Universities must keep leadership paths open to all, Lehman asserts

By Linda Myers

Critics of affirmative action in higher education who claim that all race-conscious admissions policies are against the law are just plain wrong, said President Jeffrey Lehman in his first public lecture at Cornell on the Supreme Court affirmative action decisions in two University of Michigan cases.

President Jeffrey Lehman speaks with Everilis Santana-Vega, a graduate student in mathematics, after his talk, "From Bakke to Grutter, Lessons Learned" in Warren Hall, March 5. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

"Universities must push back against ... arguments [that are] clear misreadings of the Michigan cases," Lehman told a packed house in 401 Warren Hall March 5, in a talk sponsored by the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. In June 2003 the court held that race-conscious policies were permissible as one of a series of criteria at Michigan's law school in the case referred to as Grutter v. University of Michigan, but it rejected a system that awarded points to undergraduate applicants to the university who were members of minority groups, in the case known as Gratz v. University of Michigan. Lehman, who as dean of the law school helped prepare the defense of its admission policy, was a named defendant in the Grutter case.

"To understand affirmative action in higher education, it is essential to appreciate" the unique role that great universities have in the world "to sustain a set of transcendent values, values that speak to our noblest aspirations as human beings," Lehman said. He cited as examples Cornell's role in the discovery of evidence that Mars was once a watery planet as well as the university's role in launching the Bridging the Rift Center on the border between Jordan and Israel, which aspires collaboratively to create an enormous databank of all human life. (Following the talk, Lehman left for the Middle East to attend the center's groundbreaking.)

Such giant achievements for humankind are only possible in an open, integrated environment where differing points of view are given equal consideration, Lehman said. He noted two reasons, cited in past Supreme Court rulings, for universities to aspire to create such an environment. In the first, Bakke v. University of California-Davis in 1978, the court, while rejecting racial quotas in admission, also upheld the university's claim that a diverse campus improves learning and teaching for all. And in the second, Grutter in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "the path to leadership [must] be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity," and all members of our society "must have confidence in the openness and integrity of the education institutions that provide that training."

"Justice O'Connor's message is terribly important," said Lehman. It asserts that in addition to nourishing minds, universities have an important role to play in ensuring that education is open to all within our society, he said.

While some in academia worry that it will be harder for universities to enroll a critical mass of minorities following the Grutter decision, Lehman believes that some of the tools are still there, as is the potential to forge new tools.

Advocating the importance of an academic community that reflects an enormous range of diversity, with race as only one component, where people stretch themselves to understand different perspectives, Lehman also weighed in on how well he thinks Cornell is doing so far.

"We're doing reasonably well," he said, "but I believe we can do more." He announced that his office and the Provost's Office, in conjunction with the office of Associate Provost for Admissions and Enrollment Doris Davis, is seeking to create a new Middle Schools Partnership Program in which Cornell could "reach young members of underrepresented minority groups even earlier in their precollege careers. We could help them understand what they need to do to be on an effective road to college. And by integrating such a program into an invigorated portfolio of high school programs, we could make that road a four-lane highway to Ithaca, N.Y."

Lehman also stressed that "the long-term goal is not to be a society where affirmative action is lawful. It is to be a society where affirmative action is unnecessary." While that may seem a daunting task, it is "no more daunting than the task of understanding the potential history of life on Mars and the complexity of life on Earth," he said. It will take time, patience and a broad collaborative effort, but "Cornell and Cornellians everywhere will be leaders in the quest."

The full text of Lehman's talk is available at http://www.news.cornell.edu/campus/Lehman.affaction.3.5.04.html.