The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today a legal attack against a fund that has operated for 40 years to encourage minority students to pursue journalism as a profession through summer internships.
The program being challenged is organized by the Virginia Commonwealth University the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It is one of 20 such programs nationwide funded by the Dow Jones Newspaper fund.
The Chronicle said:
The Center for Individual Rights, which has been a leader in the fight against affirmative action, alleges that the Virginia Commonwealth University Urban Journalism Workshop engages in illegal racial discrimination by excluding white students.
It argues that the program's race-exclusive eligibility criteria violate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law, as well as various federal civil-rights statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funds.
Affirmative action was designed to address historical wrongs in a society that has done a poor job of providing equal opportunities to people of color.
The left has argued that affirmative action – mandated programs that specifically recruit underrepresented groups – are an attempt to overcome our social inertia around truly transforming race relations and the professional and educational opportunities available.
Conservative groups have, with much success, dismantled many university affirmative action programs through legal challenges that argue they discriminate against whites.
However, in the Virginia Commonwealth University case, the program is funded by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, arguably a conservative paper.
The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund is supported through the contributions of Dow Jones & Company (publisher of The Wall Street Journal), the Dow Jones Foundation, and other newspaper publishers around the nation. Newspapers help pay for many of the other summer journalism programs supported by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and in some cases provide the programs with instructors.
So, in this case, the efforts of a fairly conservative company (Dow Jones) to recruit minority students into the field of journalism through a “liberal†recruitment program is challenged by a (more) conservative group opposed to affirmative action in any form.
Meanwhile, although some progress has been made, people of color continue to be underrepresented in the media as professionals.
Conor Friedersdorf @ September 26, 2006 - 5:43pm
Corporations generally are neither conservative nor liberal, nor even laissez faire -- their boards, shareholders and lobbyists instead act to maximize shareholder value, and that pursuit is almost always a better explanation for their behavior than ideology.
Robert Bartley, the late, Pulitzer Prize winning former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, famously explained the phenomenon in this editorial (on a different but analogous subject).
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