Guest view: Class study of Supreme Court and affirmative action
The U.S. Supreme court is set to hear oral arguments at the end of October in two cases that will reconsider its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling that race can be a legitimate factor in undergraduate university admissions. Typically, there are three areas in a holistic review of applicants: academic achievement (such as grades and test scores), personal achievement (such as community involvement and work experience), and special circumstances (such as family responsibilities, family hardship, and race or ethnicity).
Those against affirmative action are hopeful that the conservative court will overturn what they believe to be “reverse discrimination,” claiming that university admissions should be based on academic merit alone and that to make race a factor violates the constitutional principle of equality. The group bringing the lawsuits, Students for Fair Admissions, invokes Martin Luther King’s statement in his I Have a Dream speech that persons should ‘not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’
Since 1996 when California voters added Section 31 to the state’s constitution’s Declaration of Rights, public universities are prohibited from using affirmative action in admissions since they cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public education, employment and contracting. In 2020, Californians reaffirmed its rejection of affirmative action by voting decisively (57%) against Proposition 16 that would have removed this ban.
At Pacific, entering students fill out a widely used national survey that asks their views on contentious social and political issues. In 2019, 60% of Pacific’s first-year students believed that affirmative action in college admissions should be abolished. This percentage is lower than the percentage of students in my annual Moral Problems philosophy course who also disagree with affirmative action. In this course, I have students do a pre- and post-course survey of their opinions about the course issues.
In the post-course survey, there was a significant change in their views on affirmative action. In my 2017 course of 25 students, 38% disagreed with affirmative action, compared to 69% who disagreed at the outset. And in my 2018 course of twenty-six students, 48% disagreed with affirmative action, compared with 76% who disagreed at the outset.
I believe the best explanation for the students’ change in supporting affirmative action was they learned about the Supreme Court majority arguments defending the policy. The Court’s rationale was not to have a diverse student body for the mere sake of diversity or not to rectify the past and current injustice of racial discrimination but to achieve the following educational goals that are essential to a university mission:
To create a more complete understanding of the realities and issues in the social and natural worlds through the contribution of students who have different lived experiences and perspectives
To break down racial stereotypes and foster cross-cultural understanding to prepare students for the workplace and citizenship
For the most part, my students were completely unaware of these educational purposes of affirmative action. Universities want to admit, and to graduate, students who have more skills than traditional ‘academic’ competence. They want students whose experiences and perspectives enlarge the learning and teaching experience. This is not ‘reverse discrimination’ since discrimination is based on animus or hatred toward a group. And the group Students for Fair Admissions has taken Martin Luther King’s statement against affirmative action out of context since it was not meant as a principle to guide university admissions policy but as a cultural lament and aspiration in racially prejudiced society.
To be sure, my students also equally examined various principled objections to affirmative action—does admitting a ‘critical mass’ of minority students amount, in practice, to a type of quota and prevent individuals from being considered as individuals, both of which are illegal under affirmative action policy? Are there race-neutral ways to achieve diversity in higher education, such as admitting the top 10% students in high schools to the UC system, an approach that Texas has adopted?
Ultimately, I suspect that just as my Moral Problem students and entering Pacific students, Californians against affirmative action are probably unaware of the educational purposes of the policy and the illogic of the notion of reverse discrimination, which is a pre-requisite to coming to a fair-minded position against it. And it is probably the case that those who support affirmative action policy are not aware of the most plausible objections to the policy.
Lou Matz is an aging basketball player and professor of philosophy at University of the Pacific.
This article originally appeared on The Record: Guest view: Class study of Supreme Court and affirmative action
