Affirmative action double standard Affirmative action double standard
BY ROBERT JOINER
Post-Dispatch updated: 04/07/2003 08:18 AM
What do you call it when rich kids with less-than-stellar SAT scores are admitted to some of the nation's best universities? What do you say when some of these same kids grow up to attack affirmative action for blacks, Hispanics and other students who are underrepresented at these universities? If we were honest, we'd call it hypocrisy.
That's what was on display last week at the U.S. Supreme Court when President George W. Bush's Justice Department came out swinging against a modest affirmative action program under which a handful of promising black students were admitted to the Law School at the University of Michigan. Under attack is a university admissions policy that gives an automatic 20 points on a 150-point scale to applicants who are black, Hispanic or American Indian.
Critics attack this program as a quota in disguise. These same critics and the Justice Department say nothing about Michigan's preferential admissions for children of alumni and potential donors, even if these kids' SAT scores are below university standards. Perhaps these critics assumed that giving breaks to rich kids is the right thing to do. After all, Bush got into Yale partly because he's a special minority - a rich kid whose family name had huge pull with Yale's admissions office.
Bush's father and grandfather were Yalies. Grandad was a Yale trustee, too. So who was going to hold it against Bush the Younger if his SAT scores were 180 points below the median score for the Yale class of 1968, or because his grades put him in the 21st percentile of his incoming freshman class? Nobody sicced the Justice Department on Yale for admitting this mediocre white student over smarter kids who had better grades. So if it's okay to allow rich kids like Bush to go to the front of the line at the admissions office, why is it wrong to try to level the field by giving some consideration to poor black kids?
The fact that so little has been said about preferential treatment for rich kids suggests that opposition to affirmative action in higher education has more to do with bigotry than the principles of merit and a color-blind society. I'm not knocking Bush for his triumph of mediocrity. His experience shows that a white "C" student not only can find his way into Yale (a fact he's joked about publicly) - as well as Harvard Business School - but can become an accidental president, too. In any case, Bush's own experience shows that the Supreme Court ruling in the Michigan case could have far-reaching ramifications for a number of university policies that aren't affirmative action in name, but are in fact preferential programs for whites.
The Wall Street Journal cited a few of them in a recent feature that cut to the chase, beginning with the headline: "At Many Colleges, the Rich Kids Get Affirmative Action." It cited Duke University, where 12 percent of the seats in the freshman class went to children of alumni, and between 3 percent and 5 percent were set aside for "development admits" - children of potential donors. This preferential treatment for legacies and donor offspring, common among many top schools, benefited whites long before the government adopted programs to help underrepresented minorities get through the college door.
The double standard lies in how we apply one set of rules to programs that help whites and a different set to help underrepresented groups get a leg up the college ladder. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson wasn't prepared to discuss this angle any more than he was prepared to explain why the government hadn't gone after the military for developing one of the nation's most aggressive affirmative action programs. That program has succeeded in making the Army look like 21st century America.
When asked about the military's program, Olson replied, "We haven't examined that." And no wonder. He wouldn't have been able to explain away the hypocrisy. Olson must have thought, at least once, that but for an accident of birth to wealth and privilege, the grace of Yale, and an assist from the Supreme Court, Bush probably wouldn't be president.
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