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Founders’ Day
The University of Georgia will celebrate its 214th birthday Jan. 22 with the annual Founders’ Day observance.
A Founders’ Day reception will be held at the Athens Country Club from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The reception, sponsored by the university’s National Alumni Association, will include hors d’oeuvres, music and a cash bar.
Founders’ Day commemorates the Georgia General Assembly’s approval of UGA’s charter on Jan. 27, 1785, in Savannah. UGA is America’s first chartered state university.
The reservation deadline for the reception is Jan. 19. To make reservations or for more information about Founders’ Day, call Alice Vernon, National Alumni Association office, 542-2251.
Reverse-discrimination lawsuit ruling
In a partial judgment in the reverse-discrimination case regarding UGA admission policies, U.S. District Judge B. Avant Edenfield ruled on Jan. 6 that the university’s admissions policies were unconstitutional between 1990 and 1995, when a separate standard was applied to black and white applicants.
The plaintiff in this portion of the case was Kirby Tracy, who is white and who was denied admission in 1995 because his SAT score of 830 did not meet the minimum score of 980 required for white applicants. Black applicants at the time were admitted with an SAT score of 800.
Although Tracy has since entered UGA as a transfer student, the judge ruled that he can seek monetary damages from the University System. Damages will be determined after further hearings on the issue.
The complaint of a second white plaintiff, Ashley Davis, was dismissed by the judge, who ruled that she had been denied admission in 1996 because she did not meet the minimum academic standards, not because of her race.
“Today’s ruling reflects a decision on policies the university abandoned about five years ago,” President Michael F. Adams said. “We have respect for the law and the courts and believe that our current policies are legal and reflect a desire to continue to aggressively recruit qualified American-American students.”
That issue--the constitutionality of UGA’s current admissions policies--is yet to be decided by the judge. Most accepted applicants are, since 1996, judged on academic criteria alone. For a borderline pool of applicants, other factors are also taken into consideration, including race, gender, alumni connections and county of origin.
The preliminary ruling included the judge’s rejection of the argument, made by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, that the 1990--95 admissions policies were valid because they promoted diversity and remedied the effects of past discrimination at UGA.
“However noble this general goal is,” Edenfield wrote, “a court must scrutinize the specific policies which seek to achieve diversity. Abstractions aimed at marginally increasing diversity simply cannot carry the day because such benefit is far outweighed by the stigmatizing, polarizing costs imposed by racial classifications.”
Also still to come is a decision about race-based admissions in the state’s historically black colleges. The plaintiffs claim that the state is perpetuating racial segregation by supporting black public colleges and argue that those colleges are “academically inferior” because of their admissions policies.
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