Initiative would bar affirmative action programs

If you’ve got excellent grades, a stunning score on your Law School Aptitude Test and a remarkable background, odds are you’ll have no trouble getting into either of the law schools at Arizona’s public universities.

If, however, your application doesn’t stand out quite that much, the schools will look at other factors to determine if you’re one of the small percentage of applicants who gets in the door. Ethnic background is on that list.

But that could come to an end in a little more than a year: An initiative drive being launched today will ask voters to bar state and local governments from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in employment, contracting and education.

The measure is largely the work of Ward Connerly, a former member of the California Board of Regents who persuaded voters in his own state to adopt a similar measure in 1996, banning programs that use those factors to give preference to or discriminate against applicants. He is now taking that campaign to eight other states.

Max McPhail, executive director of Connerly’s campaign in Arizona, said the papers will be filed this week with the Secretary of State’s Office, allowing the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative to begin gathering the 230,047 signatures they need by July 3 to put the measure on the 2008 ballot.

State officials have said there are no preferences in hiring or contracting.

But the situation is somewhat different at law schools, where the number of applicants far exceeds the number of spaces available.

Patricia White, dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, said being a minority, by itself, won’t get an applicant in the door.

But she said her school looks beyond grade point averages and LSAT scores to factors such as a person’s background and work experience, letters of reference and even each applicant’s personal statement.

In fact, Toni Massaro, her counterpart at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, said LSAT scores “have modest predictive value of performance in the first year.”

“But we over and over again see applications from people who have had life experiences where, if you look at the whole record, you say, ‘You know what? I think this person is going to outperform just the numerical indicators,’ ” she said.

Both schools get applications from people whom their review committees immediately conclude are qualified while other applications are set aside.

The admissions committees use more subjective criteria to determine which of the remaining applications to approve.

Each year, 3,100 people apply at ASU for 160 slots, and up to 2,800 people apply for 150 openings at UA.

“It’s not a precise science,” said White. Some of it just comes down to balance.

Where students grew up, whether they speak another language, their work experience and their economic, ethnic and racial backgrounds also matter.

“Law is an inherently social, society-accountable profession,” said Massaro.

“So it’s important for us to have a student body that is diverse in a really broad sense of that term.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed law schools in particular to consider race in admissions, most recently in a 2003 opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that upheld admission practices of the University of Michigan to improve diversity.

However, Michigan voters last November passed a similar initiative, barring affirmative action in hiring at all levels of government and in its state university admissions.