 This program is brought to you by Emory University. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Good afternoon, welcome to our family forum series. It's a great privilege to see all of you here. Thank you very much for coming. My name is John Witte. I serve as director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, the sponsor of today's proceedings. Our center is dedicated to the study of some of the religious sources and dimensions of cardinal issues at the intersection of law, politics, and society. We pursue our work through a series of advanced research projects, seminars, courses, publications, and public forums such as this one. This year's family forum series is focused on issues of children. From this lectern, we have addressed hard issues ranging from the disposition of unwanted frozen embryos to the wisdom and folly of corporal child discipline to the immense challenges posed by adolescent sex, rape, and violence. We have also analyzed various responses by church and state authorities to the grim plight of children in America today. Issues ranging from the constitutional propriety of faith-based initiatives for impoverished children to the institutional priority of church-based action in African American communities unusually decimated by the breakdown of traditional family structures. Today, we address some of the hard legal and cultural intricacies of affirmative action in education. Is affirmative action an enlightened and long overdue rebuke to the savagery and ravages of racism, slavery, poverty, and hierarchy as Justice Thurgood Marshall once called it? Or is affirmative action a bulwark and a badge of inferiority that breeds dangerous dependencies and false entitlements as Justice Clarence Thomas recently indicated? Is affirmative action a courageous and innovative legal experiment designed to create new diversities in our cultures, our classrooms, our cannons? If so, how long should the experiment last? Whom should it serve? By what scales should we measure its success or failure? These are among the hard questions that our speaker today has addressed with great acuity and alacrity over the past two decades and more. It's a privilege indeed to welcome to this lectern Emery's new provost, Professor Dr. Earl Lewis. Provost Lewis is a distinguished historian of African American life and culture. From 1984 to 1989, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley in its African American Studies Department. From there, he moved to the University of Michigan where he served as a chaired professor and as director of the Michigan Afro-American and African Studies Department. From there, he moved to become Michigan's vice provost and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Happily last summer, the South beckoned and Dr. Lewis answered and he is now completing his first year as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Emory University. He has already taken this institution by intellectual storm. Provost Lewis has published scores of articles and seven monographs, including his recent award-winning title from Oxford University Press to make our world anew, A History of African Americans. He is co-editor of the 11-volume Young Oxford History of African Americans. His most recent title, Defending Diversity, Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan. This volume provides a unique insider's look and something of an apologia for the Supreme Court's most recent case on affirmative action, Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the University of Michigan Law School's Affirmative Action program. It is that topic which will occupy Provost Lewis today. He will offer us 30 or 40 minutes of remarks after the applause dies down. Finally, he will then take questions from the floor. Will you please join me in offering a very warm welcome to our colleague, our leader, our teacher, Provost Lewis. Thank you this officially afternoon, so good afternoon everyone. And thank you. When I accepted the invitation and John said he was teaching a class in law and what I come and talk to his class, let's say sure. And then I realized this probably is the largest class in the law school. And in all seriousness, I came to realize that this is an opportunity to talk about a larger topic to a broad cross-section. And I hope what we can do and achieve this afternoon is to do several things. One, let me lay out an argument and see what you think of it. And then two, let's respond and have a dialogue and a conversation. As was noted, I was on the faculty at the University of Michigan for 15 years. And I played a variety of roles from faculty member to director of the Center for African-American and African Studies to Rose in the History Department and then ultimately Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School. At one point during that period, Lee Bollinger, who was the President of the University and Nancy Cantor, who was then Provost of the University came and asked me would I lead an effort at Michigan on what we ended up calling diversity dialogues. The ability to actually deal with the moment of when the nation was shining a spotlight on the institution intensely about diversity and affirmative action and it made sure that the community accepted and implode and explode as a result. Knowing that that kind of intense scrutiny for a long period of time in and of itself could be very devastating as individuals began to live out and deal with the consequences of being in a spotlight for a number of years. So what I want to talk about today is the future of affirmative action and ask the question, can it survive? And this is an odd role for historians trying to predict the future. There are others in this room and across the street, particularly in the business school that bank on the fact that they can predict the futures from the stock market to other areas of life and sometimes they even win. As a historian, we do better with the fact that we look at the past because we know that the past is not always a really sharp predictor of the future. But anyway, let's engage in a conversation. Many in higher education viewed the Supreme Court decision on July 23rd, 2003 in both the Grots vs. Bollinger and Gruder vs. Bollinger cases as an overall victory. In those cases, the Supreme Court held the principle that state institutions had a compelling interest in creating a racially and ethnically diverse class. Headlines in the next day's newspaper suggested what many sensed and hoped. One headline read, colleges relieved. Another headline read, you of Michigan ruling endorses the value of campus diversity. Michigan's cases and its defense of its actions turned on a diversity argument rather than a frontal support of affirmative action. As a result, the tilt toward a diversity argument ironically exposes affirmative action to a somewhat perilous fate. A prospect many opponents no doubt invite and cherish. I don't know how many of you actually read either of the two cases in their entirety, but neither insofar as I have been able to detect ever used a phrase affirmative action. Why? Affirmative action classically defined has come to mean, according to social psychologist Faye Crosby, and I'm quoting here, the expenditure of energy or resources by an organization in the quest for equality among individuals from different discernible groups. This definition has long been accepted by policymakers from both political parties. It bestowed the tools to monitor change by race, gender, nationality, and a number of other variables. At its core, affirmative action, in my view, has been a moderate social policy since it enabled institutions to put into place plans for improving opportunities for racial minorities, women, and others. And this is a principle that the Supreme Court maintained in the two Michigan Supreme Court cases. Affirmative action, therefore, has been more about offering solutions to members of groups rather than individuals, although on average the remedies befall individuals from these specific groups. By contrast, and by contrast I mean by contrast, equal opportunity provisions have been routinely interpreted to mean benefits that redound to specific individuals who may be members of protected groups or categories. And the tension between affirmative action and equal protection is always an equal opportunity is one of those ones that is written into both social policy and commentary as well as into law. But from the beginning, reflecting both an intellectual rationale and a political compromise, the University of Michigan decided to defend diversity instead of affirmative action. And so here I'm speaking both as an academic historian and an insider when I make that point. Michigan's leadership among them, the president, provosts, and regents but the real issue was diversity. Intellectual diversity as well as racial and ethnic diversity. After all, when 1st Jennifer Grottson and Patrick Amaker sued the undergraduate college and the university's leadership, and then Barbara Gruder sued the law school and the campus leaders, the undergraduate admissions office had a complex multi-dimensional formula that it used to decide the makeup of its freshman class. The formula allowed for a maximum of 150 points. The majority of points derived from purely academic factors such as GPA, class standing, the rigor of a high school curriculum, including the number of AP courses at one school and the number taken by the student, test scores, and other merit-based factors. Students also received points if their relatives had graduated from the university legacy or if they lived in rural settings, played an instrument well over athletes. Points also went to students irrespective of race who attended schools in socially-economically disadvantaged areas to young women who intended to major in areas in which they were underrepresented and for race, racial, and ethnic membership, that is, if you were black, Latino, or Native American. From the late 19th century, university leaders had steadfastly argued that ensuring a diverse class stemmed from the mission of the school to provide an uncommon education for the common person. So on the one hand, the diversity argument had very deep roots in Michigan and at the University of Michigan. Naturally, no parenthetically, of course, the law school had a different argument. The argument was not about intellectual diversity in the sense of being able to mass a class along a long, complex list of variables in a formula. They argued that diversity was critical and because there's a question of critical mass, that the only way to ensure an intellectually diverse class is to make sure that you have representation from a broad spectrum of individuals. And that at some point, if you didn't have enough, then individuals who were in a minority would feel silenced in the context of that classroom and hence be inhibited in the educational environment. And as a result, the university and the students who matriculated in the law school would not benefit in the fullest sense from a diverse learning environment. Going back to the diversity argument, it was also the case that the diversity argument worked well in a political environment of the 1990s. And we shouldn't lose sight of this. I'm a social historian. After a period of democratic control of the governor's mansion as well as both chambers of the state legislature, the Republican Party in the state of Michigan regained control with the election of John Engler as governor. Engler's people sent word that they would not challenge the university's endorsement of a diversity rationale as long as the issue didn't become a primitive action. Although enjoying bipartisan support at one level, the party understood that the relationship between race and affirmative action have potentially explosive consequences for the party and its fortunes. This is the Republican Party I'm speaking of. If the issue became affirmative action, many in a more conservative western part of the state may become mobilized, some feared. Thereby pitting the party, growing and influencing statewide but still in a minority against an equally mobilized labor and civil rights coalition. And so the question here became how did you win? Recognizing this is a trade. If you mobilize your forces, you're most likely to also mobilize the opposition. And in the context of Michigan then the stakes were high if your goal was to control both chambers of the state legislature. And as a result then the argument was is then we will allow a diversity argument to come forth. The Republican Party will indeed support the university in that sense. It would not oppose it. But the argument had to be diversity and not affirmative action. However, not all members of the Republican Party in the state of Michigan were agreed to partake in this deal. Three state legislators led by University of Michigan graduate David J. placed ads and newspapers across the state. Seeking any white student who believed they had been denied admission to the University of Michigan due to their race. These ads produced 500 names, according to most published accounts. From that group of 500, the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington based social action group settled on a three whose names now grace future constitutional history texts forever. Gratz, Jenner, Amaker, and Gruder. And so when you think of it then and you realize that oftentimes when you read this case and in good con law books you'll get all of this, but there's a lot of politics in the background that were influencing the ways in which we got these cases, who participated, who were the faces that we saw and for those of you who watched 60 minute pieces and why they looked the way they did. The result was that on October 14, 1997 Gratz and others, versus Bollinger and others were submitted and filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. A little over a month later, December 3, 1997, Gruder versus Bollinger was also filed in the Eastern District. Then the story gets really interesting because on February 5, 1998, there was a motion to intervene in the Gratz case filed by high school students of color in the state of Michigan and their parents. It was a group called Citizens for Affirmative Action Preservation. They were joined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They all wanted to intervene believing that the University of Michigan had a history of racial discrimination and that in its own defense it would never bring forth evidence that it had a history of racial discrimination and that the only way for this to come out is then for standing by third party interveners. The motion to intervene was denied by the district courts. This would continue again and they would resubmit the same motion to intervene in the Gruder case. This was filed on March 26, 1998. Again, the motion to intervene was denied. August 10, 1999, a year later, and you realize how long this process before we get to 2003, August 10, 1999, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's order and allowed intervention in both cases. Both courts then allowed additional time for discovery and the case was delayed for another year. Between July and October of 2000, another group intervenes. This time, it's American's corporate sector. General Motors would lead then a series of amici briefs that would be filed on behalf of 1,400 corporations in support of the diversity rationale put forth by the University of Michigan, arguing that the value of a diverse workforce was important to the future of American corporate interests and American economic might. In fact, between July of 2000 and February of 2003, 74 amici briefs will be filed with the U.S. Supreme Court and other layers of the U.S. court system. And they will come from scores of organizations, professional associations, universities including Emory, colleges, law schools, Fortune 500, and more than 14,000 law school students and other individuals. Oral arguments will be held on November 16th in 2000 in the Grots case. And what was interesting in this case is that the Center for Individual Rights conceded one important point. It conceded that all students admitted to the University of Michigan under its affirmative action plan and procedures, that all of those students were qualified. So it was not a question of whether or not unqualified students had replaced more qualified students. The Center for Individual Rights conceded. All the students who had been admitted were qualified. The question really for the Center for Individual Rights is whether race should be a variable in the admissions process at all. That really was a fundamental question that I, at least I argue, and you would see it played out. They also decided to waive a trial and they went to sort of a summary judgment. Judge Duggan issued his opinion in the Grots case on December 13th in 2000 that the Undergraduate Admissions Program is constitutional under Baki since it is narrowly tailored and because diversity in higher education serve a compelling governmental interest. So it was interesting that at the district court level where it was decided, the judge decided that it was narrowly tailored and it was constitutional. He did rule however, he being Duggan, did rule that the admissions program that was in effect between 1995 and 1998 which was more formulaic was unconstitutional so he made it a divide that the changes that have been made since Grots and Armacryphal suit were more in keeping with the court understanding in Baki. At the same time December 22nd in 2000 Judge Friedman would hear oral arguments and in the Grutter case he decides however to hold a limited trial. He initially, as in the Undergraduate case they sought for summary judgment but he decided to have a limited trial. That trial would run through February of 2001 and there would be numerous individuals who would play a role in that trial. This is all part of the background that leads up then to the April 1st, 2003 Supreme Court because what will happen of course is that both cases, the Undergraduate case would have been decided at a district level. Judge Friedman would decide in favor and that case would be appealed to the appellate level and from there it would make its way all the way to the Supreme Court. In fact both cases would in the end be consolidated. Provide his background because the joke of course at Michigan that we would have a Supreme Court hearing on April Fools' Day was in and of itself a bad omen of things to come. You weren't exactly sure what to make of the tea leaves there. But when the decision came then and came forth you realized that we were at a different point in American constitutional history when you're trying to figure out the very thorny issue of how to deal with race in American life. There was a decision and there was much conversation as part of the strategy that if we were going to win this case when we were at Michigan there was one primary justice to speak to. Sondra Day O'Connor. From 1997 until 2003 there was a general consensus that the pivot swing vote in this case would be Sondra Day O'Connor. That part of advising a legal strategy meant figuring out a strategy that would be heard by Sondra Day O'Connor. And in the end it proved to be the case that she became the most important voice in understanding and approving of the procedures that had been adopted in a diversity argument. Michigan will go on to argue, and this is the piece, that diversity had then both educational outcomes and democracy outcomes. It was about education and democracy. So a series of social science studies completed by a range of social psychologists including my friend and colleague Pat Guern went back to look at what happens to young people in learning environments in which there are people of different racial, ethnic, religious backgrounds. And what we found, and what they found is a series of educational outcomes. So students tended to participate more actively in class. They were measured on critical analysis and critical learning skills. They tended to hire critical learning and critical analytical skills that have been developed. They also tended to engage in, interestingly enough, in external activities once they graduated. They tended to be, unlike the whole notion of bowling alone, they tended to be involved in the community in critical ways. It was attributed to, and argued, that this was an important benefit of diversity. The same thing that was argued also at the law school, looking at what happens to law school graduates, how do they benefit from this learning environment. That all seemed to have been very, very important. And the final analysis is one looked at and tried to understand the benefits of the Michigan approach to diversity and affirmative action. I say this in part because when you think about, then, the post-gruder and grots environment, we're now at a point where we know the outcome and I won't go through all blow-by-blow of narrow-tailoring and strict scrutiny and all the other bits and pieces that you will be discussing elsewhere here. But let's talk a little bit about the policy consequences of gruder and grots. What does it mean for us at this particular point and for now only for the University of Michigan but for other institutions similarly situated? In the post-gruder and grots environment, what can we expect? First, I think we can expect renewed efforts by opponents to frame the issue as affirmative action and not diversity. I think for all the efforts by the University of Michigan to say this is all about diversity, I think in a post-gruder and grots environment, there will be renewed efforts to frame the issue as affirmative action and not diversity. Affirmative action lends itself more readily to a narrative of unfairness. If you think of it, it lends itself more readily to a narrative of unfairness. After all, there is the assumption that a more qualified student is replaced by a lesser qualified student in the general narrative that has been constructed by, among others, Ward Connolly, Shelby Steele, and Linda Chavez. And if you go through and systematically read what they have written, affirmative action is unfair because someone more qualified has been replaced. And so I think we can expect renewed efforts then to reframe the debate. Second, I think we can anticipate new methods of attack that, in their practice, limit the degree to which institutions will be able to pursue either standard affirmative action measures or new kinds of affirmative action measures. Let me see if I can explain this. In the months after Gruder and Grots were decided, the Center for Equal Opportunities, a body, scoured websites around the country and they followed off their certain websites with letters to most major universities and they threatened those universities. They told them that they would instigate investigations by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education if they didn't expand their eligibility for some of research opportunity programs. And some of you actually may be aware of this. Now on the surface, this may seem a reasonable response, open participation by all irrespective of race. But with the decline in international applicants to graduate programs due both to the negative consequences of immigration policy and intense competition abroad, targeting students of color for programs intended to interest them in graduate school may look more like sound social policy rather than a version of reverse discrimination. Here's a question about pool and who's available and how do we expand a domestic pool at a time that we're no longer able to attract as many international students as possible? The summer research opportunity programs had existed to do that very thing. Targeting in them may in one hand seem like an appropriate response in the grutter and gross, post-grutter gross environment. But on the other hand, it also looks like it is in a way to delimit the options under the broader heading of affirmative action. Third, the specter of lawsuits has led many universities, foundations, and other institutions to adopt practices that some, including me, see as a retreat. When the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, for instance, decided to expand eligibility for old programs, on the one hand that makes sense if they're also expanding the budget. But if the budget is static, and eligibility is expanded, you decrease then the availability for the groups that had always been part of the focus of their efforts to expand inclusion. It's a huge question right now, bubbling across the American social and political landscape, is how do you accomplish both tasks? How do you make sure that you expand eligibility without diluting the focus of the programs in the first instance? Fourth, in a number of states' anti-affirmative action activists have mounted successful referenda campaigns. We think of California and Washington. Perhaps most noticeable is the attempt to get a ballot initiative on a 2006 Michigan ballot that would ban the use of race and gender in employment, promotions, and college admissions. This came after the Gruder and Grotz decision. It was led by Ward Connolly, never in my mind ever a resident of the state of Michigan. He and his colleagues would call this effort the Civil Rights Initiative. One could say this is a devious play on words. One could say a few other things. Fifth, I think in the Gruder and Grotz environment, there is the ever real danger of what I call diversity fatigue. Diversity fatigue. Man, we've been there. We've done it. I'm tired of this. Can't we find another issue? It surely sat in at the University of Michigan in the months and days, days and months after Gruder and Grotz was decided. There was a general malaise across campus. The institution had invested millions of dollars, had prevailed in the Supreme Court, and now couldn't it just be over? People were tired. They wanted to do something else. One of the ironies, I think, is that when we mount these kinds of efforts, be they for a generation or two, there is this life cycle in terms of energy and focus, diversity, fatigue, as set in across the country in many different ways. Finally, I would argue that the current focus on diversity rather than affirmative action has one other effect. Namely, the question of race and opportunity in American life gets tabled. The question of race and opportunity in American life gets tabled. Statistics still show that life chances and expectations very greatly by race and socioeconomic status. Is it possible, I ask? Is it possible to have an honestly brokered conversation about race? And I'm not so sure that we can. The historian in me wonders whether or not we can have an honestly brokered conversation about race. I'm not sure it was there in Gruder and Grotz. I'm not sure that we will see it in the days and weeks ahead. I hope you can correct me. I hope you are more optimistic than I am. I'm not quite yet where the Boers was in 1963. But one begins to wonder whether or not there are certain topics that we just can't fully discuss in ways that allow us to work through the pros and cons of an argument. So, so that we make sure we have time for conversation. Let me put out a conclusion and in there, embedded in it, a question. In conclusion, the debate over affirmative action will survive. The debate over affirmative action will survive, as will the need to tap the diversity of intellectual talent across the country. There's every reason to believe that certain practices may end, not because they don't work and haven't been important. They will most likely end because the politics of race continue to outpace thoughtful conversation about social policy. Studies show that opinions about the efficacy of affirmative action vary greatly, depending more than anything on the ways in which investigators phrase the question, series of studies. This manipulation poisons the moments for reason and detail-centered debates. As a result, in 25 years, the period most think the court is prepared to tolerate affirmative action in college admissions. Unless we take difficult steps in the K-12 sector, the past will continue to haunt the president. If that proves correct, affirmative action will be likened to that 1960s daytime soap opera about vampires, those of you who were old enough to remember it was called Dark Shadows. Now, if you remember Dark Shadows, Barnabas was killed, his coffin nail shut, but each time he managed to escape and live again. Many times he came back in a slightly modified form, never quite the same old Barnabas, although always recognizable in the end to friend and foe. Affirmative action may prove our Dark Shadows, that thing we cannot kill until we deal with a larger matter of race and opportunity in American life. In some ways, that's the largest story of gruder and grots. That's the lingering story of gruder and grots. That's the most important aspect of gruder and grots. The fact that we still have to deal not just with affirmative action, not just with diversity, but the question of race and opportunity in the 21st century. At that point we all need to stand back and ask even if affirmative action survives, what does it mean? Thank you. Well, thank you, Mr. Provost. I think he deserves another round of applause for that fine set of remarks. It is time for an honestly broken conversation on race, which the forums that we try to create in this auditorium under the auspices of our center are designed to do. And may I invite you to put questions to the Provost if I could ask you please to use the microphones that are halfway through the auditorium and put your question with pithiness and profundity please, such that the Provost can answer your question pithily and profoundly in return. Please, Mr. Gosher. A few years ago the State of Florida in response to Ward Connolly's valid initiative implemented the talented 20 program. Do you believe that programs like that are a valid way to increase diversity in the higher education because the University of Florida the following year after the implementation did see a drop in minority enrollment but since then it has been back on the upswing. I've always had a problem with the sort of talented five or talented 20 or whatever percent program. One, at least at the undergraduate level, is predicated on segregation. And so you end up then dealing with this huge social and ethical conundrum that you have to have sufficiently segregated housing patterns in the United States that then translate into sufficiently segregated schools to be able to identify then students of certain backgrounds to get sufficient numbers into universities and schools and colleges. I'm not sure as a country that we actually want to build social policy on the foundation of segregation. Thank you Provost Lewis. I'm appreciative of your reference to Du Bois and very recently heard Professor Lucius Outlaw who is Vice Provost at Vanderbilt and Professor of Philosophy and his discussion centered around Tuckville's assessment of what he called the three races at that point in the U.S. As I listen to the conversations about university level admissions and or successes I'm hearing that from the student perspective. I would like to ask if you could speak to the phenomenon of the professoriate who are ill-prepared and sometimes antagonistic towards those very admittees. Sure. It's a very, very difficult issue because what we, when I recognize Provost that a lot of the change inside of the academy comes from actually dealing with colleagues, faculty. We made the decisions particularly outside of undergraduate admissions. Typically we made the decisions as to who actually will show up in the classroom from one fall to another. It's usually a faculty admissions committee that is playing a very, very important role. One of the great challenges and I should state parenthetically I served for three years on the board of directors under the GRE, the graduate record exam. What we struggle with there is that cognitive examinations in and of themselves only tell you a fraction of what you need to know about an individual as we try to predict who should be admitted to a class. We spent three years while I was on the board trying to come up with non-cognitive factors. So for instance when you're thinking about that and dealing with faculty, so the question becomes if you're only looking at LSAT scores in GPAs or GREs or whatever, you still only account for 53 to 57% of the variance. There's a lot of other things out there, from creativity to imagination to stick-to-it-ness to a whole range of other factors that predict success in these selective environments. And a debate over affirmative action is really a debate about access to the most selective institutions in the United States. I mean we should be quite honest and clear about that. It's not about whether or not we're going to enroll enough students in our classrooms. And in fact we, in some places in certain sectors we have more seats than students. That's why we have been able to secure talent from around the world. We've picked off the top 1.5 or 1% of the world's population for the last 50 years, but in part because in certain areas we don't have enough representation here. And so it really is a debate about then admissions to places like Emory and the University of Michigan. And in that case then faculty play a very important role. The larger issue for us is then how do we begin to think through what it means to be successful? What is merit? How do we measure it? Are there multiple definitions? How do we look at the whole person in the admissions process? And that's the greatest challenge. How do we look at the whole person in the admissions process? Dr. Lewis, you mentioned as a possible solution the aggressive intervention in K through 12. And there's, I think, a strong argument that this is likely to be as effective or more effective than an affirmative action at the college or professional school level. Yet there doesn't seem to be the political will to implement this type of solution. Do you have any thoughts on why that's so? I have a lot of thoughts. Let's see if I can provide any light here. I think part of the great challenge is the K through 12 education opportunities across the nation are evenly distributed. And so if you look at the resource basis from one state to another, one goes back to the basis system of taxation. What are the tax structures in states and how are those resources then redistributed? Using Detroit as an example, we knew at the University of Michigan that when we looked at both inner city Detroit and some rural areas of the state of Michigan they had three or four AP courses offered to graduated students. In Ann Arbor the public schools offer 27 AP courses. And so it would mean then changing the allocation of resources in ways that are uncomfortable. No legislature no governor is going to step in and dictate to a municipality. There was an attempt in the 1980s in 1989 to level a plan field in part by redoing real estate taxes across the country and trying to figure out there in a way to see if that would help to smooth out the distribution of resources. Mixed results in so far as I've been able to tell. So that's one piece. The second piece is about tenure of teachers inside of certain districts and who they are, how long they're tenure, what kind of resources they get. That's a hard and thorny piece. The Gates Foundation is working with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for early college program, trying to work with universities to partner them with school districts around the country to begin to train school teachers to provide them with greater materials and credentials to assist in this problem. It's quite systemic. When you look at dropout rates and a range of other factors, it's a huge challenge. I'm not convinced that the No Child Left Behind platform is the best way to do it unless there's going to be federal dollars to support it. A lot of money is appropriated by congress means that what we have is an unfunded mandate. Some have argued in both directions that there are indeed funds there and you have governor's arguing that there's not enough funds there. The political will will have to come from the people of the United States. I think in effect we determine what our policy makers do. For those of you out here use your electorate. Use your vote. Franchise is important. Hi, Dr. Laris. Actually I was going to follow up on a question that was just asked, which is a lot of the changes that came in the civil rights movement were through legal mechanisms to address inequities in education. I guess one question I would have is what role do you think we have a group of young lawyers here that are all going to go and be part of the system. How do you think they can help to address some of the difficult tasks that need to be addressed in K-12 as well and is in higher education? That's not knowing how representative this group is in terms of your aspirations and what sectors of the law you actually intend to practice. Let me say this, I think there are certain ways that you can intervene at the local level by serving on various agencies and boards that indeed affect the ways in which people actually live their lives. That's very, very important. You can intervene in ways that actually help craft bills and in degree to which those bills themselves reflect a broader ethical concern for the least among us as well as the best off among us. And there's a real tension sometimes in the system. I think the other part is actually to engage in a conversation that to make sure that no graduate of the Emory Law School is ever able to leave this place without saying that he or she has a commitment to lead in whatever area they can lead. And that means then in the language that I have created that to be an Emory Law School graduate is to believe yourself as a citizen scholar. You have used your learning here to go and affect in a positive way change in the greater world. If you leave in nothing else, then there's real commitment to be in a citizen scholar, that you're using your learning to affect positively change for the world. Then I think we're taking one giant step forward. I'm really grateful for the fact that you brought up that the affirmative action cases recently are essentially tabling the real question of race and opportunity. And I think that the frustration that a lot of people feel when they're discussing affirmative action programs is they don't know how those programs relate back to the goal of equality. And I was wondering if you could comment on what you think the best frameworks are for really bringing the question of race and opportunity back into the discussion if it's through affirmative action or really through bringing up other topics. This is a multi-prong. For those of you who realize, I'm a product of education in the South. I was born in Virginia, went to segregated schools until I was in the 10th grade. And so I represent that transitional generation. Ten years of segregated schools, three years of desegregated schools in Virginia, came to see what it meant to move from one environment to another. And so on my face is sort of this recent chapter in American life. I graduated in 1974. I had been in desegregated environments from 1970 until that point. 1978 was Baki. The experiment with affirmative action was pretty short. From 1970 to 1978 in effect before the course intervened and said, look, this is not to redress past wrongs. It really is about creating a diverse society. If you think of that, just think of those two sort of historical problems. And you realize we had a pretty truncated period in which to wrestle over some of the thorniest issues. I mean, it seems a long way from, if you're looking now from 2003, or 2005 backwards to 1978, but really is that intervening period between 1970 and 1978 that most schools in the South desegregated. And there were longer battles in the North. And so what I would end up saying is that here's one case where history does matter. The second piece is that what you want to go and begin to do is ask what questions about race and opportunity. Did Michigan make mistakes in ways in which it formulated its class and when it had the formula? I would say, yeah, we made mistakes. It was imperfect. And in some ways, in hindsight we ended up saying, you know, what we should have done is having just for those who don't know, we gave an automatic 20 points and 150 points if you were a member of one of the three protected classes. But we probably should have had a gradation there for your social economic background. And so that if you were in one area, if you were came from an impoverished background, then you got the full 20 points and then it slid down depending on if you were my daughter and you got something else. Those are things that we knew in hindsight, but those are the kinds of questions we should be able to talk about as we try to divide policy. I asked here, in this case, people who tell me race doesn't matter. And I go, okay. So I asked the question and I asked in this audience, how many of you have ever played the racial guessing game? The racial guessing game. By that, when you're walking down the street, you see someone who looks ambiguous and you're trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. And every now and then I get someone to tell me they never have and they're amazing to me. Because I know I have. And so even in that subtle, insidious way we are aware of race and it plays a way in framing our relationships and the ways in which we approach people and the organization in the world. It's not said we're good or bad. It's the fact that we're socialized in a context. Our ability to deal with that socialization then means that we have to talk about the relationship to opportunity. That's my long-winded answer to your very, very important question. I hope it begins to answer. Dr. Lewis, I want to preface this by saying I'm personally in favor of affirmative action. There was a recent Stamford Law Review article by a UCLA prof that posited minorities admitted under affirmative action are actually hurt by it. Because they end up disproportionately towards the bottom of their law school classes and lag behind in bar admissions. Whereas if they were then admitted to lower tiered schools they presumably do a lot better. Self-esteem, success follows. How do you respond? I have read those services studies like that. Um... I'm gonna... If that's the case in the systematic at UCLA was this UCLA or someplace else? If it's systematic at UCLA then UCLA should actually try to figure out what it needs to do. I mean, if it's not preparing the students well enough to pass the bar that's a huge problem for UCLA. If it has to do with sort of quote-unquote innate abilities of students then that one is always suspicious to me because faculty get to play a role in selection of any class. If the over-predominance factor is race then in what they're looking for that's in cities and that's wrong and that's racist actually. And so I would call faculty colleagues if you bring in someone that you have any doubts that cannot succeed in that environment then you made a mistake. I mean it's not the policy, it's the practice. And we end up condemning policies when people in themselves in acting those policies sometimes engage in the wrong practices. However, I also have seen some of our studies that show that individuals when you try to use the predictors of LSAT and GPAs are imperfect measures of whether or not an individual is going to be successful in that environment. And that's the same thing for admissions to graduate school and to medical school. Before I would be able to answer in any formal way, I need to know a little bit more about the actual learning environment inside of this particular law school. But, you know, I hear the critics and in some ways that's what they're doing and they're doing it in a way just to get the numbers. Then that's wrong. Being part of what you want to do is to create a learning environment where everyone learns. The second piece of it, and it can conclude here is this is the kind of research that requires a longitudinal approach. I mean where an individual happens to be in the first year law school or the last year law school is sometimes different than where they are 10, 15 years out and there's the degree to which they're actually being able to serve a broader society. And so a snapshot approach only tells you a little bit. I was just at a meeting at Stony Brook where Professor Cole's sociologist had very similar data and I had a series of questions about what those data meant in the long run. Anyway, and my go here and I should just note and I know that's not what you meant. In my view it's about public policy. I mean it really is about what's the best policy here and whether or not it makes some sense for this particular point in time and not to convince you whether or not it's a good policy or a bad policy. It's whether or not it's a workable policy. Can someone tell us what the admission equation is in Emory Law School? Do we have a number and is it different from the graduate school than the college? I couldn't begin to tell you what you do at the law school but I defer to anyone else here. And clearly I think at the graduate level what they end up doing each individual student is reviewed and these files are reviewed by a group of faculty and individual schools and departments and programs they make the determination in the end whether or not that student is a good fit for that particular program that is compared to that particular pool. At the undergraduate level there's the essential admissions office that looks at a variety of factors including GPA AP courses standing in class special projects athletic and other kinds of talents but SAT or ACT scores etc and then you fall into certain quadrants. I appreciate the law school but we have silence on this but even in the graduate school and the college that doesn't sound like a pro-diversity program in any organized sense of the word. Okay, I hear your point. Thank you, sir. You talked about how diversity would lead to intellectual diversity. At my alma mater Williams College I recently read in the Wall Street Journal a survey 53 out of 53 professors responding identified themselves as Democrats. So if the intellectual diversity is a true goal of colleges and universities and Williams is in liberal Massachusetts it might be a little extreme but I'm not as extreme as universities go they tend to be more to the left is that kind of intellectual diversity something that universities are looking at? Insofar as I know yes and no let me start with the no part. Insofar as I know there's no faculty committee and I certainly not from my office do we ask anyone their political affiliation when they're being considered for a job in fact I actually would find that a little queasy actually to be asking people in part because of the 1950s when I joined the University of California faculty in 1984 I still had to sign a loyalty oath it was held over from the McCarthy era and so there are a lot of institutions dealing with the fact that there was a period not that long ago in American higher education where you had to engage in behavior and sign oaths that place you on one side or another of a political spectrum in a set of political possibilities as a result I think most of us engage in a series of other conversations rather than are you Republican are you Democrat are you independent are you socialist are you something else 53 out of how many faculty at Williams except selecting as well there was something about the range of faculty who responded so as a survey in this methodology question I would want to make sure you have to survey the whole population to make sure that indeed 47 who responded didn't fall into some other sort of range of political beliefs and even then that's the second piece third piece is that because one has a Democratic label if you're a member of the Democratic Party that covers a lot of people that I would conclude from that particular one variable that there was not intellectual diversity in those midst if you think of Senator Lieberman on one end of a spectrum Tech Kennedy on another they aren't quite the same people not quite the same people so part of it is how we just as research how we begin to phrase the question and to get it now get into your question and do we look at it and should we look at it and how to maintain intellectual diversity is important there are ways of doing it one way is who are the professors another way is actually to invite people in and in a way in which we expand the conversation by inviting a variety of viewpoints inside of the institution to debate and talk so if we aren't able to achieve in a short run your goal my goal of intellectual diversity by who we sit in the classroom who's an instructor we can do it in other ways you get to play a role you get to play a role in helping to form and shape the speaker series and other kinds of activities Dr. Lewis I'm really interested in what you call diversity fatigue and I wonder to what degree that is portraying a change in personal and categorical constructions of race as one's identity is it because individually we just don't think that race is that important to us I think it's a little bit of both I think it's individual for some of us at this particular point in time we like to be sort of beyond race as a problem in a reality we like to believe that we carry into the 21st century new problems and not the problems of the 20th or the 19th century and somehow we can get beyond race and so if you end up looking at surveys of young people 13 to 17 they will talk in transracial categories in some instances in terms of clothes music, friendships, relationships etc and those are real in some ways if you talk about institutions however and how institutions are organized in the ways in which we count I mean for lawyers and I was having this conversation for lawyers how do you measure change in society if you don't have categories how do you ensure that you protect in categories individuals who belong to certain categories if you don't label them and so in the process of labeling in and of itself you come back then with the dynamic and the tension here between some who rather it be over some who say yeah but we can't measure progress until we can categorize and so inside of this institution Emory is an example we could have diversity and we can do that and measure it by the number of people of different backgrounds who are here but that's diversity in sort of the pure sense that is we can count the number of different people that doesn't necessarily create a diverse community and so part of the challenge in all of this institutions and the things that we put in recognizing that institutional development becomes a critical part to sustainability individual accounts individual actions don't always amount to sustainable actions thank you professor Provost I'm a proud graduate of the University of Michigan when I was accepted in 1998 there was a major focus on diversity in its marketing strategy how has the consequences of these decisions changed that strategy since then? marketing strategy you say? that's correct that's an interesting question and I don't know how to measure it so let's talk about it for a second because if you look at the numbers of students of color if that's one aspect of diversity the numbers declined last year at Michigan and a number of other institutions immediately after the Grots and Grutter case in part because people worried about the environment that they were going to live in whether or not the institution had responded by developing new opportunities for a variety of students majority and minority if you look at it in terms of the lived experience where people live and what they encounter on the ground then there's something else there are indeed new programs that have been put in place Michigan just received a grant from the Ford Foundation to create a new center for institution of diversity which they're actually working with other universities around the country to try to figure out how we institutionalize it so it's not just there so that piece of marketing we're actually putting something that will be sustainable it's sort of moving it to the next level but let me make sure I'm understanding by marketing and how the brochures that are out there and the ways in which one attracts undergraduates and all that's always part of the ways that we all want to recognize how do we get the smartest young people to come to our institution at the University of Michigan there was 22,000 applicants for the 4,000 seats and so part of the overall strategy was making sure that you can create an environment where the most attractive students would see themselves fitting into that community and so there's that piece of marketing as well but instead getting at part of the question you're posing I want to make sure I didn't lose your question No, absolutely, thank you very much and go blue Well this was a marvelous capstone to our Family Forum series this year I want to thank all of you for coming this afternoon I want to ask you to continue the conversation with Provost Lewis in the four year that follows before you leave however I want to ask you if you will join me in recognizing a few folks that have made this forum today and the dozen forums before this year a possibility for us I want to recognize my colleagues in the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion behind the scenes with such acuity since early September and putting together these forums they are April Bogle, Eliza Ellison Anita Mann, Melanie Still Amy Wheeler and Janice Wiggins and I hope you will recognize them with a round of applause to what they have done I hope that you'll also recognize with me Corky Gallo and Scott Andrews and our other members of the AV team and our custodial crew that have worked with us this whole year in this program this lecture today and all the other lectures in this family forum series are available on our Center website that you have in your program I commend that to you you can get DVDs after the fact which we can send to you I encourage you to continue the conversations that we've had here through this virtual media and hope that you will come back next year for the various forum that we already have scheduled as indicated in your program if you're new to Emory today and you'd like to get further information on what we do by filling in that little blue card in your program and handing it to one of the ushers on your way out so we can put you on mailing lists and distribute information to you October 20 and 21 Jimmy Carter and 12 other superstars will be here to address children's rights that is going to be a major conference on this campus and we hope that you will all return for that event thank you so much for being here have a good afternoon