There have been several postings recently about Princeton abandoning its race-exclusive summer internship program. (See, for a few, mine here and here and Erin O’Connor’s here.) Now the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that MIT has also thrown in the towel. (Link requires subscription)
Like Princeton, MIT concluded that it could not defend programs to which whites and Asians were not even allowed to apply. As was the case with Princeton, credit here goes to the Center for Equal Opportunity, and its general counsel, Roger Clegg. And once again, Erin O’Connor does a superb job on this story, here, and I’ll not repeat what she reports.
Not wanting anyone to think that it has abandoned racial discrimination entirely, however, MIT insists that it “will continue to take the race and ethnicity of applicants into account, in keeping with their mission of bringing more black, Hispanic, and American Indian students into the fields of science and engineering.” Jamie Lewis Keith, MIT’s senior counsel,
stressed that the admissions policies abandoned by officials there differed significantly from those in dispute at Michigan, because MIT’s policies provided for some applicants to be excluded from consideration based solely on their race. She said that MIT officials remain convinced that the U.S. Constitution permits colleges to consider race and ethnicity as one of several factors influencing admissions decisions.
We should be thankful for small steps forward, but it would be nice if the education establishment would recognize that racial discrimination, while better than total racial exclusion, is still not good.
