ASU's law school is squaring off against an anti-affirmative action group this week in an effort to maintain the college's current admission policies.
Max McPhail, the director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, said he will file paperwork today with the Secretary of State's Office, which he hopes will lead to the placement of an anti-affirmative action measure on the 2008 ballot.
The proposed initiative calls for an amendment of the state's constitution and would prohibit discrimination against or preferential treatment of an individual based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin by public education institutions, McPhail said.
But Patricia White, dean of ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, said she opposes the measure.
"We are interested in putting together a class that is broadly representative of society," she added. "We are very interested in having students who come from different educational backgrounds, students who have broad age diversity, students who have lived in different parts of the world or country, speak different languages or have different cultural experiences."
While she said the college does not select applicants based solely on race, gender or national origin, the school takes a wide array of factors into consideration when narrowing down their choices, including different aspects of an applicant's background.
If the proposed ballot measure passes next year, White said it would prohibit the college from considering a student's national origin, among other factors.
"We think (national origin) adds, in an international world, importance," she said. "And we think it's important to have different ethnic groups."
Daniel Bernstine, the president of the Law School Admission Council — the organization responsible for administering the Law School Aptitutde Test, said he also supports affirmative action in higher education institutions during a lecture Tuesday night.
"Our society is not, in fact, color blind, and race still matters," he said. "The racial inequities continue."
But McPhail said he finds the practice of affirmative action disturbing.
"I don't think race or gender should have any role in who gets selected into law school or any school," he said. "That means other people are being discriminated against, and discrimination is never right. I want to be judged on my merits."
But Bernstine warned against the over-reliance on applicants' LSAT scores, which he said are often perceived as a student's merits.
"The test is not the equivalent or synonym of merit," he said. "The LSAT cannot bear the weight that schools place on it."
Bernstine said law schools need to take other factors into consideration, besides the often-small differences between applicants' LSAT scores, when determining admission.
Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court favors law schools' consideration of race during their admission practices, White said.
In 2003 the law school's namesake, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, wrote an opinion that upheld the admission practices of the University of Michigan to gain diversity, she said.
Bernstine said anti-affirmative action groups are seeking to achieve through the ballots what they have not been able to achieve in the courts,
Once the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative files paperwork with the Secretary of State, the group can begin collecting the 230,047 signatures needed to put the measure before voters in next year's election.
Reach the reporter at sarah.g.owen@asu.edu.
