On the eve of the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's birth, President George W. Bush announced his intention to file a brief against the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policy, thrusting the federal government into a Supreme Court case that may decide the fate of affirmative action.
Questioning the fairness and legitimacy of specific race-conscious policies is perfectly acceptable and should be encouraged. Efforts to promote diversity and remedy past discrimination must be periodically re-examined to ascertain their continued necessity and effectiveness.
But much of the opposition to affirmative action is rooted in a sense of entitlement, particularly among white students, and a concurrent sense of resentment that a minority student, assumed to be less qualified, took a seat away from a member of the majority.
The lawsuit filed against the University of Michigan exploits this sentiment. State legislators opposed to affirmative action, along with the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), the Washington-based conservative group that engineered the lawsuit, actively solicited white students who felt they were unfairly rejected by the University of Michigan on the basis of race. Finding such students was not difficult; nearly everyone who suffers the pain of rejection looks for an external source of blame, and 'I got shafted by affirmative action' is a convenient one.
The center combed prospective plaintiffs for the perfect "test case," which it found in Barbara Sutter, a white, middle-aged woman denied admission to Michigan's law school despite a high GPA and matching test scores. While statistical evidence presented to a federal court demonstrated that a minority with less impressive academic credentials was more likely to gain admission to the law school than the plaintiff, it failed to acknowledge that whites with lower scores were also ushered into the University of Michigan.
The reason? College admissions are not, and never have been, entirely about the numbers. Our president is a perfect example. Had George W. Bush relied on his grades and SAT score rather than his surname, he would have been lucky to grace the halls of UB, let alone the Ivy League. Despite the best education oil money could buy, Bush barely maintained a "C" average at the exclusive Phillips Academy prep school and attained a mediocre 1206 on the SAT - 180 points below the median score for the Yale class of 1968.
The admissions committee clearly weighed his family legacy more heavily than his academic merit. Despite earning only "gentleman's C's" at Yale, Dubya was admitted to the Harvard Business School, illustrating that affirmative action comes in all shapes, sizes and colors.
The University of Michigan, like countless other institutions of higher learning across the country, considers a wide range of factors in the admission decision. These factors range from concrete considerations like scores or grades or residency to the amorphous search for "uniqueness," hardly amenable to exact calibration.
Despite Bush's characterization of Michigan's admissions policy as a "quota system," the university does not set aside a given number of seats each year for minorities. Such a system would not only be unconstitutional, but insulting, implying that certain applicants gained admission not on their individual qualifications, but their membership in a group.
No white student is pushed aside because there are no "white seats" left, nor is any minority student automatically admitted on the basis of skin color. As the University of Michigan explained, applicants with high objective scores are admitted across-the-board, while applicants with low scores are routinely rejected. It is the mass of students squarely in the middle that require differentiation on the basis of a number of factors, one of which may be race.
All of these mid-range students may be "qualified" to attend U- Michigan but with so many students competing for so few spots in the nation's most competitive post-secondary schools, qualified students will be turned away. This was not a case of unqualified minorities gaining admission over qualified white students, but rather the admission of certain qualified students over other ones.
In the companion case before the Supreme Court involving undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan, the plaintiffs are challenging the school's admissions formula, which awards 20 "points" to underrepresented minorities. The school also awards 20 points each to scholarship athletes, the socio-economically disadvantaged, and those chosen at the "provost's discretion." Doesn't this discriminate against trust-fund babies, the hopelessly uncoordinated and those who don't have an "in" with the provost? Why aren't rich klutzes screaming about reverse discrimination?
Numbers tell only part of the story. If the goal was to achieve truly "blind" admissions, the entire application process would have to be abandoned. Colleges would admit students solely on the basis of official reports from the Educational Testing Service and high school transcripts. Evaluators would not know if the applicant's last name was Bush or Gonzales, if the applicant was black, white or striped, or if he or she could write. This process would surely be "neutral" and "objective," but it would hardly be fair.
The University of Michigan's admissions policy considers applicants as they should be considered - as individuals. Rather than blindly and unfairly assuming an individual's worth is the sum total of his or her test scores, the school considers the entirety of a person's qualifications for admission and the student's potential contribution to an academic environment that is diverse in every pertinent way.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
