The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, though it steers clear of dismantling college and university admissions policies, has tremendous implications for those of us concerned about diversity in higher education. According to the new Supreme Court decision, K-12 schools have no authority to create racial balance in schools in order to assure that students are educated in a racially diverse environment.

The Seattle decision cites Brown v. Board of Education to argue that the “classification and segregation themselves denoted inferiority.” But it is not segregation that interests the plurality of the court, but classification. For the majority of this court, making any school assignment decision based on race, even if the aim is integrated education, is wrong.

In K-12 schools, this decision will lead to even more segregation of White and non-White students. School districts, particularly in the North, have used voluntary desegregation to make school boundaries as racially balanced as possible. The end of these programs will create more schools with students who are homogenous, and expose students to fewer peers of different backgrounds.

For colleges and universities, the Parents v. Seattle decision does not mean that admissions decisions will be changed, but it does mean that the students we admit will have had less contact with members of other groups, will know less about other cultures within the United States and will not have known a full range of individuals from other groups. The college classroom may be the first time students have a substantial discussion with members of other groups.

This makes colleges and universities, and what happens in and out of the classroom, even more important. In areas like Southeast Michigan, where I teach, going to a college might be the only diverse environment our students have engaged in. And given the level of residential segregation, it may be the last. It is our responsibility to help students grapple with these issues productively in the short time we have with them.

Another implication of the Seattle decision that colleges and universities must address is the failure to teach students about the issues and achievements of the civil rights movement in America, and what the goals of that movement were. Reading the decision, one would think that Brown was about making colorblind decisions, or avoiding racial classifications altogether.

If more of our students had the opportunity to study Brown and the civil rights movement, they would have a stronger sense of what the case was about — the segregation of African-American, Hispanic and White students, and the need for ways to address these injustices within the framework of the Constitution.

This paragraph of the Brown decision might be a good starting place:

“To separate [students] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

The quote can be read several ways. Politicians, leaders, scholars and the public have long debated what means can be used to address the race-based educational segregation and its effects on student learning and development. These are the kinds of questions our students must confront, grapple with and learn about through discussion and debate — they will not deal with them so fully in any other arena.

Teaching African-American history at a college in Japan this spring has brought home to me the importance of giving our college students a critical understanding of the civil rights movement. In Japan, a country which would characterize itself as racially and culturally homogenous, students are very interested in the American civil rights movement and the struggles of African-American and other groups to attain equality and opportunity. They are, in part, looking for a history that will help them understand what it is to live in a more diverse world than the one they were raised in.

In America, the Supreme Court and much of our political life is moving in the opposite direction. While America has a long tradition of racial and ethnic diversity, and a history of commitment to an integrated society, we seem to be hunkering down in our neighborhoods, surrounded by people like ourselves, with little knowledge of or interest in our own rich history.

- Dr. Russ Olwell is a visiting Fulbright lecturer at Kyoritsu Women’s University in Tokyo, Japan, and is an associate professor of history at Eastern Michigan University.

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