RALEIGH – How’s this for a preposterously misleading headline, from The Independent Weekly in Durham: “NCSU under investigation: Group that played a role in Michigan case limiting affirmative action says N.C. State has too many blacks, Latinos.”

The organization in question, the Center for Equal Opportunity, most certainly does not express the view that N.C. State or any other university has “too many blacks” or “too many Latinos.” The president, Linda Chavez, is the former staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and former chairwoman of the National Commission on Migrant Education. She edited the American Federation of Teachers’ journal American Educator. She is a passionate advocate for improving educational opportunities for black and Hispanic students in the United States.

What Chavez and CEO in general oppose is a policy of racial preferences in university admissions. Arguing that blacks or Hispanics with fewer qualifications or less preparation for success at a school like N.C. State should not be admitted instead of better-qualified, better-prepared whites or Asians is not the same as arguing that fewer blacks or Hispanics should attend N.C. State. The issue is how best to increase their enrollment – by improving their academic preparation, as Chavez suggests, or by pretending that such preparation is irrelevant to success in college, as many racial-preference advocates do.

As explained less tendentiously in a News & Observer story several days later, the probe into admissions practices at N.C. State involves the question of whether the university is using racial preferences today in a way that conflicts with the 2003 Supreme Court decisions in two University of Michigan cases. The majority upheld diversity as a legitimate educational goal, in a case concerning admission to the law school, but struck down a numerical system in undergraduate admissions that automatically gave underrepresented minorities extra points.

CEO’s research isn’t really new but it is revealing. Author David Armor found that given black and white applicants with the same qualifications, the odds of the black student being admitted to NCSU were 13 times higher than the white’s.

This wasn’t the first study CEO commissioned on the subject. Indeed, the 2004 finding seems more modest than that of a previous 2001 paper by Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai for CEO. Here’s a critical passage:

The odds ratio of blacks over whites at N.C. State is 177 to 1, while the odds ratios of whites to Asians and whites to Hispanics are less than 1.00 and are not statistically significant. The odds ratios do not mean that highly qualified white, Asian, and Hispanic applicants are rejected. On the contrary, while a black applicant with a 540 SAT math score, a 480 SAT verbal score, and a 3.63 GPA would have a 100 percent chance of admission, whites, Asians, and Hispanics with the same scores would have almost as good a chance (96 percent, 94 percent, and 95 percent, respectively). But the gaps in admission probabilities emerge as credentials get worse. With an SAT math score of 480, an SAT verbal score of 430, and a GPA of 3.27, 99 percent of black applicants ? but only 44 percent of Hispanics, 42 percent of Asians, and 48 percent of whites with the same credentials would be admitted. With an SAT math score of 420, a verbal score of 380, and a 2.94 GPA, black applicants would have an 89 percent chance of admission, compared to 4 percent for Hispanics, 3 percent for Asians, and 4 percent for whites.

CEO has continued to gather data on university admissions since this paper appeared, and took special note of data obtained from N.C. State after a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request. According to Roger Clegg, CEO’s general counsel, the data suggested that the university had continued to use a numerical system for race-based admissions despite the Supreme Court’s ban of the practice.

It’s not clear what, if anything, the federal Department of Education will do in this case. I’m no doctrinaire opponent of affirmative action, but you might call me a full-throated opponent of the kind of racial demagoguery used here against Linda Chavez and CEO. The vast majority of North Carolinians, of all races, oppose naked racial preferences in university admissions. Their continued use at N.C. State would seem to violate both judicial precedent and the will of the electorate. It should stop immediately.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.