The really sad thing is that what Bush had to say will resonate with possibly a majority of the US population because on first glance it appears to be fair. "After all" you can almost hear them think,"what could be more fair than everyone competing for entry on a level playing field, no special privledges." (of course we all know Bush really didn't mean THAT - after all he would bever have got into Harvard or Yale if he had been required to compete on a level playing field)

However when one stops to reflect it's that "level playing field" that is the problem, it doesn't exist. Until such time as society ensures a truly equal educational opportunity from daycare right through High School then there will always be disparities in educational experiences that must be taken into account when students apply for admission to a university.

Levelling the playing field requires eliminating poverty at least to the extent that pregnant women can ensure adequate nutrition for their unborn child and thereby avoiding a number of prenatal developmental defects that can affect intelligence and the ability to learn. It also involves funding schools equally so that schools in predomibately poor districts can provide their students with the same educational opportunities as those in middle class and wealthy districts.

However, none of that will ever overcome the typically culturally poor environment that children of poor families are raised in. Because these families do not have them means to provide a rich learning environment at home, and often the parents themselves are very poorly educated, there is no chance for a level playing field.

There will always be reasons to give some applicants an edge over others that is not based on their academic performance to date. What Bush said was yet another well disguised Republican attack on race.

No... What Bush said was finally the strong criticism of a school weighing a perfect score on the SAT lower than skin color.

Look, I'm not a racist. Feel free to ask anyone I know. But the question isn't just about admissions. It's about fairness in numerous ways:

1. How long am I, myself, meant to pay for mistakes that happened before I was born?

2. How can a school not weigh academics higher than skin color?

3. What level playing field does affirmative action actually create? Are the people who benefit from A.A. programs actually better off? Many of them will say no, as they are looked upon by their peers as non-deserving of their positions in the group.

You hit on something interesting, though, which is the differentiation of class. That's a majority of it, IMO, and I would add that until a mentality change happens, A.A. is just window dressing.

And as for President Bush not taking the advice of Rice and Powell and making it his policy, I think to a degree it just pokes a small hole in the myth that the people around him are running the show.

I believe your point number 2 is simply wrong acedemics include more that just SAT's it also includes grades. While it is true that race is weighted higher than SAT's I beleive that grades are weighted considerably more than race. Why should you be discrimminated against because you are not an athlete? I think perhaps you have hit on something interesting Vinny. If you are right then it is only the white people around him running the show. :+)

The inconsistency is not so much that a school puts less weight on academics than on other factors. Indeed, Michigan weighs athletic acheivement and "legacy" (previous association with the school, which generally favors the affluent) more than academics. The inconsistency is more likely making a lawsuit out of race and not the other factors, or that constitutional law makes restrictions on one and not the other. I couldn't dream of making a case against my alma mater, Hampden-Sydney College, if they had rejected me in part because I don't have a 'legacy' of Virginia aristocracy. I could just as easily ask "Why do I have to pay for my family's short list of college graduates?" But that wouldn't be the right question to ask.

The real justification for affirmative action is not that we must pay a debt that was incurred by our ancestors, or by dead people who had the same skin color as we do, but that we have a responsibility to solve the social problems that exist now. In that sense, we do 'pay' for the mistakes made long ago, but it's no different than one generation 'paying' for a social security mess that another generation caused through neglect.

The price for past mistakes must be paid by the living. Without affirmative action, that price is paid almost entirely by minorities and other groups against whom these mistakes were made. With affirmative action, the burden of paying for these 'mistakes' begins to be spread more evenly. But the assertion that the cost of affirmative action is very great is not supported by social science. Given the greater number of white people in the U.S. and the greater proportion of white people merely applying to college, the proportion of whites who are already marginal who could plausibly be said to "pay for" affirmative action, is quite small, likely less than 5%. Government studies, like a 1995 Labor Department report, confirm a 1% figure for employment affirmative action.

Does affirmative action help? Well, it is surely only a partial solution--if a black student in general has a worse chance of getting a decent K-12 education, then U Michigan or any other AA school is going to have a serious disparity in academic ability, which is not ideal. But social science research does not support the idea that it doesn't have a significant positive effect. Bowen and Bok's 1998 book Shape of the River outlines research that shows the positive effects of college and university AA.

Will affirmative action create resentment or "divisiveness", as Bush says? It could; I have heard mixed results from research on this issue. But much of the resentment is surely caused by myths about affirmative action, such the ones I just mentioned. But the prediciton of resentment is a vague and weak one, since it can be made against almost any existing disparity as well as any proposed change. Bush worries a lot about resentment caused by affirmative action, but I'll bet he would counsel us that resentment over huge economic inequality is something we just have to get over. Comparable resentment could be predicted against those who get athletic or legacy points for admission, or against those who got a white suburban education.

The biggest myth of all is that public and private organizations should or actually do grant admission and employment based solely on "merit" or "aptitude," however measured. Organizations have many legitimate goals, and many different factors go into deciding that an applicant "fits." For many employers, the right "fit" often means "this great guy I know from school, another job, etc." In America, without assuming any racist feelings at all on the part of the employer, this means a disporportionate advantage to whites, since they are more likely to be within the personal network of current employers, managers, etc.

The problem Vinny is that your point number 1 makes the assumption that what is past is finished. You are not paying for the mistakes of the past, you are paying for ongoing mistakes. Yes they started in your country's past but they have never been rectified (if that is even possible).

I don't have a link for this as it is something I saw in passing on CNN the other day, but Harvard did a study recently where they sent out 2000 resumes for job openings. All the resumes were for black students. 50% of those students had "black" sounding names. Those students who had black sounding names had 50% less fewer responses to thoseir resumes than did the other half of the students. Racism is alive and well in corporate America.

As for your point number 3 - yes some do say that. However, ask the ones who wouldn't have made it in via academic standards alone but who once in were able to make the grade and succeed and see what the response would be.

Here's a statement issued by the University of Michigan concerning the matter.

Thanks for the link Joe. So 110 out 150 points based on academics.

Affirmative action would (and should) be made unnecessary once all of the steps that lead up to a college education are also free of racial considerations. For instance, a higher number of black v. white students attend underfunded, underresourced highschools; there's nothing these students or their families can do about it. For that reason, a higher number of white, wealthy students attend better highschools and thus better colleges.

Fair admissions isn't about non-white students being unable to earn higher education, but rather about not punishing them for the circumstances of their prior education. Ideally, affirmative action would be more closely tied to economic and class considerations than race, but at this point in American history it's still impossible to separate race from class or economics. Just as it's impossible to separate dumb, white, rich kids from legacy admissions.

I think considering skin color for university admissions is condescending. What we're saying to these kids is: "There's no way you could get in on your own, so we'll help you." In comes The Man, who reaches down to lift up minorities that could never reach the ivory tower unaided. That's offensive to me, and can't help but breed a sense of resentment and entitlement, as well as strip away the sense of accomplishment that one might otherwise enjoy at getting accepted into a prestigious school.

Let's put it in terms of chess. Totalling up the "point" value of the 16 pieces (pawn=1, queen=9, etc) I came up with 42 points per player. The University of Michigan (see Joe's statement link above), which assigns a score to each applicant to determine who gets in, awards at most 20 points out of 150 based on your pigmentation. 20/150 is about 13%. 13% of 42 is roughly 5, which is the value of a rook. Give me a rook up and I could maybe beat even Norm once or twice.

It's an excessive advantage to award in the name of diversity. I'm all for diversity as long as we mean diversity of thought or perspective. Diversity of coloration is meaningless, and attempts to assign value to it are racist. I vote we do away with the melatonin-based points and de-emphasize (but not eliminate) the socio-economonic disadvantage score.

DD, I read the same article on CNN. Two years or so back when we were trying to come up with a name for our new baby, someone gave us a wrinkled oft-photocopied handout which described a study. It turns out people with "normal" sounding names are more likely to be employed then people with unusual names. Gertrude, Velma, and Frances didn't as many points with employers as Mike, Matt, and Carrie. While this certainly extends to people named Jamal LaTiffa, (as the CNN study pointed out), I don't think it's necessarily racist, or anti-black, or anti-anything other than people not liking what sounds to them like wierd names. Racism is alive and well in America. I just hate to see it practiced by government institutions.

The rook comment above is not an argument against affirmative action, it is an argument against a particular policy. If a rook is too much, then perhaps a Bishop or a pawn is more reasonable. This does not provide an in principle argument against affirmative action. Mike also makes race more trivial than it really is. I would agree that diversity of thought and perspective is what we are after. However, the fact that someone grows up as a minority has profound effects on the experiences and thoughts they have in life. These experiences are different than those of white people and contribute to diversity of thought and perspective.

Some of our later posters probably didn't read the comments at the beginning, since the first 4 or 5 comments contain solid rebuttals to all the contra agruments that came late.

The charge that affirmative action seems condescending and therefore should be outlawed is also vague and weak, just like the prediction of resentment, since the question is not whether this or that person feels that AA is condescending, but whether racial preference is in fact an objective affront to one's dignity or is properly considered condescending. There are plenty of things that someone, according to their personal standard, might find condescending, but one's personal feelings aren't a good foundation for constitutional law.

It is true that social science research (on the whole, not what CNN reporters happen to take hold of) is somewhat mixed on the issue of feelings of resentment and condescension with regard to AA. But many of these feelings are caused by a selective ideology that easily accepts some things for free but then calls other things handouts. When average college students get Pell grants, or even when they pay the regular subsidized tuition at a state school, they generally don't call that a handout from the government, they consider that a legitimate source of money for college. Capitalist corporations regularly accept government bailouts, and are rarely heard to announce, "I guess our business just can't hack it in the open marketplace. How pathetic we are." The list of exmaples goes on. Saying something is condescending is begging the question, since saying that a distribution of a good is offensive in itself is just about the same as saying that it is not an appropriate and just distrubution. The question is: is AA an appropriate mode of distribution?

A second important fact is, however, that most colleges and universities don't view their affirmative action policies as a benevolent white hand reaching down as a savior to the unfortunate. Rather, they most of them are quite afraid of having student bodies that don't reflect the communities that they claim to serve. They really want to have students from different racial backgrounds on campus, just like they want to have smart students, students with leadership skills, great atheletes, and students with family connections to the school. Getting a culturally diverse students body is a more legitimate goal of college admissions than many other goals which colleges legally have.

The stubbornest myth of all is that everyone is born into life with an equal set of opprtunities and resources, just like a chess game. Racial minorities in general start out with a few points less than the rest of us. Why? For many reasons, some related to current racism, others related to social structures left over from more racist times. To try to break up these unfair patterns and structures is only offensive and condescending to someone who doesn't know that these unfair elements still exist, or chooses to ignore them. And remaining ignorant of the unfairness is much easier for someone who is white than for someone who is African-American or Latino.

Well said Dende Blogger. btw: It's about bloody time a mind like yours got its own blog :-)

Yeh Dende when you going to get your own blog. We'll all link to you and come and make smart ass comments about your posts. It's just about time isn't it. Let us know if you need any help to get going.

thanks for the kind words and support, norm and DD. I am taking my second comprehesive exam this saturday (wish me luck), the last big hurdle before the dissertation proposal. then I will start on projects that have been on hold for a while, including a blog of some sort. I'll probably ask for advice from you more web-savvy folks. Cheers JWJ