Washington, D.C. — In an increasingly quixotic effort, House Republicans will take another stab this week at untangling the web of unconstitutional preference programs based on race and sex. As the massive Higher Education Act comes to a vote, Rep. Frank Riggs (R-CA) will offer an amendment to bar recipients of these federal education dollars from discrimination and preferences in admission.

Riggs’ amendment would simply bring a federal appropriation into compliance with the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, his language bans public universities from discriminating against or granting preferences to any individuals on the basis of race, sex, or skin color. His amendment goes on to encourage recruitment of women and minorities, but would require that the actual admissions process to treat applicants without regard to their color or sex.

After the defeat of Rep. Charles Canady’s universal ban on preferences in committee last year, the committed few retrenched and decided to get at these programs incrementally, picking them out of larger bills that come to the floor. The first was the billion dollar highway bill but efforts to ban preferences failed in both the House and the Senate. Now Rep. Riggs will try to pluck preferences from the Education funding bill. Apparently alarmed, the Clinton Administration sent out a three-page statement, signed by Attorney General Janet Reno and Secretary of Education Richard Riley, stating their firm opposition to the Riggs amendment.

The Regents of the University of California passed a similar ban in 1995, after Regent Ward Connerly forced the issue upon discovering the blatantly discriminatory admissions practices at the system’s most elite universities. The just-released results for the first year of preference-free admissions show that matching by ability does not mean resegregation — in fact, the new practices do students the service of making them more competitive instead of throwing them into an academic environment for which they are unprepared. Perhaps the new de-politicized admissions policy will do something about the appallingly (and hush hush) dropout statistics at Berkeley, where 42 percent of black students dropped out before getting their diplomas, compared to 16 percent of white students.

Despite recent court decisions and popular opinion, college administrators around the country cling to the old preference system. In an opinion piece from the May 28 Washington Post, administrators at the University of Michigan lay out their case for “The Education Importance of Race.” Their piece defends the university’s admissions process — which employs a racially-rigged admissions formula eerily similar to the one formerly used by the University of California. The Michigan University administrators defend the use of race in the admissions process by claiming, “Race is educationally important for all students, because understanding race in America is a powerful metaphor for crossing sensibilities of all kinds.”

It’s not clear what “crossing sensibilities” has to do with earning a degree, or even if it has any meaning at all outside the socio-babble of the academy. But let’s look at the lessons the University of Michigan is teaching its students about race. It wants its students to understand race in America. But by holding one group to a lower standard than another group, students learn a disturbing lesson: one group needs special help to compete with the other. There are few lessons as pernicious as racial inferiority.

Kudos to Rep. Riggs for his effort to rid the nation’s universities of taxpayer-supported discrimination. Unfortunately, the identity politics mafia has cowed many of his colleagues, and it looked doomed to fail last week. In a surprising show of unity and courage, though, the Republican leadership voted to push for passage of the Riggs amendment, and it now has a fighting chance. Either way, the fight over Riggs’ amendment shows that the promise of true equality under the law may be a long way off, but at least it has not been forgotten.

—Katherine Post, Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity