Alas, I have to put Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aside. The Chronicle of Higher Education just announced the release of a report by Gary Orfield and friends advising colleges and universities that it is still safe to divvy up college admissions, financial aid, and other goodies according to skin color. Orfield was the director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, where he superintended a steady flow of racial preference apologetics under titles like Chilling Admissions and Diversity Challenged. Orfield moved with his the Civil Rights Project to the UCLA graduate School of Education at the end of 2006, and this report is the first fruit of the sunnier locale. Charting the Future of College Affirmative Action: Legal Victories, Continuing Attacks, and New Research is available as a free download but at 210 pages, you might not want to print the whole thing.
The report consists of eight essays and an Foreword by Professor Orfield. Among the essays, Karen Miksch’s “Stand Your Ground: Legal and Policy Justifications for Race-Conscious Programming” has the most odoriferous title. (Concluding sentence: “Education researchers and policy makers must also utilize the press to document successful race-conscious programs, while continuing to bring public attention to the ‘pipeline’ crisis.”) The concluding chapter, “Race-Conscious Student Financial Aid: Constructing an Agenda for Research, Litigation, and Policy Development,” sounds most ominous. I suppose it is late in the day to complain about universities using the cover of scholarship for what amount to straightforward political advocacy, but Orfield & friends are masters at this. Here is a typical bit of tendentiousness from the race-conscious financial aid article: “State race-conscious aid programs more than doubled in number over the past two decades as an appropriate response to the inequalities created by privatization.” ( The inequalities created by privatization? Appropriate? So politics had nothing to do with it?)
CHE rightly reports that the basic theme of the volume is that colleges and universities ought to ignore the pressure from conservatives to abide by the legal limits that the Supreme Court has put on racial preference in higher education, most recently in the 2003 majority opinions in Grutter and Gratz. The gist of Orfield’s theory is that these opinions give a lot more scope for racial preferences than conservatives say. Is he right? I much doubt it, but the argument he is pushing will certainly make it harder to convince colleges and universities to relinquish race preferences that cannot be justified by the Grutter decision. This won’t slow down Ward Connerly’s push for race-preference-ending ballot initiatives in five more states on November 4, 2008, and it won’t stop other organizations like the Center for Equal Opportunity and the National Association of Scholars from alerting colleges and universities about the legal risks they run if they continue to engage in racial discrimination.
I will nonetheless read every word of Orfield’s report. Harry will have to wait.