Federal Officials Oppose Quotas in Tennessee Schools

WASHINGTON — The Reagan Administration, continuing its assault on racial quotas, is opposing a program that sets aside 75 positions for blacks in Tennessee’s state-supported schools for law, medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.

Reciting some of the same arguments it has used to fight mandatory hiring quotas in public employment, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division maintains that the Tennessee plan discriminates against whites who want to be admitted to the professional schools.

In a 50-page brief filed Friday with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, the department argued that the set-aside plan in the state college and university system in Tennessee “ . . . does not eliminate unlawful conditions in order to prevent the creation of a new set of victims, but affirmatively creates a new class of victims in order to achieve racial balance.”

The brief asked the appellate court to either reverse, or remand to a lower court for another hearing, a consent decree containing the set-aside program, which was approved last September.