Editorial

Affirmative Action Worth the Fight

Diversity – ethnic, racial and socioeconomic – is a case worth fighting for.

That’s why two cases in which two white young women accuse the University of Michigan of racial discrimination for a point system that favors African American and Hispanic applicants, are so important.

In December, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take on the case for appeal, and has scheduled a hearing for April. Scholars consider it the most important affirmative action case to come before the court since 1978, when a cloudy ruling allowed schools to define their own policies.

At issue is whether state-funded schools have a “compelling interest” to use race as a factor in admissions to augment diversity. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could have wide-reaching effects for private colleges and universities, including Oberlin, which often receives federal or state aid for financial funds and scientific research programs.

Jennifer Gratz, one of the plaintiffs, was denied admission to the University of Michigan in 1995. She sued the university for preferentially favoring students of color, who received 20 points on the university's 150-point admissions scale by virtue of their minority status. She charged that the policy was tantamount to raising these students GPAs by one point across the board on the standard 4.0 scale.

Though the university no longer uses the system, a ruling in favor of Gratz and denied law school applicant Barbara Grutter would reconfigure the higher education landscape. In a 1978 case, the late Justice Lewis Powell declared that "the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race … under some circumstances."

We believe that there is a compelling interest in achieving diversity in higher education -- not just diversity of race, but diversity of socioeconomic status, of athletic and artistic talent, of location. Colleges often gives preference to students from underrepresented states -- i.e., it is easier to get into Oberlin if you are from Alaska with the same test scores as a student from New York. Diversity is an imperative component of a complete college experience.

Some look to the "success" of schools in California and Texas that have abandoned race-based admission policies -- noting that the admittance rate for students of color remains high. Under then-Governor Bush, Texas embraced a system in which the top 10 percent of students from Texas' public schools would be admitted to state colleges. A similar, stricter system is in place in California.

But this "success" has begun to taper off. Meanwhile, graduate schools are edgy because they are desperate to ensure that minorities are represented in a plethora of scholarly fields, for which often very few minority applicants apply.

A proper education is not simply about serious engagement with a field of study, it is also about serious engagement with people different from oneself. Financial aid was devised as "affirmative action" for students from lower-income families. Students of color are often similarly disadvantaged, at times because talented students are lost in a welter of applications when they are unable to distinguish themselves in programs like Advanced Placement testing that are not available in poor school districts. Oftentimes, the schools themselves are less prestigious. Should we punish students with slightly less of an academic career because the school that was available to them was scantily supported?

Regardless, we cannot afford to abandon affirmative action, which has given so many opportunities to families and students of color across the United States, and has broadened the horizons for a generation of sheltered white Americans.

Editorials are the responsibility of the Review editorial board—the Editors in Chief, Managing Editor and Commentary Editor—and do not necessarily reflect the view of the staff of the Review.