An Appearance of Discrimination
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Are minority applicants being accepted at a lower rate because significantly fewer of them are qualified for admission?
If so, let’s examine what that says about our undergraduate education system. Law school is a graduate-level program; applicants are (or soon will be) graduates of an accredited college or university. If, after completing a college education, a significant number of minority applicants are less qualified than their non-minority counterparts for admission to law school, there is certainly a problem, but it has nothing to do with affirmative action in law school admissions; it has to do with the quality of education we are providing our minority students at the undergraduate level.
How can there be such a disparity? Are our colleges and universities, even now, such hotbeds of racism and sexism that minority students are denied educational opportunities open to the majority? Are these institutions shirking their responsibility to help under-prepared students, perhaps admitted through undergraduate affirmative action programs, overcome a lifetime of educational deprivation, poor study habits, and social alienation? Are minority students being segregated into a ghetto of marginal and overly specialized “ethnic” or “feminist” or “multidisciplinary” academic programs that leave them less prepared for real-world post-graduate disciplines than those students that pursued more mainstream interests? Are minority students merely “passed through” as affirmative action statistics, never having demanded of them the standards that would qualify them for graduate work? Or does the problem go further back, to high schools and elementary schools which fail to prepare students for college just as colleges fail to prepare them for graduate schools?
If colleges and universities, for whatever reason, are failing to educate minority students entrusted to them, it is within the college and university educational milieu that we must seek solutions, not within the graduate school admissions process.
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Are minority applicants being accepted at a lower rate because the admissions office is in fact a bastion of latent racism and sexism?
This seems to be the position of many minority advocates. But given the loyalty of admissions officers – and university administrators and faculty in general – to the old affirmative action programs banned by Proposition 209, it seems quite unlikely that they are hiding a closet racism which would disadvantage minorities in the admissions process. Which is why it is so paradoxical that many defenders of affirmative action – and perhaps many potential minority applicants – seem to believe that without affirmative action minorities have no chance at admission because of prejudice in the admissions office. This would appear to be the furthest thing from the truth.
Even so, if this is the case, the solution is not reinstitution of affirmative action programs; it is the mass firing of those who would so violate their public trust by allowing racism and sexism to bias their admissions decisions.
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Are minority applicants being accepted at a lower rate because admissions officers, angry at the loss of their customary tool for implementing what they consider a moral crusade, have torpedoed the admissions process in an effort to bring on the disaster they predicted would follow the end of affirmative action?
I don’t think this is the case, and the suggestion would seem incredible if not for a long history of public officials subverting the intent of popular laws to maintain the status quo; consider the initial implementation of California’s tax-slashing Proposition 13, in which local governments immediately and very publicly eviscerated the most important and visible functions of government in an effort to scare the public into reconsidering their zeal for tax reform. Reform efforts of all political loyalties have always been resisted and subverted by those who held power within the old systems; this temptation becomes even stronger in the light of a self-conceived moral certitude – just ask Oliver North. If that is what is going on here, then the solution goes beyond mass firings to mass arrests, for not only have admissions officers violated the public trust, they have violated the very laws against discrimination that they hold so dear.