ENDING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

     Affirmative Action, first coined and developed into policy in the early 1960s, along with the teeth of the 1965 Civil Rights Act (later enervated by the Court), may well have seen their most productive days. Before we say good-bye to affirmative action, however, I’d raise two points about when affirmative action should end.

     I’ll be fine with the end of affirmative action based on race (and class) when

          . medical and other professional schools end their age-old admissions preferences to children of doctors, lawyers, etc. Call any med-school, any law school. If the assistant admissions dean to whom you’re passed is honest, she’ll tell you that the practice is very much alive and that the school believes it’s in the interests of the school’s future and of medicine and law in the United States. And that may be right. What she won’t tell you unless pressed (and she may not even think about this much) is that the children of doctors and lawyers are overwhelmingly white upper-middles because doctors and lawyers are and have been forever overwhelmingly white upper-middles.

     And when…

          . legacy-admits end. Legacy admits are those kids brought to prep schools, colleges, graduate and professional schools because a grandparent, mother, father, aunt and/or uncle once attended (and has typically been a solid donor). Some innate and learned candidate qualifications are hoped for and often present in legacies. Yet we also know that, historically, those with the wherewithal to be solid donors are white and don’t wonder about their class-of-origin. Can a legacy-admit be less than qualified? Ask the first President Bush about Yale and his son. That’ll clear it up.

     Of course these schools argue that preferential admissions of these sorts are necessary to the future of the schools and, they’ll say, to the general welfare. They may be right because one can only speculate about the future.

     But that’s the point.

 

     Affirmative action isn’t about what most people assume it’s about. Most think it’s about the past, righting wrongs and about why your kid did or

 

didn’t get the admissions deal the kid from across town or across the lawn got.

     It isn’t.

 

     As with all of the traditional, longstanding preferences, affirmative action is formative; admissions preferences help define what the professions (and, more broadly, society) will look like in decades and generations. Like all preferences, they’re about presumed Social Good.

 

     The sticking point is the clash between a future where far more of all origins are modeling for kids what it means to be a good lawyer, doctor, teacher, CEO…and how we understand admissions as personal, collective, or both. It is personal only as to the thin or thick envelopes, as to the immediacy of elation or pain. Yet because they help form society’s future, admissions are collective in every other way and as such there are vital societal, economic and cultural, interests in some reasonable guarantee of diversity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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