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Chronicle article: MIT Opens 2 Programs to White and Asian Applicants in Response to Federal Inquiry
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Shulman)
Tue Feb 11 07:47:24 2003
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:39:35 -0500
From: Peter Shulman <skip@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from:
skip@mit.edu
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--**Peter
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- The text of the article is below -
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003
MIT Opens 2 Programs to White and Asian Applicants in Response
to Federal Inquiry
By PETER SCHMIDT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided to open
two summer programs to white and Asian-American applicants in
response to a discrimination complaint being investigated by
the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, officials
at MIT said Monday.
The two summer programs -- one for incoming freshmen, the
other for high-school students -- previously had been open
only to black, Hispanic, or American Indian applicants. The
Office for Civil Rights began investigating the programs last
spring, after receiving a complaint from two organizations
that oppose race-conscious college admissions policies: the
Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Sterling, Va., and the
American Civil Rights Institute, based in Sacramento, Calif.
The groups alleged that MIT, which is private, was violating
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial
discrimination at any institution that receives federal funds,
including federal financial aid and research grants.
Last month, officials at MIT quietly decided to open the
programs to students from all racial and ethnic groups after
concluding that race-exclusive admissions criteria could not
withstand a legal challenge. Jamie Lewis Keith, the
university's senior counsel, revealed the changes in the
policies on Monday, in response to questions about the federal
investigation.
"From a legal perspective, we did not have a lot of choice,"
said Ms. Keith. She characterized MIT's decision to alter the
admissions criteria as based on "an analysis of what our peers
were doing around the country, and what conclusions other
institutions have reached on the legality" of such policies.
"We are not aware of any racially exclusive programs that have
been successfully legally defended," said Robert P. Redwine,
who oversees the programs in question as MIT's dean for
undergraduate education. He said that MIT's president, Charles
M. Vest, had approved the admissions-policy change.
Both of the summer programs will continue to take the race and
ethnicity of applicants into account, in keeping with their
mission of bringing more black, Hispanic, and American Indian
students into the fields of science and engineering,
university officials said. But the programs no longer will be
off-limits to white and Asian-American applicants, and the
admissions criteria have been expanded to look at various
other factors related to disadvantage.
MIT plans, for example, to consider whether an applicant is
part of the first generation in his or her family to attend
college, or comes from a high school that does not send a high
percentage of its students on to four-year colleges,
university officials said.
MIT has informed the Office for Civil Rights of its change in
the summer programs' selection criteria, but has yet to
receive a response from the agency, university officials said.
Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said
the agency is continuing its investigation.
Roger B. Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal
Opportunity, on Monday welcomed the changes made by MIT, but
said that they did not go far enough, and that his group would
push the university to adopt admissions criteria that are
completely race-neutral. "Our hope is that, by the end of the
process, MIT will conclude that admission into these programs
should no longer consider the applicants' race or ethnicity at
all. We also hope that OCR will make that point to them," Mr.
Clegg said.
The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing the question of whether
colleges' admissions policies can give any consideration to
race and ethnicity, in the context of two major
affirmative-action cases involving the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor (The Chronicle, December 13, 2002).
Ms. Keith, of MIT, stressed that the admissions policies
abandoned by officials there differed significantly from those
in dispute at Michigan, because MIT's policies provided for
some applicants to be excluded from consideration based solely
on their race. She said that MIT officials remain convinced
that the U.S. Constitution permits colleges to consider race
and ethnicity as one of several factors influencing admissions
decisions.
About 60 students annually enroll in the two MIT summer
programs in question: Project Interphase, which helps incoming
freshmen adjust to college life, and the Minority Introduction
to Engineering, Entrepreneurship, and Science, which enrolls
high-school students, mainly between their junior and senior
years. Ms. Keith said MIT has already altered its recruitment
literature for the high-school program, and informed high
schools of the new admissions criteria, so that white and
Asian students will not be deterred from applying. The
university plans to inform incoming students of the changed
criteria for Project Interphase some time after the April
deadline for their decision whether to enroll at MIT.
Mr. Clegg said his organization initially contacted MIT in
early 2001, after receiving a complaint about the
institution's admissions policies from the parent of a
rejected white applicant to one of the summer programs, and
then contacted the Office for Civil Rights after MIT refused
to abandon the policies that it then had in place.
MIT is one of several colleges that the Center for Equal
Opportunity and American Civil Rights Institute have
identified as having race-conscious admissions or employment
policies. Last week, Princeton University announced that it
planned to either revamp or scrap a summer program for
minority students, partly in response to word of the Office
for Civil Rights investigation of MIT and to threats by the
two anti-preference groups to alert federal officials about
Princeton's policies (The Chronicle, February 7).
On a separate front, the American Civil Rights Institute has
placed an advertisement in today's edition of The Daily Texan,
the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin,
urging students to contact the institute if they wish to
challenge a state-sponsored financial-aid program open only to
women and minority members. "If you believe this is unfair and
want to learn more about how you can open this program to all
worthy students, regardless of their race or sex, we want to
hear from you," the ad says.
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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