Affirmative Action

Since I am doing another blog on Affirmative Action (also known as reverse discrimination) this semester, I thought there would be no better way to start of a discussion of the supreme court than with a topic that is still applicable to us today and that shows how the court can effect discussion of a topic in a very direct way.

As a little bit of background, In 1954 the supreme court ruled in a set of five cases remembered under the name of the first, Brown vs. the board of education of Topeka, Kansas (I will get to this later). The main consequence of this case was that Segregation in schools became Illegal, and it eventually led do the complete desegregation of the U.S. Almost 25 years later we come to Allan P. Bakke (sorry, no picture), and a similar, but in some ways, an opposite struggle.

Allan Bakke was a national merit scholar who went to school to become an engineer for the Marines, worked as a marine until he was around 30, and then tried to get into various medical schools, which at the time discriminated on age. One program that he applied to was the very prestigious UC-davis school of medicine in California, and was rejected. The reason this was important, was that he was more qualified than a number of the applicants.

On all of the academic records and testing Bakke ranked among the caliber of the 84 students, out of 100 slots, who made it into the school through the schools normal application, but was far more qualified than the 16 students who made it in the “special program” seats. This special program guaranteed 16 slots were for “disadvantaged students”, without defining this term, but of 272 white males who applied through this program, all were turned down. It acting as a policy discriminating against the white applicants giving them 84 seats, and minority race students 100 seats to apply for.

When Bakke learned that, among other figures, his MCAT score was more than twice the average score of the “special program” students, he threatened to take legal action if he was not admitted the next term, since he was in all of the academic ways they used to choose their students “better” than these students.

After a long set of deliberations the case finally reached the supreme court. The University argued that the “special program” students still met the minimum academic requirements of the college, and that it was important to the livelihood of these races. To quote their brief, “[T]he outcome of this controversy will decide for future generations whether blacks, Chicanos and other insular minorities are to have meaningful access to higher education and real opportunities to enter the learned professions.” Bakke meanwhile argued that he was being discriminated against because of his race, which was white.

The court was heavily divided on the issue of the case, as most felt that their was reason to help the disadvantaged races get a good education, but were split on whether or not the policy was too extreme. The court had previously come to accept and use a line from the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, “Our constitution is colorblind…”, in matters of racial policy. In the Bakke case however, they brought down a very interesting verdict. They ruled, through a very tangled web of various opinions, that a “quota system” went against all racial equality laws, but upheld minority status as a factor to be considered in policies.

The true effect of this case is that any extreme forms of affirmative action, those that border on reverse discrimination are illegal, but that there is at least a legal place in the United States for affirmative action. Whether this is a good or bad outcome is your call.

Tags: haley, passion, rcl1314

By Michael Betts in Uncategorized on January 31, 2014