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Dr. Julianne Malveaux tells it like it is. The new president of Bennett College for Women has outspoken opinions about the recent Supreme Court decision against voluntary school-integration plans. She's really worried about the "combination of an indifferent if not hostile court and activist opposition on the part of people like Ward Connerly, who seems to be a freelance missile who's determined to torpedo the wall of diversity that's been built heretofore."

We asked DiversityInc readers how they think the Supreme Court decision will impact American schools. Click here to read what they said. (See also: The End of An Era? Supreme Court Deals Blow to School Integration and 7 Ways to Promote School Integration After Supreme Court Limits Race-Based Plans)

Dr. Malveaux is a contributor to DiversityInc, authoring such articles as Diversity and the End of Eminence. An economist by trade, she serves on the boards of the Economic Policy Institute, Women Building for the Future and other organizations. (See also: Bennett College Chooses Trailblazer as New President)

Dr. Malveaux also participated in DiversityInc's roundtable on work/life, which you can read in the March 2007 issue of DiversityInc magazine.

DiversityInc: Was the court right to strike down these programs?

Malveaux: Those of us who care about diversity issues clearly feel this court is incorrect. [Justice Anthony] Kennedy did offer a bone or a little bit in affirming the importance of diversity, but the issue of saying you don't mandate it is problematic because diversity isn't something that happens without effort. To suggest that there's just some natural process of getting a diverse student body flies in the face of two centuries of history as well as issues of housing segregation and income inequality that have existed for some time.

DiversityInc: What are the implications of the decision for higher education?

Malveaux: This is a court that is very conservative, strict constructionist. I would not like to have seen this court make a decision in the Michigan cases. As we look ahead at the docket, what we can see is continued attacks on issues of diversity—a combination of an indifferent if not hostile court and activist opposition on the part of people like Ward Connerly, who seems to be a freelance missile who's determined to torpedo the wall of diversity that's been built heretofore. That combination doesn't leave us with a climate that is conducive in our schools.

This means that there's yet another way that gaps between students will be reinforced. We already know that based on housing segregation and issues of income, students of color come to the higher-education table often with less of a portfolio. They've gone to schools that may not have advanced baccalaureate courses or advanced-placement credits, and these are ways that they are implicitly discriminated against. It's not that they couldn't master these things; it's that their high schools don't offer them. When you put together magnet schools like in Seattle and decide you're going to share opportunities to make education more balanced, it means some students of color won't have opportunity, let's be clear. It doesn't necessarily mean higher education will have a different pool of students, but it's potentially a pool that's less prepared.

Private institutions are able to make certain kinds of decisions about student composition in higher education; we have private dollars that are able to guide decisions. The challenge here, of course, is what do we do with public dollars?

DiversityInc: Many are talking about socioeconomic alternatives to race-based voluntary-integration plans. What is the impact of economic and racial integration in an educational setting?

Malveaux: The socioeconomic alternative is a good one. It doesn't deal always with the racial issues. The fact is that you have significant numbers of poor white people as well. If we simply did socioeconomic integration without including race, you wouldn't necessarily change a profile. You end up with a very vibrant environment when people can learn with people who are much different than they are, with different kinds of lifestyles and backgrounds. It's a dynamic kind of thing that happens only too rarely in a society that is stratified in many ways both by race and economics.

DiversityInc: When people say "make the schools perform" as an option for resolving our current educational crisis, what do you think needs to be done?

Malveaux: I agree, but how do we do that, and what kind of dollars are we putting into K-12 education or pre-K education? There are a number of questions we have to ask about our commitment to making the schools perform. In the long run, we must have better schools; we can't survive global competition without better preparation for the future labor market. It's not either/or. These people are saying "Make the schools perform." How are they suggesting we do it? Are they simply saying this because they don't want to deal with issues of diversity? These people who come up with that response need to be questioned and they need to be questioned sharply.

DiversityInc: How will the ruling impact the preparation of students to go to a historically black college or university (HBCU) or Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)?

Malveaux: It's a galvanizing decision around school quality and around what diversity advocates need to do. Students of color may be less prepared, to the extent they are excluded from magnet schools that prepare very well. There won't be a crisis in change of demographic makeup. To the extent a white student matriculates from an HBCU or HSI, he or she graduates with a cultural competency that you couldn't pay for. HBCUs won't ever en masse become white universities. Bennett, for example, will always be a black-women's school. There's nothing wrong with white students wanting to matriculate. What's wrong is when black students can't matriculate. It will affect issues of diversity in the long run if don't talk about diversity in K-12.  

DiversityInc: Many have dubbed the recent decisions a "reversal" of Brown v. Board of Education. What progress have we made in the last 50 years, and why?

Malveaux: Brown was a controversial decision when it was made. It took away de jure as opposed to de facto segregation. No longer could you have schools that were designated black/white, but you can take away de jure and keep de facto if you have housing patterns that are segregated. For example, you could plop a school down in Newark, N.J., and say that you can tell by plopping it there what the composition is going to be—predominantly African-American students.

Even with the minimal legal progress that Brown purported to make, the court did not implement Brown for another decade. Remember Brown, too, said "With all deliberate speed," which people interpreted as, "Take your sweet time."

It's a little strong to call the recent decision a reversal of Brown, but we had the opportunity to now deal with de facto segregation and refused to and what we've done is slowed the pace of progress, but that pace of progress had been slowed since 1976 and the Bakke decision. There have been assaults to notions of diversity since Bakke, notions of affirmative action, notions of a diverse campus and workplace. Those who care about access and equal opportunity and affirmative action and diversity are now challenged to increase their commitment and deal with these issues more. Legal opposition has pushed people into a euphemistic discussion.

Education is the first frontier, but we've also got to talk about economics, differences in income. If we're really talking about what our society looks like, we've got to look at the entire pipeline and what happens to people along the way, and that includes more complex things like healthcare access, employment, why African-American graduates fare less successfully in the labor market than white high-school graduates, for example. Education had often been the proxy issue for all those issues because we know education has the power to transform lives, and since we know that, it's become shorthand for dealing with other things. Let's not take this one case and make it more than it is, but let's not make it less than it is either.

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