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Last week President George W. Bush the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program on what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 74th birthday.
He must have the same absent-minded secretary as Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who announced his disapproval of former Police Chief Bernard Parks in the middle of Black History month. At a time when a politically savvy conservative would be rallying to raise the waning support of minorities, Bush is trying to make it harder for them to receive a college education.
Has he forgotten Texas’ 10 percent plan, which he penned and implemented? The 10 percent plan offers public university admission to the top 10 percent of graduates from each high school, the majority of which have large black and Hispanic populations.
Florida, governed by Bush’s younger brother Jeb, and California also use a similar system. Bush’s hypocritical outcry against reverse discrimination has fallen on deaf ears. He claims to support diversity in higher education and his 10 percent plan is evidence of that support.
So why now would he chose to side with three white kids suing the university for unfair admission policies? The three say they were denied admission to University of Michigan in favor of less qualified minorities, which may very well be true. But you have to pick your battles, especially if you are the president of the United States.
On paper, Michigan’s admission policy is “unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution,” according to Bush. The Constitution is a document that is stagnant and antiquated. King put it best, “… the Constitution reflect(s) the thinking of the Founding Fathers that this was to be a nation by white people and for white people. Native Americans, blacks and all other non-white people were to be the burden bearers for the real citizens of this nation.”
Though the Constitution has been amended and most of the racist and backward ways of thinking are confined to senile senators and extremist organizations, the proverbial playing field is far from level, especially where education is concerned. The public university system is not the problem; it begins much earlier at the primary level of education.
Overcrowded, under-funded elementary schools are run by underpaid educators attempting to nurture the developing minds of children, and many of these children are dealing with substandard living conditions and difficult family situations. If nothing is being done to raise the quality of education for these underprivileged children, the slack needs to be taken up elsewhere.
By the time these students graduate from high school and want to apply to colleges, the damage of their sub par education is done, so a slight advantage in the admission process may not fix the problem, but at least it’s a start.
I think Bush is putting too much faith in the letter of the law, ignoring its spirit. Michigan’s admission policy (conniving politicians have dubbed it a quota system) awards African-American, Native American, and Hispanics 20 points on a 150-point system. To put into perspective the value of those 20 points, a perfect Scholastic Aptitude Test score is awarded 12 points. It seems disproportionate at first glance, but Michigan’s administration would disagree.
Maybe a minority living in this country brings life experience to the university that enrich the collegiate learning environment more than a white, scholastically flawless student. Michigan's enrollment is 15 percent minority. And according to campus officials, without its efforts to increase minority enrollment, its minority makeup would be only 4 percent.
The 1978 Supreme Court decision in the case of Bakke v. University of California Board of Regents allows race to be used as a factor in university admissions. Four justices said the program at UC Davis that reserved 16 percent of enrollment to its medical school for minorities violated federal law, while four said even quotas was considered Constitutional if it served the purpose of helping minorities overcome discrimination. The ninth and deciding justice felt that quotas were impermissible, but the practice of using race as a plus-factor in pursuit of diversity was completely acceptable.
Although Pepperdine does not employ a quota system, the race of the applicant is considered in order to cultivate diversity, a practice which has elevated this institution to a more universal university.
Bush is worried that one policy at one university will tip the scales in favor of the non-white. Statistics show that African-Americans attend college at half the proportion of white Americans and less than 10 percent of Hispanic-Americans go on to higher education.
The problem is obvious. Bush thinks the solution is complicated. The University of Michigan does not.
Submitted January 23, 2003
MALIBU, CA
