Urban Unrest

27 September 2006 | Opportunities | Ernesto Aguilar

I am in Northern California for the upcoming national board meeting and will keep you posted. In the meantime, this piece appeared in the September 26 Chronicle of Higher Education.

Advocacy Group Challenges Program for Minority Journalists as Discriminatory

By PETER SCHMIDT / Chronicle of Higher Education

An advocacy group plans to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a summer program for minority student journalists operated by Virginia Commonwealth University, the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and the publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The program is one of at least 20 for minority high-school students operated by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund in connection with colleges around the nation. For nearly 40 years, the fund has helped finance the programs with the intent of inspiring minority students to pursue careers in newspaper journalism.

The Center for Individual Rights, which has been a leader in the fight against affirmative action, alleges that the Virginia Commonwealth University Urban Journalism Workshop engages in illegal racial discrimination by excluding white students. It argues that the program’s race-exclusive eligibility criteria violate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law, as well as various federal civil-rights statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funds.

Virginia Commonwealth’s legal department declined comment Monday, saying it would not respond to a lawsuit that it had not yet seen. A university spokeswoman, Pamela Lepley, would say only that the summer workshop in question was “a very well-respected program” and “a very good program that we have been involved with for more than two decades.”

Richard Holden, executive director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, refused to comment on the lawsuit or to say whether the two-week Virginia Commonwealth program and others like it are race-exclusive. The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund is supported through the contributions of Dow Jones & Company (publisher of The Wall Street Journal), the Dow Jones Foundation, and other newspaper publishers around the nation. Newspapers help pay for many of the other summer journalism programs supported by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and in some cases provide the programs with instructors.

The lawsuit the Center for Individual Rights expects to file today wouldn’t mark the first time a college program for minority students has encountered opposition. Two other advocacy groups, the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute, began challenging race-exclusive college programs in late 2002, but their avenue of attack has typically been to send colleges letters urging them to open the programs up to members of any race and threatening to file a discrimination complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights if the colleges fail to do so. Nearly all of the more than 100 colleges that the groups have contacted so far have complied with the demands.

The Center for Individual Rights has been heavily involved in the fight against race-conscious college admissions, helping to represent the plaintiffs in key federal lawsuits challenging such policies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Washington.

In an interview Monday, Terence J. Pell, the center’s president, said the lawsuit challenging the Virginia Commonwealth program was “sort of the logical next step” in the fight against race-exclusive programs. He argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 rulings in the two lawsuits his group helped bring against the University of Michigan established once and for all that colleges could not operate programs that excluded members of any ethnicity or race. Although the Supreme Court reaffirmed that colleges could give some consideration to applicants’ race or ethnicity for the sake of promoting racial diversity, race-exclusive programs “produce just the opposite” by creating environments that consist solely of members of certain favored minority groups, he said.

In cases where race-exclusive programs are operated by colleges in tandem with businesses or philanthropies, those involved “all sort of point fingers at each other” when accused of discrimination, and argue that some other participant in the effort is requiring race exclusivity, Mr. Pell alleged. He said the lawsuit named as defendants everyone involved with the Virginia Commonwealth program, including the university, Richmond Times-Dispatch publisher Media General Inc., and individuals who helped finance and administer the summer workshop, because “it is necessary to bring everybody into court and solve this once and for all on the record.”

The plaintiff in the case, Emily Smith, is a junior at Monacan High School, in Virginia’s Chesterfield County, who submitted an application to participate in the Virginia Commonwealth summer program last March. The lawsuit alleges that Virginia Commonwealth initially notified Ms. Smith that she had been accepted for the workshop but then rescinded its offer after one of its faculty members called Ms. Smith, asked her race, and learned that she was white. The lawsuit asks that Ms. Smith, a 15-year-old with muscular dystrophy, be awarded damages because Virginia Commonwealth’s actions wasted her time, caused her emotional distress, and closed educational opportunities to her.

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s guidelines for newspapers and colleges involved with such summer workshops say “each participant must be a minority (defined as U.S. citizens who are black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native.)”

Among the other colleges involved in similar programs this past summer were Florida A & M University, Kent State University, Marquette University, Monmouth University, New York University, San Francisco State University, Seattle University, the University of Alabama, the University of Arizona, the University of Kentucky, the University of Miami, the University of Missouri, and the University of Texas at El Paso.

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