THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, June 1, 1995                 TAG: 9506010001
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A10  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   52 lines

RULING STANDS AS BAR TO RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS NEED SHOULD BE A FACTOR

Most Americans consider it a maxim: Those who can, pay. They pay for their housing, their food . . . their college education. So why should African Americans who can afford to pay their way through school be eligible for public scholarships denied whites, Latinos, Asians, Aleuts - anybody who isn't black - yet cannot pay their way?

Daniel Podboresky, a Latino with a straight-A average at the University of Maryland, posed that question by suing the school. He is ineligible for its Benjamin Banneker program, which awards 40 full scholarships to black students only, regardless of financial need. The lower court agreed with the university that the program is fitting recompense for past discrimination against blacks and a useful means to the desirable end of diversifying a student pop-u-la-tion.

But last fall, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found the program's basis in race alone to be unconstitutional discrimination. And this week, the U.S. Supreme Court found no reason to reverse the court of appeals.

It also found no reason to take up the case and render it either moot in the 4th Circuit, which includes Virginia, or make it the law of the land. But if the justices didn't want to argue the matter, the colleges, the states and the public do. This case makes a sorely needed point in the current, larger debate over affirmative action.

Ever since the Bakke decision in 1978, the high court has upheld university affirmative-action programs that include race as a consideration. Letting the ruling stand in Podboresky sets a reasonable limit on remedial discrimination for a society whose goal, as yet unachieved but still striven for, is color-blindness: While race may be a consideration in scholarships awarded from public money, race may not be the sole consideration.

This ruling is not a victory for white men angry since the day Alan Bakke sued. It does not affect publicly funded affirmative-action programs based on need and race, or privately funded programs based on race, ethnicity, aptitude, interest or the personal quirk of any donor.

This ruling is not a door closed in many black faces. Minority-only scholarships account for only 4 percent to 5 percent of all scholarship funds. Only 7 percent of American minorities receive them. Many if not most of the recipients qualify on financial grounds as well. And the fact that some African-Americans students do not qualify on financial grounds is one indication of the nation's progress, however far it has yet to go, toward equality of opportunity. by CNB