that affects all current and incoming students who seek secondary education here in the U.S.,” Cummings said.

Despite low attendance, the panel was well-received.

“I loved it,” Caves said. “I thought it was fantastic and well-represented both historical, legal, and educator’s perspectives. I liked that there were two opposing legal points of view.”

End of article

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