OPINION & EDITORIAL
Still Murky
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Also by Badger Herald Editorial Board:
- A security fee-for-all (December 11, 2007)
- Farewell, Chancellor (December 10, 2007)
- $$FC (December 6, 2007)
- In a bind (December 5, 2007)
- Entitlement Town (December 4, 2007)
Related Stories:
- Summer preview: Affirmative-action ruling (May 8, 2003)
- The case for affirmative action (April 3, 2003)
- UW must eliminate race factor (December 7, 2006)
- Affirmative action aids UW (December 8, 2006)
- We need a second opinion (February 13, 2007)
by Badger Herald Editorial Board
Thursday, July 3, 2003
Admission to any institution of higher learning is a cut-and-dry scenario — it’s yes or no, in or out. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (the already infamous ‘Michigan’ cases)feature little clarity of this sort.
Affirmative action as a policy was designed in the 1960s, a brainchild of the Kennedy administration, in an effort to “act affirmatively” in making government institutions open to traditionally underrepresented groups. The Supreme Court’s ruling this week did little to tighten up the definition as a whole: Explicit, numeric accounting of race in admissions is now prohibited while “taking race into account” during admissions decisions is explicitly permitted.
Both the law school and undergraduate admissions policies at the University of Michigan favored minorities when taking race into account, attempting to add “a feather to the scale” when weighing a candidate’s viability — to say nothing of the fact that Michigan’s feather fell more like a brick. While the policy that gave 20 points to a member of an underrepresented minority and 12 points for a perfect SAT score is now a thing of the past, Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy appear to have been ruled unconstitutional primarily because the school was too open and honest about their processes for the use of race.
On the contrary, Michigan’s Law School admissions policy made race a factor by, in the words of the majority opinion, “engaging in highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file.” This is nearly a precise echo of the system employed by University of Wisconsin-Madison admissions counselors.
Plenty of ink has been and will be spilled as to the broad legal and socio-political ramifications of these decisions; further legal challenge to the system of affirmative action as now defined will undoubtedly come. While an explicit rubric system for taking race into account is now unconstitutional, any degree of subjectivity when race is used is now deemed acceptable. When does a review including race become “holistic,” and when does the practice of accounting race cross over into racial discrimination? If the policies cannot be publicly codified, there is no way for the public to know they are being carried out in good faith – which brings us to the specific quandary posed UW in light of the Bollinger decisions.
We’ve consistently urged UW to open the mysterious vault of the Red Gym and explicitly disclose how race is used in the admissions process. As it stands now, UW employs the “feather on the scale method,” likening minority status as one of many possible plus factors in determining the admission of candidates on a subjective, individualized basis. Per this decision, if they were to grant our wish – and disclose the true weight of the feather - they would likely stand in defiance of the law. If UW is simultaneously permitted to hide the facts and prohibited from disclosing the truth, as Justice O’Connor and others now infer, something is terribly amiss.
The bottom line remains that poor, underprivileged high school students deserve a chance to enter this or any other institution of higher learning to improve their lot and that of their families. Race need not be an explicit factor in this decision – a wealthy black student from Brookfield should not receive a more substantial “feather” from UW than a white, penniless first-generation refugee from Eastern Europe. This scenario embodies the essence of improper racial classification programs initially sought to combat and remains likely in the wake of these unfortunate decisions.
