The Supreme Court is currently weighing the arguments about affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan and its law school, and the community should be having conversations about the issue. The editorial board, then, will weigh in once again, in hopes of prompting further discussion.
Earlier this year, we said that ethnicity still should be a factor to consider when deciding admissions policies. At the time, though, we said that Michigan’s implementation should be a concern, and that opinion could use some explanation.
Proponents of Michigan’s system have advanced two different arguments about affirmative action policies. The traditional one is that they are intended as redress, as a means of franchising those who have systematically been disenfranchised and neglected with regard to educational opportunities.
This argument is strong; it takes little examination of current socioeconomic conditions to see that people are regularly denied educational opportunities because of their parents’ own lack of opportunities and because of poverty. The plaintiffs in the Michigan case have gone to other colleges. Their situation was not one where being denied access to a public school rendered them unable to acquire an education.
For many lower-middle-class families, however, a state college may be the only chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, work hard and achieve the American dream. One of the reasons for having public systems of higher education is to provide such opportunities. The American entrepreneurial attitude isn’t cobbled together from nothing — the social safety net is a way for people to improve their lives and the lives of everyone around them.
The social redress argument, then, needs to be moved from ethnicity to socioeconomic status and family history. When faced with application choices, state colleges should consider the ways that society does not offer equal opportunities, and they should realize part of their mission is to provide such opportunities. Such a move would still provide redress to historically neglected and oppressed ethnic minorities, and it would also address those oppressed by capitalism.
The second argument, recently added by supporters of affirmative action policies, is that the state has a compelling interest in providing a diverse educational atmosphere for all of its students. Privileging ethnic minorities benefits the ethnic majorities, they claim, because students aren’t properly educated without being exposed to a wide range of social and ethnic viewpoints.
We completely agree. Unfortunately, until the public engages in a much more complicated conversation about what that diversity should look like and how it should be accomplished, we find this argument unworkable. Here are some questions to start that conversation:
What percentage of diversity is “diverse enough”? Which diverse community should a college represent: the city, the county, or the state it’s in, or the country, or maybe the whole world? How would that be accomplished exactly? What if there aren’t enough members of the “proper” minority groups to go around?
In short, without resorting to a simple quota system of arbitrarily determined percentages of each underrepresented group, how can colleges possibly know whether they’re done — whether affirmative action policies have been successful?