When John Brooks Slaughter arrives at work at Occidental College, as he has each day for the last 11 years, he watches students dressed in grunge slouch by on their way to class, some shouting, others laughing, their heads bent close in conversation. It is an utterly ordinary scene, except that the faces--black, white, brown, tan, yellow--could fill a Benetton ad. And Occidental President John Slaughter is the casting agent.

As a child in 1940s Kansas, Slaughter was schooled within a system so rigidly divided by race that it became a national symbol of injustice. Just a few years after he graduated from Topeka High, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation is unconstitutional. Those ugly years of separation molded Slaughter, now 65, into one of the country's most passionate advocates of equal opportunity in education. Through a varied career that's included jobs with the U.S. Navy, the National Science Foundation and the University of Maryland at College Park, he has tirelessly voiced one theme: A college education is the road to fulfillment and success. Those who don't fit the traditional image of student--those who are poor, minority, full-time workers or older than 21--not only must be given access, but can be without compromising scholastic standards.

"People in our society find it difficult to believe that excellence can coexist with equity," he says. "I reject that notion."

This belief has produced startling results at Occidental, a small liberal arts college in Eagle Rock. Under Slaughter's administration, the onetime nearly all-white institution recast itself as a school that U.S. News & World Report has labeled the nation's "most diverse." Forty-three percent of its 1,550 students are Asian, Latino or African American. And more than half the faculty hired in the past decade are women and/or people of color.

Last June, Slaughter announced his retirement to take effect this June 30. On campus, the announcement was followed by rumors: Because Occidental's governing board of trustees could have extended his tenure but didn't, the president was, in essence, forced out, and that he was furious. He vehemently denies this, and no one else is talking for the record.

But the persistence of the gossip underscores the controversy that has risen from John Slaughter's transformation of Occidental College. Is it merely an idealistic and overly expensive experiment? Or is it a glimpse of L.A.'s future?

Come to Occidental on a sunny day and chances are good that you'll find John Slaughter sitting outside his office in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigar and chatting with a student. Around them, the campus gleams, a gorgeous 120 acres of Italian/Mediterranean-style buildings, oaks, eucalyptus and flowering trees. Slaughter's pride is obvious as he gives a tour, pointing out an airy, high- ceilinged new student center and a lounge area decorated with Mission-style furniture. "Hey, how're ya doing?" he greets everyone he sees, and students, faculty and administrative workers all respond with genuine warmth.

There's something immediately likable about Slaughter, a mellow-voiced man with a receding hairline, bifocals and thick brows. He seems avuncular, calm, soothing. Even when he's searching for an answer, he doesn't move or fidget. He has a puckish smile that he flashes a lot.

The school's commitment to what its "mission statement" calls education with "a distinctive interdisciplinary and multicultural focus" is evident everywhere, in programs and policies that would give conservatives nightmares. Through the spring, campus placards announce observance of Black History Month; Semana de la Raza; a celebration of women's "herstory"; and tributes to Armenian and Asian American heritage. Each year, student leaders go to Palm Springs for a retreat that includes "diversity training," and political correctness abounds: In a recent letter to the editor of the student newspaper, one man identified himself, without irony, as "a conscious, proud, white, male, heterosexual, owning-class, able-bodied individual."

But to laugh at this excess is to miss the fact that something intriguing is happening at Occidental. Diversity may be the rule in a magnet school or Cal State classroom, but that's not the case at higher-echelon colleges that produce America's upper-middle classes. Here, however, where a disproportionately high number of graduates get PhDs, a sociology course may be taught by an assistant professor whose parents are working-class Mexican immigrants to students who include the scion of a wealthy Eastern family; a first-generation college kid, whose father's yearly income is less than Occidental's $21,000 tuition; and an extremely bright inner-city valedictorian who arrived not knowing how to write a term paper. This mix hasn't produced paradise; in recent years several interracial fights and outbreaks of racist graffiti have occurred, and some white students complain that "if you say anything against multiculturalism you're seen as a racist." But most students I talked to say they are glad to be there. "To be honest, before I came here, I was afraid of white males," says Sandra Gallardo, a 20-year-old senior. "And now there are several who are my friends. I learned that I can trust."

Iasha Warfield, 21, grew up in the Moreno Valley, and "in theory, my high school was 'diverse.' But I was the only black woman in my honors class, the only black woman in the gifted program. I never even met the black teachers because they were teaching remedial classes. I'd never met a black professional until I came to Occidental."

Moreover, against the common argument that high minority enrollment invariably equals low academic standards, U.S. News & World Report rates Occidental among the nation's Top 40 liberal arts colleges. It has a 78% six- year graduation rate, roughly equal to that of UCLA's. And in the past decade, 10 of its students have been chosen as Rhodes, Marshall or Truman scholarship winners, an impressive number for such a small school.

A reaccredidation committee for the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges was "genuinely impressed" when it visited the school in February, says Ronald Thomas, chief of staff for Trinity College President Evan Dobelle, the committee's chair. "They have done what many small private institutions have tried to do and failed, or to which they've simply paid lip service. The team thought it [the combination of strong academics and strong diversity] was a remarkable success."

This success is generally credited to Slaughter, an engineer by training who didn't even enter the academic world full time until he was 41. The move toward diversification was by no means his idea; it began in the 1960s, when the college obtained sizable scholarship grants specifically targeting minority students. In 1978, the faculty voted a two-course "non-Western civilization" requirement for graduation. In 1987, it started a free six-week program designed to keep minority students by helping them adjust to college life, and opened a "multicultural" residence hall. "By then we saw the demographic changes coming in Los Angeles," says Eric Newhall, professor of American studies and English (and an Occidental alumnus). "Put simplistically, the argument was, rather than acknowledge these changes when we're forced to do so, why not plan for them?"

But it was Slaughter who turned what had been a well-meaning but not terribly coherent effort into the heart of the school's identity. Within 18 months of his appointment, the school had written its "mission statement," which declared that an outstanding college was one that combined academic excellence with ethnic, racial, religious and gender equity, creation of "community," and civic service.

Slaughter considers this statement one of his major accomplishments ("I wanted something that defined what we stood for"), and, indeed, it became the core around which the school mobilized. Recruiters began targeting high- achieving minority students. Admissions officers reduced reliance on SAT scores (Slaughter dismisses them as "as good as a coin flip" in determining a student's college success) and increased emphasis on high school performance, essay writing and strong letters of recommendation. Professors began experimenting with different ways of teaching, such as lecturing less and stressing "active learning" techniques. Faculty research committees aggressively sought out women and minority candidates. The latter effort, adds Slaughter, was absolutely crucial to the plan.

"Mere diversity is not an end in itself," he says. "Plantation life in the South was diverse. A penitentiary is diverse. But what's the distribution of responsibility? At a university, is it likely that a person of color is teaching class or administering a major unit in the administration? That's what defines that school's commitment to equity." (For similar reasons, Occidental has no separate Chicano or black studies departments. To Slaughter, "these programs always appear as appendages rather than central parts of the institution.")

Finally, in what some considered a long-overdue effort to connect Occidental to the city surrounding it, Slaughter introduced himself to then-Mayor Tom Bradley. The two became good friends, and Bradley later appointed Slaughter to the Christopher Commission, which recommended changes in the LAPD after the 1992 civil unrest. The need to "give back" to the community became another Occidental mantra, and today nearly half its student body participates in various forms of volunteer work.

Occidental's turnover came during the very years when anti-affirmative action sentiment and concerns about multiculturalism were growing nationwide. In 1995, the UC Regents voted to prohibit the use of race and ethnicity in system-wide admission; in 1996, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Texas case that racial considerations in law school admissions were unconstitutional; and California voters passed Proposition 209.

But Slaughter managed to create a remarkably wide base of support for "the mission." That's partly because Occidental's multiculturalism is not the cliched variety, despite lapses into touchy-feeliness and jargon. The taboo word "class" is mentioned nearly as much as race, and seven years ago, Slaughter says, financial aid policies were altered so that decisions were based on economic need rather than ethnicity.

"My argument was that if we're serious in our claims that we value excellence and equity, we're going to eliminate any distinctions," he says. Slaughter also emphasizes that "diversity" includes white men. "If you make someone feel he's being excluded and others are benefiting at his expense, of course he'll rise up and react. And in my opinion, that's dumb." When a student gave an anti- white speech at a rally just after the 1992 civil unrest, Slaughter responded with a warning to the campus that "I will not tolerate such behavior."

A large measure of Slaughter's success also came by dint of his own personality. Faculty members describe him as a "consensus builder" and praise his "democratic leadership." (When he arrived, for instance, he thrilled professors by letting them run their own staff meetings.) What professor of politics Roger Boesche calls "his ability to love and be friends unequivocally" also inspires great loyalty. Robert C. Maxson, president of Cal State Long Beach, points to the time when he was suffering a professional crisis as head of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Slaughter showed up unannounced at his office one afternoon just to offer support. Students responded enthusiastically to Slaughter's practice of inviting all incoming students into his office for a personal hello and an invitation to come back to talk whenever they liked.

"At my old school," says Deborah Thompson, 22, a transfer student from Bates College in Maine, "I didn't even know who the president was."

But Slaughter is far more complicated and contradictory than such praise might suggest. He's radical enough to suggest, as he did at a 1993 meeting with a business group, that high-income families be charged more to attend UC schools, yet he's a strong advocate of the kind of classical education that includes Plato, art and music. He's an idealist who believes university leaders should assume the lofty position of being "moral and intellectual voices for what we should know is right in our society," and he's an ambitious, wealthy man who lives in Pasadena, drives a black Mercedes and sits on the boards of directors of firms such as Arco, Avery Dennison, IBM, Solutia and Northrop Grumman. He is someone who spends his work hours immersed in 21st century issues but spends his leisure time laying track for a small-gauge model railroad re-creation of the Topeka, Kan., he knew when he was 10.

He never forgets his race: "When I get up in the morning," he says evenly, "the first thing I realize is that I'm a black man." Yet he takes great offense at being defined by it: Last year, when The Times announced his retirement, describing him as "one of the most prominent African American leaders in higher education," he immediately phoned the paper. "I said when [UCLA Chancellor] Chuck Young retired, did you call him 'one of the country's foremost white presidents'?" He never shows anger in public but is driven by the moral outrage of someone who knows what it's like to be considered second class.

John Slaughter was born in 1934. his father was a coal miner, onetime Baptist preacher and apartment building janitor who left school after the third grade. As an adolescent, Slaughter became a voracious reader of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and fell in love with the idea of building things, but when he told teachers he wanted to be an engineer, he was politely steered toward a vocational course in radio repair.

He made it to Kansas State University--because he hadn't taken the right prep courses in high school, it took him five years to graduate--then to graduate school at UCLA and UC San Diego. Almost always the only African American in his engineering classes, he faced the routine humiliations of being black in a white era: He and his college roommate were refused service at a Kansas restaurant; he never knew whether he'd be relegated to the upper balcony when he went to the movies; in 1960, when he and his wife, Bernice, tried to buy a house in San Diego, they were refused showings in many neighborhoods.

He responded with determination "to be as successful as I could" and to bring others along with him. During the 1960s and '70s, he was on the board of the San Diego Urban League youth training program, headed a committee on minorities for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and spoke in inner-city high schools, urging kids to consider engineering careers. By the time he was hired by the University of Washington to run its Applied Physics Laboratory in 1975, "I had come to the conclusion that I enjoyed working with people more than things. I also found I loved the feeling of being on a college campus. And I concluded that if I was going to be on one, I might as well run it."

Two years later, then-President Jimmy Carter appointed Slaughter assistant director for astronomical, atmospheric, earth and ocean sciences at the National Science Foundation, and he, Bernice and the children, John Jr. (a vice president for a Baltimore financial securities firm) and daughter, Jacqueline (associate director of the Mesa Engineering Program at Cal State L.A.), moved to Washington, D.C. He left in 1979 to become academic vice president and provost at Washington State University. The following year, Carter called again, and Slaughter became the National Science Foundation's first African American director.

The high that came with such a career pinnacle was brief. A few months later, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, and subsequent budget cuts ended the kind of educational programs Slaughter felt should be a foundation priority. After two years he left in frustration to become chancellor of the University of Maryland at College Park, a Southern school, he notes, that he couldn't have attended when he was of college age, and whose traditions still included a football half-time ritual of having a student run across the field carrying the Confederate flag. "One of the first things I did," he says wryly, "was put an end to that."

Slaughter was hired to improve Maryland's academic ranking, but increasing minority representation on campus was also high on his agenda.

"The chair of the board of regents asked, 'How do you plan to do this?' " he recalls with obvious pleasure. "I said, 'I'll get some buses, drive them to D.C., load them up with students and bring them back for a picnic so they can see they're welcome here.' And that's just what happened."

Not quite. But "through talent and likability, John was able to make us understand the dual goals of excellence and equity, and how compatible and important they were," says William E. Kirwan, who served as provost under Slaughter, succeeded him as president, and is now president of Ohio State University. "The real leap forward at Maryland happened after he left, but his fingerprints were all over it. The percentage of African Americans increased by 50 to 70%. The school also improved academically; its college of engineering is now ranked 13th in the country, and it was in the 30s when John arrived."

Slaughter's progress at Maryland was halted in the spring of 1986, after 22- year-old Len Bias, the school's star basketball player and a recent Boston Celtics draft pick, died of a cocaine overdose. When it was revealed that, among other things, Bias had either withdrawn from or was failing all his classes and that the basketball team's combined GPA was around 1.8, Slaughter said publicly the university had failed its athletes, and he fired popular coach Lefty Driesell. Slaughter dealt with reporters nonstop in the months that followed Bias' death, and my asking about it now seems to make him a bit weary. "Lenny," he pauses, and when he starts again, his voice is very quiet, "was a marvelous young man, whom I cared about immensely. His death was a tragedy that, to this day, I would reverse if I could."

After Bias, Slaughter says he lost all faith in collegiate athletic programs as steppingstones for minority students. "College sports," he says with pained resignation, "is just a business. And it's getting worse."

But the Bias crisis strengthened him as an administrator. "I learned that I could take punishment. I learned that I could take responsibility for things that were my responsibility." Though he doesn't stress it, the time also served to remind him of those things that hadn't changed since his youth in Topeka. After he hired an African American high school coach to replace Driesell, who is white, Maryland basketball fans erupted in anger, and vicious letters that made copious use of the N-word poured into Slaughter's office. Ask how that felt, and his face freezes. There's a flicker of bleakness in his eyes. Then he laughs it off ("It's not something you hope will happen to you"), and the moment passes. He left for Occidental in the fall of 1988, but he still wears a ruby University of Maryland ring.

Everyone seems to like John Slaughter, but not everyone likes what he's done at Occidental. No one is willing to speak publicly of dissatisfaction. But there is no question that, especially at first, the rapidity of the school's demographic make-over troubled some members of the then mostly white male board of trustees. "Many were alumni who graduated in the '50s and '60s," says Los Angeles businessman Stephen Hinchliffe, a longtime board member and former chair who is white. "They remembered Occidental when it was monochromatic. You'd have to be a hermit to think there wouldn't be concern."

"A speech given by a trustee five years ago said, in essence, 'We're headed in the wrong direction; we'll end up with no white males here!' " recalls a faculty member who attended trustee meetings at the time. In addition, a number of alumni not on the board have consistently expressed displeasure with what they believe to be the sacrifice of academic standards and "traditional values" to meet racial goals. Ironically, a change that aroused the most rage, the removal of the campus chapel's cross, had been approved by Slaughter's predecessor.

Some of Slaughter's most ardent supporters on the faculty have other criticisms. With a few exceptions, they say, he didn't hire strong seconds-in- command and was too slow to fire those who proved incompetent. Some also fault his fund-raising, particularly given his corporate connections, a failing Slaughter acknowledges. Finally, and most significantly, there's the problem of money: Occidental has reeled from one financial mess to another in recent years. "There was no explosion," says one professor, "just a steady grind of bad news."

The situation is not entirely Slaughter's making: Even before he arrived, a huge financial aid budget was straining resources. The percentage of Occidental's total expenditures that goes to scholarships is about 10% higher than that at comparable schools. (Last year more than 70% of students received help, with the average grant around $19,000.) With a sizable portion of the school's investment portfolio in real estate, Occidental was hit hard by the Southern California recession of the early '90s. And, say several faculty and staff members, long-established bookkeeping practices were an outright disaster when he arrived.

Nevertheless, say some critics, when it came to money Slaughter could not seem to gain control.

"He'd present what was happening as a short-term problem," says a faculty member. "But then every few months there would be another 'unexpected' million- dollar deficit, and another and another. Staff couldn't be hired, raises weren't given, and the faculty got the feeling they couldn't predict their own futures. He eroded people's confidence in his ability to manage."

Slaughter says mildly: "I'm not trying to shift blame, but the fact is the precise nature of the college's fiscal picture was not known when I came. There were some issues that we later learned had been present for at least 20 years. They had not been uncovered by auditors in the past, and uncovering them has been a full-scale effort. Often people in higher education want quick and easy solutions. There aren't many of those around. However, we are confident now that all has been resolved and the plan that's been developed for the college's future is a sound one."

Whatever Slaughter's shortcomings, most believe he's changed Occidental forever, and many feel it's for the better. And the strongest argument for Occidental's course of action is rooted in practicality: It says that a racially and ethnically diverse community must train an equally diverse professional and political class to represent it. "I'm convinced," says trustee Hinchliffe, "that we're educating future major players in this city's establishment."

"You can't talk about the global village, then resist teaching people to work together," adds professor Newhall. "What we're doing is tremendously complicated. But I believe that 20 years from now, most schools in America will be forced to make similar changes, because if they don't, intelligent 18-year-olds will have nothing to do with them."

On March 11, Occidental trustees announced they had selected a new president, Theodore J. Mitchell, a former UCLA vice chancellor--and a white man. The campus took the news with remarkable calm. "There's no going back," says American studies professor Arthe Anthony. "The mission is not any one person."

Slaughter has accepted an endowed professorship in leadership in education at USC, starting Aug. 1. "I'm very pleased with the experience I've had here," he says. "The commitment was to build a microcosm of a society where people were measured on their merits, and not judged on whether they were African American, Latino, female, disabled, gay--any of those things that traditionally separate us from each other. Do I feel we perfected that? No." He smiles. "But I think we've proved that it's possible."

I teach at one of the "100 worst" schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Superintendent Ruben Zacarias placed my school, John Muir Middle School, on probation last September primarily because its students scored low on the Stanford 9 test, along with not meeting other "key indicators" such as attendance and parent participation. The school's average scores are significantly below the 25th percentile. If student scores on this test do not improve by one to two percentile points, the district may take over John Muir. Eventually, the state could forcefully remove all staff.

Standardized tests like the Stanford 9 do not measure critical thinking, contain many cultural biases and are given in English. Because more than half of Muir's pupils are immigrants learning English, their low scores are not difficult to fathom. Furthermore, the Stanford 9 is a norm-referenced test. It is designed to produce results that form bell-shaped curves ranking a student's scores against others. Historically, such tests have not served as learning tools. Rather, they have been used to unfairly sort students onto either high- or low-academic tracks based on their test ranking, resulting in unequal access to education.

Muir is typical of the 100 "worst" schools. It's located in a low-income, mostly African American and Latino community hurt by a lack of businesses and job opportunities and devastated by government cutbacks in social spending. My classroom's ceiling has a hole, its chalkboard is cracked and its floors warped. I often have 35 students in my classes. Unfortunately, in threatening schools like Muir with probation or a takeover, Zacarias fosters no discussion about the detrimental effects of poverty, racial segregation and lack of resources on students' test scores.

Fundamentally, our school community is the product of an economy that perpetuates poverty in communities of color and a political system that scapegoats the victims. Over the last two decades, 280,000 unionized manufacturing jobs disappeared in Los Angeles, many of them in the vicinity of Muir's South-Central campus. They have been replaced by low-paying light- manufacturing employment and mostly part-time service jobs. At the same time, county, state and federal governments cut social spending. More recently, Californians voted to ban affirmative action and bilingual education. Yet, low- income people of color are routinely blamed for being unemployed, underemployed or demoralized.

Use of standardized tests to stigmatize LAUSD's worst-performing schools is the education version of this scapegoating. The district does not provide these schools with the resources they need to help their students learn--and then blames them for poor test results. Politicians who shy away from real education and economic reform use the tests as a smoke screen, claiming that raising scores will attack poverty. But as long as we live in a society of racial segregation and uneven economic development, slightly higher scores on standardized tests are not going to make a major difference in the lives of poor students. Students scoring at the 25th percentile will be in the same boat as those below the 10th percentile as long as they face the same lack of opportunity in their communities.

Rather than deal with these problems, the district has further entrenched test-based discrimination along race and class lines. First, in response to pressures to raise their test scores, schools in poorer areas emphasize narrow test-taking drills at the expense of course content. In contrast, schools in wealthier areas and with higher scores more often do project-based learning, which explores content on multiple levels. The result is separate and unequal schooling.

Second, top district officials have directed Muir teachers to focus their efforts on that small minority of students who score above the 40th percentile. These students, the district contends, have proved they can take tests well. If they receive more attention, so the argument goes, their test-taking abilities are bound to improve. Their resulting higher individual scores can pull up the entire school's average: Muir would be saved from a potential takeover. Thus is created the illusion of school reform. By using such tactics, the district is choosing to fend off its critics by touting trick scores on a flawed test instead of advocating real school reform that would demand dramatically increased funding and expanded programs to benefit all students.

Teachers, students and parents can initiate real school reform by organizing a boycott of Stanford 9 testing next spring, especially at the 100 "worst" schools but supported by all who recognize the inequities perpetuated by these tests. Alongside the boycott, they should demand an alternative assessment of students based on portfolios.

Under portfolio assessment, teachers and students compile a variety of work throughout the school year. Among the elements are writing samples, tapes of dramatic performances, skill-achievement sheets and projects. The resulting individual student portfolios are evaluated by teachers and parents according to a scoring guide. Vermont currently has a promising portfolio-assessment system in place. The chief benefit of portfolio-based evaluation is that it shows a student's progress over time rather than as a snapshot drawn from a high-stakes exam taken in a few hours.

Such alternative approaches to student assessment cannot occur in a reform vacuum. They must be linked to smaller class sizes, better campus facilities and programs like bilingual education. These reforms would ensure that the alternative assessments are fair, honest and rigorous. This approach would be truly effective if the city and state linked it with enhanced economic opportunities in low-income communities through the creation of good-paying jobs. Our students deserve nothing less than a comprehensive approach to education reform.

 
Yale or jail? That's the little joke circulating in anti-"diversity" circles, responding to the ferocious debate about how many minorities -- and of what quality -- are being admitted under quota systems to elite colleges.

The thrust of the "Yale" joke is that being admitted to a second-tier school where academically frail minorities can thrive makes more sense than force-feeding them into the top schools where they do less well -- and must live with the suspicion that they don't really belong.

Many minority success stories are graduates of non-Ivy, low-prestige schools, the anti-diversity crowd insists. It's not a question of Yale or jail.

It's not much of a punch line, but it represents a piece of the affirmative action battle in higher education that doesn't get much public visibility: the data. The politicians and the pundits are quick with the rhetoric, long on emotion, on the subject of racial preferences in higher education.

But in pointy-headed intellectual magazines and academic journals and books that don't have color pictures, scholars have begun to study the numbers, to analyze whether, in fact, the push for  diversity, or preferences, or affirmative action, passes the logic test: Are blacks suddenly better off, when they benefit from "preferences" that get them into top schools in higher numbers?

Do they perform as well as students with higher test scores?

The battle has been given a public face with the publishing of two books, two sets of authors, two competing lecture tours, two sets of radio and television talk-show appearances.

First off the starting line was "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions," a defense of racial preferences at top-tier colleges by William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, and Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University.

The challenge was quickly met with the just-published "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," written by Stephan Thernstrom, a professor of history at Harvard, and his wife, Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York, who criticize the racial preferences at top schools in general, and attack the Bowen-Bok book quite specifically.

At the most arcane level of academics at play, these books are a battle of the data: competing charts, competing test-score analyses, differing interpretations of performance, quarrels over the importance of control groups in social science research, hints of data ignored and data distorted.

They aren't the kinds of books you might take to the beach this summer, but the authors have learned to chatter in public.

Abigail Thernstrom, who is accustomed to being designated the bad girl at dozens of feel-good race symposia across the country, snuck into the state Capitol in Hartford a few weeks ago to make her case before a group of conservative lawyers.

You didn't read about it in any local newspapers, or see her on television; the journalists don't come running to cover a naysayer on politically correct race stuff unless the speaker is wearing a white sheet.

Thernstrom suggests that the data (such things as college grade-point averages and college drop-out rates) on black performance at elite colleges indicate that black students are being punished with kindness; that they are enrolled in programs in which they are less successful than if they had chosen colleges more appropriate to their academic skills.

In one of her more incendiary conclusions, she suggests that half of the black students admitted to Harvard were admitted with no preferential treatment at all, but that these top-tier minority students are tarnished with an affirmative-action cloud that labels them as charity cases.

For those who are weary of the ongoing squabble about how many and what color and whether SAT scores are a ticket to heaven, Thersntrom offers a more interesting, and perhaps more important, issue to ponder.

She suggests that the battle over racial preferences at elite colleges distracts us from the cause of the problem: the failure of kindergarten-through-high school public education -- a system immune to reform, hostile to change, and content to sit back and watch the college fight.

"Who cares whether a few more or a few less blacks get into Wesleyan?" she asked the state Capitol crowd. "K-through-12 education is a total disaster. We should shift our gaze to the younger years."

Summary: The challenge to a North Carolina lottery system that denied a white girl admission has been turned into a full assault on the integration plan

One could hardly blame Bill Capacchione for wanting his 6-year-old daughter, Cristina, to attend Olde Providence Elementary School.

The sparkling school set in Charlotte's fast-growing Southeast quadrant has 30 up-to-date Apple computers in its computer laboratory, a television studio where students produce and broadcast programs to all the school's classrooms, and an involved parents' organization that raised $26,000 for supplies and student activities last year.

Olde Providence is a magnet school with an enriched academic program set up as part of a school desegregation plan ordered by a federal judge in 1969. Some of the school's pupils are assigned there by lottery to maintain a student population that is 60 percent white and 40 percent African American, reflecting the makeup of the district.

In 1996, Cristina, who is white, was denied admission to Olde Providence because she was not selected in the lottery. Her father sued the school district, charging that his daughter had been denied admission because of her race. There are separate lotteries for African Americans and whites.

The trial of the lawsuit by Capacchione, who was joined by six other white families, against the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education is under way in U.S. District Court. The suit, which was broadened by the Reagan-appointed trial judge, Robert Potter, into a full legal assault on the district's integration plan, is being closely watched by civil rights advocates and conservative opponents of affirmative action and school desegregation plans that are based solely, or in part, on race.

The families are also seeking monetary damages because of the harm they say their children suffered.

The case has both historic and legal implications. In a 1971 decision, Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court for the first time allowed federal courts to impose far-ranging actions -- including the busing of students – to integrate schools.

The school district curtailed the use of busing several years ago, and nearly all of the 12,000 students who are still bused are African American. Still, the school board and lawyers for African American students who have intervened in the case want to retain the desegregation plan to ensure that African American students have access to some of the better schools, which tend to be in white neighborhoods, as is Olde Providence.

Desegregation order 30 years old "Charlotte, after an initial period of resistance, became known as the place that made" massive transportation for desegregation work, said James Ferguson II, a lawyer representing the African American students in the case, as he did in the original case that brought about the desegregation plan. "So I think the eyes of the nation are on this place."

The white plaintiffs say the fact that Charlotte is under a federal court order to integrate its schools is no defense against their complaint of reverse discrimination. The desegregation order, they argue, is 30 years old. The judge who issued it and monitored compliance has long since died, and the school board has not filed any reports recently on how well its school integration efforts are proceeding, or whether such efforts are still practical or needed.

Should the plaintiffs win, and should the court award them the monetary damages they seek for the harm they are alleging was done to their children, then the dozens of school districts still under decades-old court desegregation orders could be vulnerable to lawsuits from white parents, lawyers on both sides say.

"If this case goes in our favor," said Lee Parks, the plaintiffs' main lawyer, "it's going to signal to a bunch of districts that they have to bring these desegregation plans to an immediate close or run the risk of paying damages to parents who are harmed. There is going to be a price to pay if you try to hide behind court orders."

The current lawsuit threatens to disrupt the tenuous racial harmony that has existed in an area where conflict has been submerged by a rising tide of prosperity. The case has been a heated topic in the local newspapers and on radio talk shows.

Some African Americans say the suit stems from the influx of white professionals from the North who have helped increase the number of Charlotte school pupils to 100,000 during the past 10 years, making it the nation's 23rd-largest district, up from 29th. Many of the newcomers, drawn to Charlotte's suburbs by the area's balmy weather, low taxes and booming economy, have no memory of racial segregation and see little justification for maintaining efforts at integration.

As she watched her son Matthew hustle around a dirt running track at Olde Providence Elementary, Naomi Ballard spoke of being a volunteer at the school office and answering questions from newcomers who were surprised they could not automatically send their children to the school.

"They had moved into the neighborhood because they heard it was a good school, and now they were being told they might not be able to send their kids there," said Ballard, who is white. "They're confused. It's like a foreign system to them."

Emotional harm disputed African Americans are particularly incensed over the idea that the white plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages for the emotional harm they contend their children suffered from not getting into particular schools. On the witness stand last week, Capacchione, who moved to California after the suit was filed, testified that his daughter "felt she wasn't smart enough to get into Olde Providence."

Some school officials scoff at the notion that the girl suffered any emotional damage, noting that as a result of her rejection at Olde Providence, Cristina ended up at an elementary school that was rated academically as one of the top 10 in the state.

"Tell me how they are harmed," said Arthur Griffin, chairman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board. "Tell me how you are harmed by going to a brand-new school. Tell me how you are harmed with teachers that have higher credentials. Tell me how you've been harmed when you have access -- there's been no denial -- to quality education."

Parks, the plaintiffs' lawyer, agrees that the harm to Cristina and the other white plaintiffs may seem trivial compared with the suffering of African Americans during segregation. But, the lawyer said, that should affect only the size of the award, not whether it should be granted.

AUSTIN - Programs, facilities and funding at Texas' two historically black public universities do not measure up to those at traditionally white institutions, a preliminary report by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has found. Details of the OCR's report were presented Thursday to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The preliminary report is part of a wide review by the OCR to see if Texas colleges and universities are in compliance with the federal Title VI law, which prohibits discrimination in higher education. The OCR also is reviewing minority admissions, retention and graduation rates at all public institutions and more reports are expected later this year.

"These are early, preliminary concerns" the OCR has, said Raymond Pierce, OCR's deputy assistance secretary for civil rights, in a telephone interview earlier this week. Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University, the historically black schools, may not be receiving a fair share of grants and funding; buildings and facilities may not be up to par with those at other institutions; and academic programs at the two schools may be duplicated at other nearby schools. Mr. Pierce said that "this is not a final finding saying that Texas is in violation of Title VI."

Board members said they would be seeking remedies to problems the OCR finds. They also noted that the 1996 Hopwood decision, which led to the elimination of affirmative action in Texas colleges and universities, may make it more difficult for Texas to comply with federal nondiscrimination guidelines. "We've been trying so hard to improve," said Wendy Marsh, a board member from Amarillo. "I think this is one of the most serious problems we face today." After the meeting, Commissioner of Higher Education Don Brown noted, "I think there's broad agreement that we have a long way to go." A 1981 OCR investigation found that Texas higher education did not comply with Title VI and that blacks were segregated and Hispanics underrepresented in colleges and universities. In response, Texas came up with the "Texas Plan," which outlined recruitment, scholarship and funding efforts to increase minority enrollment and integrate schools.

The original Texas Plan - it has been updated twice since 1983 - included provisions to give Texas Southern and Prairie View "resources comparable to those of traditionally white institutions," according to coordinating board documents. The Texas Plan in place today includes programs for increasing minority graduation rates, hiring more minority staff and encouraging minorities to go on to graduate school. The ongoing OCR investigation is to ensure that the Texas Plan is working. Under Hopwood, Texas institutions can no longer recruit or enroll students based on race. So officials have been seeking race-neutral ways to recruit and enroll minorities, including offering all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their classes automatic admission to a public institution and offering scholarships based on need. Mr. Pierce of the OCR said that Hopwood should not be a factor in whether Texas can ensure that all students have access to equal education and that the education at historically black institutions is on par with other schools.
 
 

AUSTIN - The ruling that ended affirmative action in Texas' public higher education has had a devastating impact on the University of Texas' law school and should be overturned, Attorney General John Cornyn told a federal appeals court yesterday.

In an 87-page brief, Cornyn and attorneys for UT asked the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a 1996 decision that struck down a law school admissions policy that gave some preferences to black and Mexican-American applicants.

The university blamed the 1996 ruling for "putting the law school at a severe competitive disadvantage" with states not bound by the decision.

"Many of Texas's brightest minority students are now wooed to other states by strong minority admissions and financial aid programs, often never to return," the brief said.

In the 1996 Hopwood vs. Texas ruling, a three-judge appellate panel said race could not be considered in admissions to promote diversity, but only to remedy specific discrimination by the law school. Dan Morales, who was then attorney general, advised Texas public universities to eliminate racial considerations from their admissions policies.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in Austin issued an injunction barring UT from using race as an admissions factor, but awarded only $1 each plus attorney fees to the four Anglo applicants who challenged the admissions policy.

Both sides notified the 5th Circuit last year that they planned to appeal. The plaintiffs filed one set of briefs with the appeals court in March; they have a month to respond to the arguments UT made in the brief submitted yesterday.

Austin attorney Steven W. Smith, who represents two of the plaintiffs, said the university has not presented new arguments, but the makeup of the appeals court has changed slightly since the previous appeal.

The university has asked for a hearing before the entire 15-judge appeals court rather than another three-judge panel. UT argues that the previous ruling contradicts Supreme Court precedent.

"If you want a great university and don't want it to be segregated, at the margins you have to have some consideration of race," said UT law professor Douglas Laycock, who worked on the brief.

UT law school UT admitted 41 blacks and 55 Mexican-Americans in the 1992 entering law school class, but the numbers were down to 8 blacks and 30 Mexican-Americans in 1998, the brief says.
 

U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick has approved a settlement to end race-based admissions in The City's public schools, ending 16 years of affirmative action in San Francisco's educational system.

Announcement of the settlement Tuesday followed hours of emotional testimony from parents, students and community activists, who were divided over the impact of the ending of the federal desegregation consent decree under which the schools have operated since 1983.

The "fairness hearing" Orrick conducted was required under the settlement, which was reached on Feb. 15.

Orrick said that while he "shares the concerns of the parties who spoke," it was not legally possible to "rewrite portions of the settlement. The court must accept the settlement in whole or drop it."

Judge will monitor schools

The judge added that he would continue to monitor the school system, and if segregation resumed, "both parties will return to the drawing board." He noted that the settlement required the district to submit a student assignment plan that would maintain ethnic diversity without explicit consideration of race as an admissions criterion.

Before court opened, some rallied to vent their unhappiness with the settlement, on the grounds that it killed affirmative action.

Chanting "equal quality education, we will fight for integration," about 30 placard-bearing students and activists demonstrated in front of the federal courthouse on Turk Street, vowing to keep up the pressure to maintain cultural and ethnic diversity in the The City's public schools.

"We intend to make it clear that the segregated schools of the past will never happen again," said Shanta Driner, an activist with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary.

"I am here today because the end of the consent decree will be disastrous for African American students in San Francisco," said Jamaal Marshall, a senior at Lowell High School. "When I first came

to Lowell, I was scared. I didn't think I'd find any other African American students. Now, with the end of the consent decree, I feel my race is not welcome at Lowell. When you can fit all of the school's African American students in one classroom, you have a problem."

Orrick has presided over the school district's federal desegregation consent decree since its start.

UC-Berkeley rally against deal

Among those attending the rally were several UC-Berkeley students who have felt the impact of the end of affirmative action.

"We have seen re-segregation at UC-Berkeley, and we are here to build a movement for integration," said Tania Kaptner, a first-year graduate student at Berkeley. "We can't let any of our schools go back to the days before Brown vs. Board of Education."

The district and the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the district's race-based admissions policy to elite schools agreed to end 15 years of federal court-ordered desegregation just hours before the suit was to have gone to trial.

The settlement abolishing the district's race-conscious admissions policy will also phase out the annual $37million that goes with the desegregation plan by Dec. 31, 2002. That is when the consent decree was scheduled to expire.

The district now is required to craft a colorblind school admission policy.

Andrew Hurwitz is a partner at Osborn Maledon. He recently delivered the third annual Willard H. Pedrick Lecture at Arizona State University's law school, in honor of the school's founding dean. This article, the first in a series of two, was excerpted from that lecture.

When I was a member of the Yale Law School Class of 1971, we had one woman professor and not a single minority professor. Of my class of approximately 150, there were fewer than two dozen women, and even fewer people of color. At Arizona State University, the founding class of 1970 had 14 women and only four minorities. In short, when I entered law school, the profession was still a club largely restricted to white males.

Today, virtually every law school class in the country, including those at ASU, are divided approximately evenly between men and women. The minority population of the most recent graduating class at ASU was about 27 percent, and the same is true at many of the other great law schools in this country.

The door to the profession has been opened to women and minorities. There is a lot more to be done, but we no longer look the same, or come from the same backgrounds.

This kind of change is, I suggest, an enormously good thing, not only for legal education and the profession, but also for those we serve.

Why did it come about?

While an expert could spend hours telling you about sociological progress and the maturation of the American society, if we're going to be honest with one another, we have to start with the words no one dare mention - affirmative action.

When I served on the Arizona Board of Regents, we were distressed with the minority enrollment and graduation rates at the Arizona universities. A very wise colleague, Jack Pfister, suggested to us that whenever something gets measured, it inevitably improves. And so, we undertook a very simple yet dramatic step.

We told the university presidents that we expected minority enrollment and graduation rates to go up 10 percent every year. We also told them that we expected this to happen without the lowering of standards. And, we told them that if they couldn't achieve these goals, they had to come before the board on an annual basis and explain in public why they had failed.

Remarkably, universities that had struggled to enroll minority students suddenly found qualified applicants, and took the steps necessary to make sure those qualified students graduated. And, what happened at the universities generally also occurred at the schools of law.

I don't believe for a moment that university administrators or law school deans were racists in the past. Rather, I suggest that higher education and law schools in general are conservative institutions, resistant to change. When law school deans recruited students in the late 1960s, the best recruit was someone who looked exactly like the dean - a white male with good LSATs and superior grades from a fine undergraduate institution. And, since those students did exceedingly well in law school, the wisdom of the admissions policy was reinforced.

The law schools have changed. But things have not changed simply because justice and light have prevailed. They have changed because policymakers believed that our society will work only if higher education aggressively recruits and retains a diverse student body.

This is particularly important in the law, a profession that touches all segments of our society. If the law schools, which are the gatekeepers to the profession, do not admit and graduate significant numbers of women and minorities, we will be guaranteeing a sort of legal colonialism, where the laws are made, enforced and interpreted solely by one segment of society, but expected to be obeyed by all.

In Arizona, we have made some real progress on this front. But, just as we are beginning to achieve success, storm clouds are gathering. The case law - and the political mood, as is evidenced by Proposition 209 in California and similar initiatives elsewhere – is no longer friendly to the notion that diversity is a goal worth achieving in law school admissions.

The greatest danger to continued progress in opening up the legal profession to minorities comes, however, not from the case law or the electorate, but from law schools themselves. Unfortunately, the common reaction to the case law and the political events of the past several years has been the one that Boalt Hall initially had – all admissions will be governed by a so-called merit system, strictly based on LSAT scores and undergraduate grades. The initial Boalt experience with admissions under this system demonstrates what will inevitably occur – a virtually all-white entering class.

Let me suggest that "merit" is not solely measured by the numbers. Ask yourself who the most important lawyers of this century have been. If Thurgood Marshall does not appear on any of your lists, I would be shocked. Yet, Justice Marshall was anything but at the top of his undergraduate class at an elite college. A school operating solely on the basis of grades and LSATs probably would not have admitted him.

There is a plethora of well-qualified minority candidates for law school admission. There are, in Arizona and elsewhere, lawyers who can be the Thurgood Marshalls of the future, if we only care to seek them out. There is nothing in the Constitution or in common sense that requires that law schools measure "merit" entirely on LSAT scores or undergraduate grades. Our business schools routinely look for such qualities as entrepreneurial ability and real life experience in making their selections.

Law schools must do the same – we must focus a little bit more on what makes a good lawyer. I have no doubt that grades and LSATs are somewhat reasonable predictors of success at law school. But any sort of slavish devotion to them is unwarranted.

If admissions officers focus, in addition to the traditional measures, on the real people in front of them, I think we can continue to maintain the diversity we seek.

Is the applicant one who believes in public service? Does she have the ability to communicate and the desire to serve others? Does he really have a commitment to the law and to justice?

Those questions, I suggest, are not always answered by college grades or board scores.

I am not suggesting, as former Sen. Roman Hruska of Nebraska once did, that mediocre lawyers are a good thing. Rather, to the contrary, I am suggesting that we need not have a mediocre profession, and that we will have one if we revert to law school classes made up of only the majority.

And, I am suggesting that the selection of those who will practice law is of such great importance to the future of this country that it deserves the kind of thought, and the kind of leadership, that does more than throw up its hands at unfavorable Supreme Court decisions.

 
Faced with a reverse-discrimination complaint and potential federal intervention. Rutgers Law School-Newark five months ago quietly intensified a top-to-bottom review of its 32-year-old program to help minority and disadvantaged applicants get into the school and obtain degrees.

The spotlight on the Minority Student Program (MSP) has been under way on an expanded basis apparently since November. That came to light last week when New Jersey Lawyer obtained a copy of a memo acting Dean Eric R. Neisser sent to faculty members.

It's a potentially thorny issue, given the forced dilution of affirmatives action programs at law schools in California, Texas and elsewhere. Some of those affirmative action shutdowns so far have withstood court challenges. It remains unclear whether the action at Rutgers-Newark could be the forerunner of another such situation or a defense mechanism to head off a full-scale legal attack against the program.

What is known, though, is the law school apparently has been weighing at least some changes suggested by federal education authorities and that Neisser advised law professors he has reason to believe that expanding the MSP review will be seen by federal authorities as a sufficient response to get the government off the school's back.

School officials long have underscored the importance of the program and its impact in bringing more diversity to the state's legal community. The program is open to and includes disadvantaged white students as well as minorities.

Based on past published reports, MSP applicants can gain entrance to the law school even if their Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) scores are l0 points lower than other applicants. Whether that spread still exists is not known.

Accounts differ as to why the MSP review was initially launched on a seemingly routine basis under former Dean Roger I. Abrams, and then broadly expanded last year when Neisser became acting dean.

Neisser emphasized to NJL that faculty and staff evaluations of programs like MSP are not uncommon in higher education. His own words, however, in an e-mail message and letter obtained by NJL suggest the stepped-up aspect of the review conceivably may be part of an effort to appease the federal agency considering the reverse-discrimination complaint brought two years ago by a white student denied admission to the school.

It is clear that something happened last fall to cause school officials to vastly expand the parameters of the routine MSP review begun a year or so earlier. Now the school has turned, in part, for assistance and advice to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as well as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education has declined to respond to any question about the matter, including whether that agency might have suggested MSP could be vulnerable to constitutional attack.

OCR representatives in Washington and New York only would say that some news could be available in a month.

NJL reported in February 1997 that the investigation into the white student's complaint could be completed within 135 days.

Neisser e-mailed all faculty members last Nov. 25 that a meeting he had with OCR representatives was a success from the school's standpoint.

"It appears now that, in light of the faculty undertaking a serious study of our MSP, including gathering data on one of the models that OCR had proposed, they will not only dismiss Maher's complaint, but will close their compliance review file, indicating that our study is responsive to 'their Title VI concerns."'

Maher, whose first name neither Neisser nor OCR officials would supply, is the disgruntled white male applicant who filed the complaint, contending the school discriminated against him because of his race and gave preference to less- qualified minorities entering through MSP.

Based on what officials have said, it would appear the law school may not keep records tracking MSP graduates' performance on the bar exam.

For months now the school repeatedly denied NJL's requests for information comparing the pass-fail rate on the state bar exam of MSP graduates to others at the law school. The paper was told by school officials that such information about individual students was confidential. When NJL said it just wanted the pass-fail figures collectively, officials said the figures are not compiled and that it did not have the personnel to assemble such statistics.

Over the years, MSP received high praise as a door-opener to the law for white and minority students who might not otherwise have had the opportunity. The program was begun soon after the Newark riots in 1967.

After the Newark school's faculty voted unanimously this past November to expand the MSP review, Neisser so advised Steven Periera, chief attorney for the OCR regional office in New York by letter, a copy of which was obtained by NJL.

It said the school's in-house review committee is focusing on "procedures, operations and outcomes of the Minority Student Program and, where appropriate, the general admissions process."

The letter further noted the review is "to gather information about comparable programs elsewhere, with the purpose of examining the current goals of the MSP and whether the current structure is appropriate to achieve those goals or [if] any changes in the program are advisable."

Neisser further advised OCR that the review committee will report to the faculty Sept. 30, and the faculty will review the report next November.

One prominent professor, who declined to be identified, said review committee members considered MSP "a model program that falls clearly within the requirements of the law."

The professor also refuted claims by some at the school that it used different standards for minority students than whites.

"We unified all admissions efforts" before the OCR complaint, the source said.

According to the source, more emphasis is placed on the life experience of MSP applicants because studies of the progress of these admittees demonstrate such experiences are a better predictor of law school success than LSAT scores and undergraduate records.

Both Neisser and the source denied the impending departure of Marcia W. Brown, the long-time MSP director, was caused by the OCR review.

Rather, they said, she accepted a more lucrative position to lead a Lucent Technologies foundation assisting inner city children.

Brown could not be reached. Her office referred NJL's calls to Neisser.

In California, minority applications and enrollment at state law schools have declined in the wake of Proposition 209 banning affirmative action efforts.

Similarly, minority applications and enrollment at Texas law schools dropped after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hopwood v. State of Texas that preferences for minorities are unconstitutional.