Affirmative action leaves problem unsolved

Frontiesman editorial board

In two recent affirmative action rulings, the Supreme Court found that the University of Michigan's efforts to achieve a "critical mass" of minority students in its law school is acceptable while the school's point system for undergraduates is not. The law school's policy is guided by language -- it instructs admissions officers to give special consideration to disadvantaged minority applicants who can contribute to the school's targeted critical mass. The undergraduate school, apparently due to the high volume of applicants, applies a simple point system -- minority applicants get 20 extra points.

Even if the results are the same, the Supreme Court held that the approach is what counts. The undergrad policy seems to apply a more explicit quota standard while the law school, due to the apparent subjectivity of its policy, does not.

What seems to have become lost in the ongoing debate over affirmative action is the initial intent of the law. The idea was that unfair obstacles, based upon race, prevented equal representation in higher education and the workplace. Affirmative action tells universities and employers to remedy the problem, but the Supreme Court has also told them not to use quotas to do that.

The reason affirmative action has become such a tangled issue now is that it was never designed to be a permanent solution to a problem that goes much deeper than simple discrimination. The question we should have been asking all along is, "Why do universities like Michigan have to award extra points to minority applicants in order to achieve representative student bodies?" We don't ask that question because we suspect the answer is too complex. We're afraid we'll find something out about our society that makes us uncomfortable.

The problem is that, due to de facto segregation that still exists in much of our society, minority students are often not as well prepared (in terms of primary education) as whites. Those are the problems that should have been addressed over the past 30 years. Affirmative action was a stop-gap at best, and we've wasted valuable time arguing over numbers and statistics while ignoring a more insidious, and serious, problem. We continue to tolerate inequality, and affirmative action has allowed us to delude ourselves into thinking we don't.

While the Supreme Court argues over quotas and statistics in higher education, the inequities in our elementary and secondary schools continue to feed the deeper problem. In the end, we'll never solve our most serious challenges on a balance sheet. We've got to bend our backs to the task -- but we first must open our eyes to the affliction rather than the symptoms, and our hearts to the idea of true equality.