In a splendid report of good news, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Right has reached an agreement to resolve a complaint filed against Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC), which is part of the large state university in Lubbock, Texas. Health Sciences has five separate schools, and the complaint (made by the Center for Equal Opportunity) concerned whether the current use of race in admissions by any of the schools is legal. They are: the School of Allied Health; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Nursing; the School of Pharmacy; and the School of Medicine.
OCR found that Allied Health, Biomedical Sciences, and Nursing had “never considered race or national origin in their admissions practices.” As for the remaining two schools, Pharmacy considered race in admissions from 2005 through 2008, when it removed from its admissions process any reference to “consideration of an applicant’s race . . . as a factor in the . . . process,” according to OCR. Finally, the School of Medicine has “considered race or national origin as one factor in its holistic admissions practices since 2005.” It has agreed to quit that practice.
OCR affirms that it “has no basis for further investigation of the respective admissions policies and practices” of the four schools that don’t use race. After all, there can be no investigation unless there is something to investigate, and that “something” must be a “racial classification” of some kind or other.
The OCR investigation tells a story that includes Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 ruling that affirmed the use of race and ethnicity in admissions. When that case was handed down, Tech’s board of regents put out a statement saying that in light of Grutter, “the components of the System will implement admissions policies that add race and ethnicity to a . . . process that considers ‘an individualized and holistic’ review of the applicants.” The components already were on the job. “OCR found that all five schools had made an independent determination regarding whether to include race and national origin as factors in their respective admissions policies,” and three had said no. They deserve credit for seeing the virtues of race-neutral admissions when the issue was being intensely debated in the wake of Grutter.
Pharmacy and Medical are the two schools that have used race in admissions, with Pharmacy ending the practice 10 years ago. The current policy provides for the consideration of four different “diversity factors” when the admissions staff
is deciding whether to offer a grant of admission.Three of the factors seem not at all to concern race. The fourth is this: “Other special considerations as presented by the applicant.” That could mean most anything. In an interview, an assistant dean told OCR that “other special considerations” is not to be interpreted to include consideration of an applicant’s race. We’ll see.
As for the remaining one of the five schools that OCR investigated, the School of Medicine, it is the only one that “currently considers race or national origin as a factor in its admissions process.” The school has agreed to a Resolution Agreement” under which it will soon “discontinue all consideration of an applicant’s race and/or national origin” in admissions. Here the medical school has decided to try race-neutral admissions. The agreement provides, however, for reversing course and bringing race back to the process, should various conditions be met. “We’ll see” on this one, too.
