The Law and Politics of Affirmative Action
in American Higher Education:
A Twenty-First Century American Dilemma
by
Jeffrey S. Lehman
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
August 28, 2006
I want to begin by sharing with all of
you two personal reasons why I am especially delighted to be participating in
this seminar today.
One reason has to do with Uppsala University. During the summer of 1977, after my
senior year of college, I worked at the National Institutes of Health as a
research assistant to a mathematician named Judith Prewitt. Dr. Prewitt is one of the most
brilliant individuals I have ever known, and she earned her Ph.D. in math and
science here at Uppsala. Because
of Dr. Prewitt, this university has always symbolized to me the very highest
standards of intellectual endeavor, and I could receive no higher honor than an
invitation to speak here.
A second reason is that for several decades I have felt indebted to Sweden for insight into the subject of race in the United States. I began my academic career teaching about race, poverty, and the American welfare state. And in my courses on those subjects, I would often have my students read excerpts from the most influential book ever written about race in America – An American Dilemma, by Gunnar Myrdal.
[SLIDE]
It is difficult for any country to understand how its own
fundamental ideals are in tension with one another, and to adjust its public
policies so as to minimize the consequences of that tension. Myrdal showed America how an ideal of
equal opportunity is central to the American creed, and how deep the tension
was between that ideal and the experience of blacks in America during the 70
years after slavery’s end.
[BLANK SLIDE] My own work on affirmative action has been,
in part, an effort, 50 years after Myrdal, to illuminate the tension between
ideals of colorblindness and integration in twenty-first century America. But I regret that I cannot repay our
debt to Sweden through my work.
Myrdal’s gift to America came because he became a true expert on
America. I am very far from an
expert on Sweden.
So it will be up to you to determine what relevance, if
any, the American experience with affirmative action might have to current
discussions of social policy in Sweden.
The American experience is grounded in commitments to both
colorblindness and integration.
You must decide how significant those values are in contemporary
Sweden. What other values might be
even more significant here, and to what extent might those values inform the
development of an effective and authentically Swedish approach to diversity and
social inclusion?
What I will try do this morning is describe, as best I can,
America’s struggle. I will devote
the first portion of my talk to law, to the question whether, and under what circumstances,
the practice of affirmative action in university admissions is permitted by
American law. I will devote the
second portion of my talk to effectiveness, to the question of what
universities must do in order to have the benefits of an affirmative action
program outweigh the associated costs.
So let me begin by taking you back 29 years, to October 12,
1977. My career had just shifted
from medicine to law, as I had wrapped up my work with Dr. Prewitt at the
National Institutes of Health and had enrolled as a student at the University
of Michigan Law School.
[SLIDE]. On that day, a
37-year-old white man named Allan Bakke was sitting in the courtroom of the U.S.
Supreme Court, hoping that law might enable him to shift his career to
medicine. [SLIDE].
Bakke had applied to the medical school of the University
of California at Davis. At that
time, Davis was composing its entering class of 100 students in two parts. 84 of the 100 seats were filled under
the so-called “regular admissions program.” And 16 of the 100 seats were filled under the so-called
“special admissions program.”
Anyone could be considered under the regular admissions program. But to be considered under the special
admissions program, one had to be "economically and/or educationally
disadvantaged" and also a member of one of four specified "minority
groups" (African Americans, Chicanos, Asians, and American Indians).
Bakke had been rejected, twice. He was not competitive enough to claim one of the 84 seats
in the regular admissions program. And he was ineligible to be admitted under
the special admissions program because he was white.
[SLIDE]. Bakke
filed a lawsuit claiming that the special admissions program violated the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution. That provision
states, simply, that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.”
Bakke argued that his inability to compete for the sixteen seats set
aside under the special admissions program meant that he was not being given
the equal protection of the laws.
Bakke’s lawsuit proceeded through the courts of the state
of California, and in the California Supreme Court, he won a complete
victory. [SLIDE]. That Court said that the Constitution
requires universities to be colorblind, to pay absolutely no attention to
race. [SLIDE] It ordered the
medical school to admit Bakke.
[SLIDE] And it issued an
injunction prohibiting the university from ever again taking race into account as
a factor in admissions.
The University appealed from the State Supreme Court to the
National Supreme Court, and on June 28, 1978, eight and one half months after
it heard argument, that Court announced its decision.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court has nine Justices, so in any
case it takes five Justices to establish a majority position. In most cases it is not difficult to
identify the points where at least five Justices agree. But Bakke was unusual. Six of the nine Justices wrote their
own opinions, and different justices joined different parts of each
other’s opinions.
And if you try to diagram them all, it looks something like
this. [SLIDE]
For all intents and purposes, there were three groups.
Four Justices, led by Justice Stevens, took one
position. Another four Justices,
led by Justice Brennan, took a different position. And the ninth Justice, Justice Powell, followed what we
might like to call, “The Third Way.”
The Stevens Four would have agreed with the California
Supreme Court in result. Relying
on a federal statute, they would have struck down the policy, let Bakke in, and
endorsed the principle of colorblindness.
The Brennan Four would have upheld the University of
California at Davis program completely.
In their view, whenever it appeared that an otherwise neutral system
would have a disparate impact on racial minorities because of the legacy of
past discrimination, it would be OK to use a race-conscious program to try to
cancel out that disparate impact.
And then there was Justice Powell. [SLIDE]. What was the content of his third way?
Justice Powell didn’t like quotas. [SLIDE]. The Davis system was a quota system. So Justice Powell joined with the Stevens
Four to say that it was illegal and that Bakke should be admitted.
On the other hand, unlike the Stevens four, Justice Powell
did not believe that the law required universities to be rigidly
colorblind. He believed that some
consideration of race in admissions is permissible. And so he joined with the Brennan Four to overturn the injunction
that had been issued by the California Supreme Court. [SLIDE].
The analysis that Justice Powell used to reach these
conclusions is instructive, because it is closely tied to American history, and
American ideals. [SLIDE]
1.
First, because of
America’s shameful experience with slavery and then with the legalized
oppression that Myrdal documented, race is an especially dangerous tool for
governments and large institutions to use. It is a “suspect
classification.” [SLIDE]
2.
As a suspect
classification, it may not always be unconstitutional, but we must always
subject it to strict scrutiny.
[SLIDE]
3.
If an organization is
going to depart from rigid colorblindness, it must do so in pursuit of a compelling interest. [SLIDE]
4.
And the departure from
rigid colorblindness must be narrowly
tailored to the promotion of that interest. [SLIDE]
So why did Justice Powell conclude that some consideration
of race can be justified as promoting a compelling interest? Because he was persuaded that a
university’s interest in being an effective teaching community is a
compelling interest, one that is linked to the First Amendment and to
fundamental principles of academic freedom. He concluded that a university might appropriately decide
that having a racially diverse student body is important to being an effective
teaching community.
What does racial diversity have to do with effective
teaching? America has long
understood itself to be a heterogeneous nation of immigrants. In Myrdal’s time, the accepted metaphor
for America was the so-called “melting pot,” which suggests a somewhat uniform
blend of ingredients. Today, that
metaphor stands alongside competing metaphors for multiculturalism, such as the
tapestry woven of many threads, or the rainbow of many colors. A diverse student body helps provide
students a better preparation for life in that kind of a society.
Americans remain proud of their nation’s diversity. They see it as a source of strength and adaptability. But they also recognize the challenge in the national motto, e pluribus unum, one made out of many.
Preparation for adult life
in America entails preparation for all of the messiness, complexity,
stimulation, and excitement that are associated with life in a racially diverse
society.
Justice Powell’s opinion concluded that this compelling
interest in having a racially diverse student body could be promoted in
a narrowly tailored way, without the use of the rigid quotas that Davis had
employed. Here he cited the
undergraduate admissions policy used at Harvard. The Harvard policy treated race as a kind of nonquantifiable
“plus factor” that would make a positive difference in an individual
applicant’s file.
After the Bakke decision at the end of the 1970’s, the
1980’s were a calm decade for affirmative action issues at American
universities. Universities
accommodated themselves to the Powell approach. Everyone assumed that his Third Way was the law of the land. “Quotas are bad, but plus factors and
individualized consideration are OK.”
As for me, I spent the 1980’s finishing law school, serving
as a law clerk to Justice Stevens, practicing law, and then returning to the
University of Michigan to join the faculty as a law professor.
[SLIDE] The
1990’s, however, were not so calm.
At the start of the decade I served on a five-member committee of
Michigan faculty, charged with writing a new admissions policy for the law
school. [SLIDE]. We drafted a policy similar to the Harvard
undergraduate policy that had been described in Bakke. [SLIDE] No quotas. No
set-asides. [SLIDE]. Diversity was understood
comprehensively. [SLIDE]. Nobody was to be admitted who wasn’t
fully qualified and prepared to do the work at Michigan. [SLIDE]. At the same time, we made it clear that we would consider
our interest in having an integrated student body as a plus factor in the
evaluation of individual candidates.
We added one idea to the Harvard plan. We wanted to explain a little bit more
than Justice Powell had explained, or than the Harvard policy explained, about
a question that troubles anyone who actually administers an admissions
program. And that question is,
“How many minority students makes a class diverse?” Is it one per class?
Two per class? Ten percent
of a class? Fifty percent a
class? How do you know when you’re
diverse?”
The answer we provided was to refer to the concept of a
“critical mass.” The notion was
that when you get beyond mere “token” representation, to something that we
would describe as “meaningful” representation, you see a change in the social
dynamic of the classroom. The
minority students relax and feel more at ease. They no longer feel as though every time they speak they are
perceived as the spokesperson for their race. Other students see the minority students disagreeing amongst
themselves. The entire question of
race becomes more complicated, more challenging in some ways, but also more
educationally accurate and valuable.
That was the concept of “critical mass.” It was central to how we thought. But by putting it into our policy, we
brought upon ourselves the burden of having to explain what the difference is
between a “critical mass” and a quota.
[SLIDE]. We
adopted the policy in 1992, and in 1994, I became the dean of the Law
School. But out in the larger
world affirmative action at universities was coming under new kinds of
attack. An organization calling
itself the Center for Individual Rights, or CIR, set about challenging such
programs around the country in a variety of different ways. In 1995, CIR persuaded the University of
California’s Board of Regents to apply a principle of unwavering colorblindness
to university admissions in California, and the following year they persuaded
the voters of California to pass a referendum known as Proposition 209 that
made that principle permanent.
Also in 1996, CIR successfully sued the University of Texas
Law School on behalf of a rejected applicant named Cheryl Hopwood. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Fifth Circuit effectively revived the old California Supreme Court rule
of rigid colorblindness. It issued
an injunction saying race could simply never be considered, in any way. And when the Supreme Court declined to
review the Fifth Circuit decision, many people were starting to wonder if
Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke was still the law of the land.
Late in 1997, CIR filed two lawsuits against the University
of Michigan. One, known as Gratz,
was against the University of Michigan for its undergraduate admissions
program, the second, known as Grutter, was over the law school admissions
program.
The Michigan undergraduate admissions policy at issue in
the Gratz case was different from the Law School policy at issue in
Grutter. About 14,000
undergraduate applications were received each year, and the University had adopted
a fairly mechanical approach to handling them. It used a formula that gave points to a limited set of
quantitative factors, including 20 points to applicants who either came from
economically disadvantaged backgrounds or were members of racial minority
groups.
When the lawsuits were filed, the press coverage was very
critical of the university. It
suggested that Hopwood in Texas and Proposition 209 in California had signaled
the end of affirmative action. And
it reflected a broad populist sentiment that such programs had outlived their
usefulness.
But there were encouraging signs as well. Most importantly, the business
community stepped forward to say, very strongly, that it was important to them
that they be able to hire from integrated campuses. They wanted well-trained minority graduates. And they wanted white graduates who
were comfortable living and working in an integrated environment.
We decided that we needed to fight on two fronts. We needed to defend ourselves in
court. And we also needed to
engage a broader mission of public education about what we were doing.
Our message, carried forward by university leaders and by
public figures like Gerald Ford and Colin Powell, was as follows: Moderate, carefully calibrated
affirmative action, was good for society. It wasn’t free; any time you depart
from colorblind approaches, you incur a price – you are reinforcing the notion
that racial categories are appropriate and useful tools. But it carried important benefits
– better preparation for life in an integrated world, and a visible pathway to
social inclusion and upward mobility for underprivileged minority students.
After five years of litigation in the lower courts, our
cases were argued in the Supreme Court in April 2003 and decided less than three
months later, on June 23. In the Gratz case, the Court struck down the
undergraduate policy by a vote of 6-3.
But in the Grutter case, the Court upheld the Law School’s policy by a
vote of 5-4, in an opinion by Justice O’Connor. [SLIDE]
O’Connor’s opinion was a true majority opinion, joined in
its entirety by four other Justices. It was remarkable for several things.
[SLIDE] First,
it stated, clearly and unequivocally, “we endorse Justice Powell's view that
student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use
of race in university admissions.”
[SLIDE]
Second, it endorsed Michigan’s concept of a critical mass. “[T]he Law School's concept of critical
mass is defined by reference to the educational benefits that diversity is
designed to produce. … These benefits are substantial. … [T]he Law School's admissions policy
promotes 'cross‑racial understanding,'
helps to break down racial stereotypes, and 'enables [students] to better
understand persons of different races.'
These benefits are 'important and laudable,' because 'classroom
discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and
interesting' when the students have 'the greatest possible variety of
backgrounds.'”
““The … need for critical mass [does not reflect a] belief
that minority students always (or even consistently) express some
characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.' To the contrary, diminishing the force of such stereotypes
cannot [be] accomplish[ed] with only token numbers of minority students.”
[SLIDE] This
much is, to some extent, familiar ground.
But O’Connor’s opinion also noted another justification for affirmative
action:
“[U]niversities, and in particular, law schools, represent
the training ground for a large number of our Nation's leaders. … [SLIDE] In order to cultivate a set of leaders
with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to
leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race
and ethnicity.”
[SLIDE]
Justice O’Connor went on to explain why our policy was not a quota. “Quotas impose a fixed number or
percentage which must be attained, or which cannot be exceeded. … In contrast, a permissible goal
requires only a good faith effort to come within a range.”
“Here, the Law School engages in a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment.
The Law School
affords this individualized consideration to applicants of all races.”
Finally, Justice O’Connor made the following observation:
[SLIDE] “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first
approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in
the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority
applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the
use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest
approved today.”
This final sentence has received much attention. Was Justice O’Connor making a
prediction about how much progress our society will make, or was she
establishing a fixed time limit?
It seems obvious to me that she was being studiously ambiguous, setting
forth a strong challenge for our society.
At the end of the day, America’s embrace of affirmative
action is tenuous and uneasy.
Whether people supported us or opposed us, most Americans believed that,
in explicitly using the category of race to structure our affirmative action
program, we were using a very dangerous tool. Think of a very sharp knife. Or a caustic chemical.
Or a technology like recombinant genetics. Or any tool that could, in the wrong hands, cause enormous
harm to innocent people.
Not everybody trusts universities with sharp knives. Not everybody believes that we are
sincere. [SLIDE] One need look no further than Justice
Scalia’s vituperative dissent, in which he refers to “universities that talk
the talk of multiculturalism and racial diversity in the courts but walk the
walk of tribalism and racial segregation on their campuses.”
I don’t often find myself quoting Justice Scalia, but I
believe that his assertion that we at American universities are hypocrites
about racial diversity is an assertion that would attract significant public
agreement. And I believe we need
to take that argument as an urgent challenge.
[SLIDE]. And this brings me to the second part of my talk this morning. Even if we assume that affirmative action is legal, there is ongoing passionate discussion of two questions. One, which I won’t address in my initial comments, although we could discuss it later on, is what can be done outside of universities, in the rest of our society, to make affirmative action unnecessary by 2028. The second, which
I will address, is what must be done inside universities to ensure that
we really are claiming for our students the benefits of an affirmative action
program that we articulated in court.
Now let me begin by noting that a rather superficial
discussion prevails today about whether American universities are doing the
necessary work to obtain the educational benefits of affirmative action is
quite superficial. Critics point
to lunch tables in the cafeterias of American universities and see groups of
students that are separated by race.
They say, “See, your campuses are segregated, not integrated.” Defenders say, “Don’t look at the cafeterias,
look at the classrooms. They’re a
heterogeneous mix of races. We’re
highly integrated.”
To understand which perspective is right, it is important
to be precise about the kinds of intellectual benefits that might come with
having integrated campuses. While
there is debate about that question, I believe that, in the United States, two
benefits in particular stand out.
The first potential benefit of an integrated campus is the intellectual benefit of perspective enlargement.
As Bill Bowen has expressed it, “Students need to learn how
to put themselves in other people’s shoes.” Others might say that students need to see the world through
other people’s eyes.
In our efforts to become better at imagining multiple
perspectives on the world, it is enormously helpful to build a base of
experience by listening to others describe how they actually see a
situation. It is helpful to listen
through the voice of literature.
It is also helpful to listen to a live person, someone you know and
trust, who is sharing the same experience with you and who is prepared to
engage in sustained conversation that goes beyond a quick exchange.
The second potential benefit of an integrated campus is, in
some ways, a special case of the first.
It is the particular experience of role reversal associated with one’s
identity as a member of a minority group or as a member of the majority. Because of continuing residential
segregation in the United States, very few of our white students have had a
chance before college to experience what it feels like to be, racially, in the
minority. Our minority students
are, of course, much more likely to have experienced both contexts in which
they were members of the predominant group and contexts in which they were
not. But most of them had
secondary school experiences that were mostly one way or the other – either
they grew up as part of a relatively small minority in an overwhelmingly white
environment or they grew up in an environment that was heavily “majority
minority.”
How can we tell if, overall, students on our campuses are
getting the benefits of perspective enlargement and role reversal?
Let’s begin with these snapshot pictures – of cafeterias
and classrooms. Does the existence
within a cafeteria of significant numbers of racially homogeneous lunch tables
mean that the project of integration is a failure?
I believe the answer is, they are suggestive but not at all
conclusive.
Segregated cafeteria lunch tables certainly prove that we
are not raceless communities. We
are not colorblind. Americans
notice race. We who are observing
the cafeterias notice it. And our
students notice it.
That is why being in an integrated environment carries with
it opportunities for perspective enlargement and role reversal. But we must acknowledge that those
opportunities bring with them a certain degree of effort, of stress, of social
risk. And it is entirely normal
and understandable that people might want, at times, to opt for lower stress
environments.
Our ultimate collective aspiration might be to become a
society where race does not have that kind of meaning any more. But our short-term goal is to prepare
students to live effective lives in a society where race still has that meaning
but is nonetheless heterogeneous and integrated.
I believe our short-term goal should be to have our
students live in a community that is meaningfully integrated, so that most
of them are experiencing perspective enlargement and many are experiencing role
reversal.
A meaningfully integrated community is characterized by behavior
at the level of the individual, and a culture at the level of the campus. For the individual, it means a daily
ebb and flow between people like oneself and people who are different. A commitment to move back and forth
between the spaces that are safe and the spaces that nurture growth and
challenge. For the campus it means
a shared commitment to value and support that kind of movement. It means a consistent, openly voiced
endorsement of the value of being meaningfully integrated – in action and not
just in demographics.
So if that is what it means to be meaningfully integrated,
at the level of behavior and at the level of culture, how will we know it when
we see it? The question is much
more difficult than it might sound.
[SLIDE]
Imagine a community of 100 students, all of whom are either orange or
green. Suppose 80 are orange and
20 are green. And suppose that no
matter when you looked at the community you saw the same thing: 75 orange students huddled together, 15
green students huddled together, and one “actively integrated pod” of 5 orange
and 5 green students.
I would submit that you do not yet have enough information
to say whether the overall community is meaningfully integrated.
To be sure, if it were the same 5 orange students and the
same 5 green students in the actively integrated pod, every hour of every day,
then I would readily conclude that the community is failing to be meaningfully
integrated. For 90% of the
students would not be experiencing the benefits of integration.
But I would reach a very different conclusion if, over the
course of the day, there were a constant rotation of students in and out of the
pod.
[SLIDE]
Suppose that, within any given 16-hour day each of the 20 green students
is spending 4 hours in the integrated sector. And suppose that 60 of the 80 orange students are each spending
1 hour and 20 minutes in the integrated sector. I would argue that, as a first cut, those 80 students are
experiencing a meaningful ebb and flow in their lives. Only 20% of the students (all orange)
are getting no integrated experience at all. As a first impression, I would certainly be open to the
claim that this is a meaningfully integrated community.
[SLIDE] So when we evaluate ourselves, we need to keep
several things in mind.
First, we need to focus on the right things. Looking at a lunchroom and seeing a
group of black students sitting together is no cause for alarm. We should be alarmed if, when we look
at a lunchroom, we see no integration pods at all. But even a relatively small number of integration pods could
be enough to signal a healthy community.
Second, we need to focus on flows, on the movement
associated with an individual’s daily life, on the longitudinal rather than the
cross-sectional.
Third, we should probably also recognize two different
kinds of pods, which offer two different kinds of benefits. Pods that include meaningful numbers of
students from different races are where we can expect to find perspective
enlargement. Especially if there
are three or more students from each race, we are more likely to find multiple
perspectives expressed within each race, so that students from other races
acquire more nuanced understandings of the extent to which race does and does
not shape perspective. But we
should also be alert to the role reversal pods, the ones where we see a handful
of white students amidst a larger number of minority students. These pods do a special kind of
educational work, one that I believe we should treasure.
I believe that there are real empirical questions here, questions that are worthy of serious investigation.
And I believe that we should conduct the investigations.
And then, after we have investigated and reported what we
see, what should we do next? It
depends, of course, on what we find.
But since this is a social phenomenon like so many others, we can expect
to find a story of mixed success.
A small but growing number of students fully reaping the benefits of
living in an integrated environment.
A small and shrinking number of students who spend four years in a
diverse campus and derive almost no benefit from having done so. A large, heterogeneous middle group
that seems to be getting some benefit, but perhaps not as much as we might
wish.
What should academic leaders do with the information once
we have it?
One response might be to do nothing. Especially if it appears that things
are getting steadily better. And
there are certainly reasons to think that things are getting better. My own impressionistic sense is that
students today are living significantly more integrated lives than they did 20
years ago. The emergence of
hip-hop as a central feature of youth culture has changed the terms of
engagement of students across racial boundaries. So has the rapid emergence of strong Latino and Asian
presences within our community, catalyzing a shift in our self-understanding
from a biracial model to a multiracial model. So I believe there is some merit to the idea that we should
not do too much, lest we disrupt a process that is moving in the right
direction.
But I think we can safely do at least a little more. I think that, as academics, as
teachers, as role models, as long as we are not too heavy handed, we can have
an impact on the kind of culture we experience on campus. We can provide regular, repeated
nudging, to encourage our students in the direction of a daily ebb and
flow. Even more, we can nurture
the integration pods that we see on our campuses.
Let me offer one example. Ever since 9/11, Cornell University has seen an
extraordinary alliance between our Muslim students and our Jewish students. Year in and year out, we find
remarkable efforts at joint programming, so that students from each group come
to appreciate the perspectives of the other. The projects have included a collaborative mosaic, and an
annual banquet at the end of Ramadan that has drawn hundreds of students into a
comparative discussion of the role of fasting in different religions.
These are important integration pods. They emerged from student ideas. But when I have spoken with the student
leaders who brought them about, they have impressed on me how critical they
felt it was that faculty members endorsed them. Not so much through public pronouncements. But by showing up themselves and
participating.
Allow me to summarize this way. Our students should reap the benefits of affirmative action;
our campuses should be not merely diverse but also integrated. To prepare themselves for life in an
integrated world, they should take advantage of the opportunities we offer for
perspective enlargement and role reversal. This need not be a constant in their lives; a daily ebb and
flow between the comfortable and the challenging is a worthy aspiration.
It is important that we monitor our success in this
regard. We should do the work of
evaluating the prevalence of integration pods within our communities, and the
extent to which they touch the lives of a broad cross-section of our students,
and we should nurture them as best we can.
If we do all these things, then we will have done good work
as Americans. We will have helped
to better align our society with the ideals that Gunnar Myrdal identified as
the American creed.
I shall conclude now with some quick thoughts about the
relevance I think our experience may hold for observers from other
countries. I would draw four
conclusions:
a.
[SLIDE] It is helpful
to be explicit about why programs to enhance diversity are adopted. In the United States, I believe that
programs to produce more racially integrated campuses can give students
experiences of perspective enlargement and role reversal that will better
prepare them for life in a racially diverse, multicultural nation of
immigrants.
b.
[SLIDE] It is helpful
to recognize what important values, like colorblindness, are compromised by an
affirmative action program, and try to structure programs in ways that minimize
harm to those values.
c.
[SLIDE] If a
compromise to such values is unavoidable, then it is important to proceed with
caution, to recognize that sharp knives must be used carefully. That means that it is useful to set
targets by reference to concepts whose meaning is reflected in the sociology of
student behavior, like critical mass, rather than through rigid quotas or point systems that feel arbitrary.
d.
[SLIDE] Finally, if a
program of affirmative action is used, it is important to make sure that the
benefits that are being sought are pursued after the admissions process is
over, and to monitor whether they are being achieved in ways that justify the
ongoing investment.
[SLIDE] I thank you very much for your attention.
