Thread: Affirmative Action

I remember studying the UC vs. Bakke case many years ago. Is affirmative action the same or different than 'racial quotas?'

This article goes into many topics, so the concept of affirmative action gets diluted.

AA for education, is probably different than hiring and promotions, etc. Recently in the US many universities scrapped using race and ethnicity as a factor. Meaning these schools were focusing on academics, social organizations, and the basic background of the candidate.

THIRTY years ago last week, the Supreme Court handed down its Bakke decision, hoping to end the argument over the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admission. But with hindsight, it’s clear that the justices mainly helped hasten the end of serious discussion about racial justice in America. As they set the stage for a lasting argument over who should get into college, the wound of race continued to fester, unhealed, and our politics moved on.


The ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was the court’s disorderly attempt in 1978 to bring some order to racially conscious admissions programs. The medical school of the University of California at Davis had set aside 16 spots for members of groups described as having been subjected to past discrimination.


The program was not unusual. Worried about lagging minority enrollments and prodded by the federal government, colleges across the country, having once taken race into account to keep certain groups out, had begun considering it as a factor in order to help members of those groups get in. A rejected applicant, Allan P. Bakke, argued that the program at Davis discriminated against him because he was white.


The Supreme Court was unable to make up its collective mind. Four of the justices would have upheld nearly all college affirmative action programs, and four others would have struck nearly all of them down. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s lone opinion therefore controlled the result.


Justice Powell proposed that university administrators could consider an applicant’s race — sometimes, anyway — as long as they did not establish any racial quota, a term he inexactly defined. Baffled colleges consulted baffled lawyers. Justice Powell’s laudable effort at compromise had sown confusion. Eventually, college administrators worked out their response: They would pay attention to the Bakke decision when it suited them — the rest of the time they would ignore it.


In the ensuing years, America has come to treat racial injustice the same way. Having failed miserably in our efforts to undo the damage wrought by two centuries of slavery and another of Jim Crow, we threw up our hands and moved on. We still fight over affirmative action and pretend it means we’re fighting over racial justice. We debate its pros and cons in order to avoid coming to grips with more fundamental challenges.


Those who suffer most from the legacy of racial oppression are not competing for spaces in the entering classes of the nation’s most selective colleges. Millions of them are not finishing high school.

The rate for Asians is fairly high. Another group has a high school dropout rate of over 50%. Parents? Values on education? Quality of schools?

We countenance vast disparities in education in America, in where children start and where they come out. And we do not even want to talk about it.

It was not always this way. From the early years of the nation’s founding through somewhere in the mid-1970s, racial injustice was the fundamental moral question of American politics. Through wars and depressions, through scandals and disasters, the attention of the American people was repeatedly yanked back — at times forcefully — to the divide between black and white.


Stephen L. Carter, a law professor at Yale

entire: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06carter.html

Originally Posted by Milkman

Meaning these schools were focusing on academics, social organizations, and the basic background of the candidate.

As well they should. The idea academic institutions should make academic achievement by applicants secondary to racial, ethnic, or any other category is pretty silly.

The governments needs to spend time and energy making sure there is a level of equality in the provision of publicly available primary and secondary education facilities. If a community is unwilling to take advantage of this the gov should not reward irresponsible parents or students by mandating preferential treatment re university entry.

Government needs to play a role in making sure those with the academic qualifications to enter a uni have the financial support to do so.