Racial ruling will make mark beyond university campuses

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's endorsement of affirmative action this week brought sighs of relief from institutions as different as West Point, Yale and General Motors.

Current or former leaders at all three had urged the high court to consider how race and racial preferences work in the real world.

The 5-4 ruling acknowledges that, "in a society like our own ... race unfortunately still matters," as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor put it.

The court's most significant civil rights statement in years will affect walks of life beyond the college campuses that Monday's rulings directly addressed, lawyers said Tuesday.

"This decision is not confined merely to the halls of academia but rather is intended to show the court's support for the breadth of affirmative action in the workplace, in the corporate boardroom, the military academies and throughout other institutions in American life," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

At the same time, the court did not signal a new willingness to support broadly preferential treatment for racial minorities. Its limited, cautious rationale is unlikely to undermine previous rulings that rejected race-based preferences in college scholarships, construction contracts and other arenas, lawyers said.

"It only directly reaches situations where the state is acting as an employer or operator of a university," said Andrew Koppelman, a constitutional law professor at Northwestern University and author of "Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality." "But people can give the words of the Supreme Court whatever persuasive authority they like. If the Supreme Court says affirmative action is a good thing ... that might influence your thinking."

The court didn't quite say affirmative action is a good thing, but made clear that it has a place in society for now.

Ruling in two cases covering affirmative action programs at the University of Michigan, the court upheld the use of race as one among many factors that public, tax-supported colleges and graduate schools may use to select their students. A majority of justices said a diverse campus is valuable enough to justify flexible admission programs that give qualified minorities an edge in competition with white applicants.

As with many major Supreme Court rulings, the full implications may take awhile to sort out. It is not clear, for instance, how many colleges or universities will have to retool their admission policies, or whether schools might resurrect preferential programs that were shelved while administrators awaited the high court ruling.

In the meantime, lawyers, educators, business leaders and others are reading the rulings closely.

Yale Law School professor William Eskridge Jr. said most public and private law schools have policies similar to the one the court upheld Monday. He said the ruling probably won't make it easier for minorities to get into law school.

"It would leave the odds about the same," Eskridge said.

A ruling the other way could have returned elite campuses to nearly all-white status, numerous outside groups told the court this year.

O'Connor's majority opinion in the more significant of the two cases Monday refers to studies about race and minority achievement, and to friend-of-the-court filings from big business and a long list of retired generals and civilian military leaders.

The ruling "recognizes what we've always recognized -- the need for a diverse group of people both in education and in the workforce," said Edd Snyder, spokesman for General Motors Corp. GM's brief reminded the court that global companies want talented and qualified employees who can market products to diverse customers around the world and at home. Universities are the training ground for those employees, GM and other major U.S. corporations said.

Perhaps even more persuasive was a brief signed by a long list of retired three- and four-star generals, admirals and other military leaders.

"At present the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the military academies and the ROTC use limited race-conscious recruiting and admission policies," that filing said.

"When a minority looks up, he or she doesn't have to see the same race leading him or her, but they sure need to see representatives of their race in the leadership," said Joseph Reeder, a former undersecretary of the Army and one of the lawyers who wrote the military leaders' brief. "They need to realize this is one team, one fight."