Just this past week a teen in Sugarland, TX decided to sue Texas-Austin because she was not accepted for admission into the University. Problem is she is suing based on racial discrimination…oh, yeah she also happens to be Caucasian.

If this case sounds like deja vu then that’s because it has happened before. In 1996, Cheryl Hopwood was the first person to win a lawsuit against an institution of higher learning based on race since Cal v. Bakke in 1978. The resulting aftermath of that lawsuit meant that race-based admissions and scholarships were no longer allowed in Texas. I remember that lawsuit well because one of my scholarships was race-based along with several friends of mine. I remember the Hopwood case spurring the exodus of minority students from Texas to Oklahoma (see OU’s football record from 1997-present). Later Grutter v. Bollinger reversed the Hopwood Decision.

I’m actually not 100% for race-based exceptions. I think in some instances they are used with too much liberty and without boundaries or criteria like the ones sometimes used in corporations. Policies such as these have hearts the right place but they are not managed or policed properly. The core difference with race-based admissions in colleges and universities versus the corporate sector lies with the schools themselves. A corporation’s ability to recruit and secure a diverse talent pool is only as good as the organization itself. Many corporations fall well short of the mark and most have only recently begin to realize that only the healthiest, most successful corporations have a racially diverse structure from the top down. For a university it has to be a core competency. Universities need a diverse student body to further their research initiatives as well as to attract more prospective students. Public universities need to maintain a diverse student body, but those students also must be able to maintain the rigors of college life. It’s a very thin tightrope for universities; diversity, challenging curricula, financial well-being, and maintaining a respectable dropout rate.

Dictionary.com describes discrimination as treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit. My problem, along with many others, is the last line of that definition “rather than on individual merit”. The hardest thing to define is whether the person claiming discrimination actually can qualify for said reward despite their race. That’s where organizations like The Project On Fair Representation step in. They are the organization involved in this particular case. In this instance they must ultimately argue that our society operates within the parameters of equal opportunity while arguing for equal opportunity in other cases. Their whole quandry is laughable, but let’s go back to earlier to the fact that I attended Texas A&M with one of my scholarships being race-based. We were a small class of students that stayed close up unto and past our senior year. Though I can’t quote statistics the majority of us graduated and almost all have had successful careers. To suggest that a university that was 76% Caucasian denied around 300 White students admission to accept 300 minority students based strictly on race incredulous.

A friend who works in admissions at Texas A&M now mentioned to me after this news hit the AP that thousands of qualified students are denied entry into A&M every year regardless of race. There are several factors that go into a student’s college selectability such as whether they are a Top 10% student, participation in extra-curriculars, participation in athletics, high school GPA, etc. All this is considered along with the students’ essay, references, and presumed choice of major. I don’t know all the criteria used at the University of Texas but I do know that the Sugarland teen suing UT fell outside of her graduating class’s Top 10 percent.

Quite possibly this student has a legitimate beef but more often than not Admissions counselors have to listen to sour grapes from denied students. Despite what the AP might lead you to believe, there is a strong base of qualified, Black students who can compete academically at colleges and universities. Unfortunately, many of those students are still not making it to top schools because of several factors with finances being a primary one. Without minority-based financial aid, many minority students don’t even apply because they know they can’t attend if they are accepted.

The purpose of race-based exceptions is to provide a diverse working environment and to “level the playing field” with the thought being that as Corporate America and Academia are diversified they will continue to feed themselves with more diversity. There are numerous societal cues that point to the fact that the playing field isn’t level and no policy has been able to undo what years of slavery, discrimination, and racial genocide have caused. Think about it; why would a school need to make exceptions for itelf on how it recruits students? Race-based admissions are not enacted to fill in a minority in where a qualified, non-minority would be. They are there to give an opportunity for minority students to attend when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It’s not a perfect system but until a better system is found it’s all we have and it should be preserved.

For more information visit http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5682324.html or http://www.projectonfairrepresentation.org/