Affirmative Action: Another Nail in the Coffin

When a group of Boston University students recently decided to promote a “whites only” scholarship program, the response from the left was predictably long and loud. Cries of “racism” filled the airways and the blogosphere. Opponents thundered that if such a race-based program were to proliferate to other schools, then how could needy minority students contend for what they saw as an ever-decreasing portion of the economic pie? And that was precisely the point of the promoters. If race-based scholarship programs were acceptable and politically correct for all races but Caucasian, then why was it not equally correct for that one? The answer they claim lies in the fifty year old untested assumption that racial considerations as a means to redress grievances trump all other approaches and perspectives.

Back in the early 1960s, it made sense to tinker with the idea that the United States was a nation that paid no heed to race as a means by which any ethnic group could advance itself to the detriment of another. There was such a glaring need for a wide spectrum of racial inequalities to be placed on a level playing field that the Supreme Court ruled that it was permissible to use one’s genes as a reason for coming in the back door when the front door was shut.

Alan Bakke changed all that. You will recall that Bakke was a white medical school hopeful who was rejected from every medical school to which he applied solely because of his race. His grades in college and on entrance tests were far higher than those recorded by sanctioned minorities who were admitted. Bakke then sued to gain entrance to Temple University’s medical school on the grounds of reverse discrimination. He won his case, attended the program, and has since graduated to become a practicing physician. After the Bakke case, colleges and universities have found out that the Supreme Court has since reduced their flexibility in admitting students based on race. Quotas were out. In were dysfunctionalities. The same colleges and universities that used to use a number-based quota system now use applicant dysfunctions as a means to sneak in the back door. If a prospective applicant is a recovering drug addict, or a victim of abuse, or has a prison record, then that applicant will find that he has a spot reserved for him, one that is denied to a non-dysfunctional applicant. The condescension that these schools have in assuming that dysfunctions are a marker mostly of minorities is breathtakingly appalling.

What these Boston University students have done to upset the racial apple cart is to force America’s admissions committees to face some unavoidable but ugly facts concerning just how far these committees are willing to go in the name of racial equality if in so doing they use racial theories that are honorably applied to one race but not to another. As of this writing, no court or even Boston University itself has ruled on the legality, or even the ethicality, of Caucasian-based scholarship programs. How this plays itself out in Boston will go a long way toward defining just how far the United States has truly gone in setting limits as to the role that race may play in the squabble to be accepted into higher education.