Affirmative action policies ask colleges and universities to help correct society’s failures in dealing with racial disparities.
Most of us can agree that decent education for African Americans lagged for nearly a century from Reconstruction until the Brown vs. Board of Education. It took the Supreme Court and the Federal government to enforce the racial integration of schools and end the fiction of ‘separate but equal.’ It was the 1950’s, the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and it took nearly a decade, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., for action.
It began with Federal policies that discrimination in hiring on any government contract, or in government housing, would not be allowed. In 1972 the government extended those policies to include both private and public colleges and universities. Schools were ordered to ‘correct the underutilization of minorities.’ No one understood what that meant, but it pressured Admissions to give minorities preference in admissions.
With no guidance some schools used numerical data while others set quotas to achieve a ‘more equal opportunity.’ And for the next decade as young men of all races who hoped to avoid losing their lives in the jungles of Vietnam, sought college deferments. Schools encouraged minorities to apply. Then there was a ‘hiccup.’
A Vietnam vet, Allan Bakke, applied to the University of California – Davis. He was denied admission. He was a little older than his contemporaries, but his scores were adequate, and he had served his country with distinction. He was also white. Oops! Davis had set aside eight slots for minorities. No openings for Bakke. “I should have gotten one of those spots,” Bakke felt. He sued the school alleging reverse discrimination.
Wait a minute…affirmative action policies were intended to help minorities gain a better foothold into the middle class. What’s this white dude doing? A revelation: it is impossible to help one class without having an adverse effect on someone else.
By the time the Bakke case reached the Supreme Court everyone had an opinion. UC Davis ultimately found a ‘slot’ that permitted Bakke to attend. He went on to medical school and spent his career as an Anesthesiologist at a hospital in Minnesota. All the minority students who graduated achieved varying levels of success…except one. He killed multiple women in botched liposuction procedures, lost his license and was killed in a botched carjacking.
Reverse discrimination lawsuits gained legitimacy and soon cases against the Universities of Michigan and Texas followed. At the present time, Asian students are suing Harvard using the same principle.
Since that flurry, courts and schools have continued to vacillate…a few more minorities here…too much racial consideration there.
UCLA receives over 100,000 applications each year and accepts 14%. Stanford receives 55,000 and accepts 4%, a rate similar to Harvard and other Ivy League schools. Many schools have stopped using SAT scores in evaluating applicants. Biases, intentional and unintentional, are built into each of us. This will continue to fuel the question of who gets accepted subject to controversy. Race, gender, grades, essays, test scores…none are perfect measurements of what one can do or what they might accomplish in life.
For more read BY ONE VOTE by Carole Eglash-Kosoff, available on Amazon.
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