LAST WEEK'S ruling at the University of Michigan's Law School was about something worse than affirmative action. U.S District Judge Bernard Friedman was well aware of this when he struck down the law school's use of race as a factor in admissions. He ruled in favor of Barbara Grutter, a white woman who was denied admission to the law school in favor of minority students with lower test scores and grades. Michigan's admissions policy justified this decision under the pretext that affirmative action made this constitutional. Their reasoning would make sense if what they were doing really could be called an "affirmative action." But it can't be, and so Friedman was right to end it.
A more accurate term to describe what they were doing would be "racial preference action." In his ruling, Friedman wrote, "approximately 10 percent of each entering class is effectively reserved for members of particular races, and those seats are insulated from competition" (Law School Admissions Ruled Illegal," Michigan Daily, March 27). In other words, they established a quota that regarded race as a more important factor than academic performance.
Affirmative action was created to benefit only those who had been discriminated against wrongfully during the Civil Rights Movement. For a generation after the movement it was fitting for American society to make amends to those minorities in this way, especially blacks.
Most schools no longer talk about paying reparations to blacks for past discrimination through college admission. That idea went out of style with snap bracelets and the Macarena. Yet Michigan has continued to admit students under this policy since 1992 -- a policy that now is not only outdated but also unwarranted for today's society ("Law School admissions ruled illegal, Michigan Daily, March 27).
Since colleges are dealing with students whose only recollection of the Civil Rights era are in textbooks, it would be foolish to reward students simply for being the sons and daughters of those discriminated against. It's like putting a bandage on a son when his father is the one with the wound.
Now that Latinos are overtaking blacks as the country's largest minority, the mission of affirmative action changes. Much of today's Latino population never witnessed the Civil Rights Movement. In this case, the admissions office was offering the same bandage, but this time to someone who never got a scrape.
So if Michigan offered a Latino student a spot at its prestigious law school under the guise of affirmative action, it wouldn't make much sense. That is, unless they changed the definition.
Conversations nowadays focus not on affirmative action, but on incorporating different perspectives and cultures into college classrooms. That, in a sense, has changed the definition. Because of this change, the affirmative action saga -- if we could call it that -- has been transformed from an act of penance to a new-fangled search for something Friedman referred to as "viewpoint diversity."
Yet if we begin to talk about such a vague concept, this saga would probably never end. It raises a litany of questions and issues that proponents of affirmative action never were prepared to answer.
They would first have to define the term "diverse viewpoint." In an ideal world, a diverse student body would have an equal number of representatives from all walks of life and similar academic backgrounds. In Michigan's case, only Latino and black viewpoints fit their definition of diverse, implying that only underrepresented perspectives counted. That would immediately rule out Asians, America's ex-minorities, who no longer find themselves underrepresented in higher-level education. Applicants who were poor, of mixed nationality, homosexual or handicapped would not even register on their diversity radar -- though they each represented diverse viewpoints.
Even if that issue was settled, proponents also would have to determine how important it was to ensure a diverse student body. It ought to work as a balance-tipper. That is to say, if two applicants with similar grades and scores were compared, the scale should be tipped in the black student's favor because of his "diverse viewpoint." It should not be the case that he is admitted without equivalent grades and scores to back him up. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Michigan's admissions office did.
Judge Friedman settled this issue quite nicely when he said diversity simply wasn't a compelling state interest. Although racial inequality is still rampant in parts of the nation, not everyone agrees that universities should ensure diverse student bodies. A survey by the American Council on Education said that almost a quarter of the randomly surveyed participants did not want colleges to make such an active effort.
Perhaps the community is tired of trying to define what counts as diverse. Perhaps what matters more to them, and what should matter most to universities, is the fact that the best applicant should get in and get a good education.
Either way, we are left questioning an admissions policy in Michigan that appears to have admitted students who might not have deserved it.
(Juliana Chan is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.)
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