If there was one good thing that came out of the Harriet Miers nomination fiasco, it’s that it made everyone realize how bad affirmative action is for our country. Just like Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court justice she was nominated to replace, Harriet Miers was chosen, not because she was the most qualified candidate for the job, but, at least in part, because she was a woman.
Perhaps fortunately, we will never find out if a Justice Miers would have been as disastrous as Justice O’Connor on the court. After Miers withdrew her nomination, Bush picked Judge Samuel Alito for round two of the media feeding frenzy, and the controversy all but disappeared. Reasonable people support Alito’s confirmation because, despite being a white man, he just happens to be a qualified candidate, arguably one of the most qualified.
President John F. Kennedy was the first person to use the term “affirmative action” in 1961 in Executive Order 10925. Under the section on nondiscrimination in employment by government contractors and subcontractors, it reads, “The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.”
Using Kennedy’s definition of the term, affirmative action is almost innocuous. If an individual’s race, religion, ethnicity, etcetera are not pertinent to the job he’s performing, there’s no excuse for discriminating against that individual in hiring or promoting practices. Kennedy’s main idea is that individuals cannot be discriminated against because of race, but affirmative action today does exactly that.
The affirmative action policies that we have now are not the innocent nondiscrimination policies Kennedy advocated. In hiring and in college admissions, affirmative action policies are often used to give preferences to minority and female applicants. When two applicants are both minimally qualified, companies or colleges may choose to accept the less qualified of the two if that individual is a woman or a minority. This means that the more qualified applicant is being denied a spot simply based on gender or race. This discrimination against the more qualified applicant is the polar opposite of what Kennedy’s executive order advocates.
The Supreme Court handed down its most recent ruling on affirmative action in college admissions toward the end of 2003. CNN reported that the court heard two cases, one involving the University of Michigan’s law school, that used race in the admissions process but did not give it a specific assigned value, and one involving the university’s undergraduate program, which gave racial minorities extra points in the point system used to determine admission specifically because they were minorities.
The Court decided that the undergraduate program violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and unconstitutionally discriminated against white students but that the law school admissions system was constitutional because it did not give a specific weight to race.
In other words, the court said that when the university is open about its policy of racial preferences, as the undergraduate program was, affirmative action is unconstitutional. When the school is secretive about how much influence it actually gives to race, as the law school was, then it’s OK.
One of the major arguments in support of affirmative action, an argument bought by five members of the Supreme Court at the time, was that the law school policy – affirmative action policies in general – are beneficial when they serve the purpose of increasing diversity. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist even wrote that the undergraduate program was unconstitutional because it was not narrow enough “to achieve respondents’ asserted compelling interest in diversity.”
The Supreme Court’s rulings on these two cases only directly apply to public universities funded by taxpayers. Being that Boston University is a private institution, it’s entitled to do what it wants with affirmative action in admissions or employment. That doesn’t give BU an excuse to follow a senseless policy. As it is written on the application for undergraduate admission for the 2005-06 school year:
“Boston University prohibits discrimination against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, or marital, parental, or veteran status.” I guess they must have forgotten to include political orientation in this list.
The statement continues to say, “This policy extends to all rights, privileges, programs, and activities, including admissions, financial assistance, employment, housing, athletics, and educational programs. Boston University recognizes that nondiscrimination does not ensure that equal opportunity is a reality. Because of this, the University will continue to implement affirmative action initiatives which promote equal opportunity for all students, applicants, and employees.”
Well, could they make up their minds? Which one is it? Affirmative action gives certain individuals special preferences. Equal opportunity doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
Since it’s the only constitutional justification for affirmative action, I’ll assume that the purpose of BU’s affirmative action initiatives in admissions is to ensure a diverse student body. Considering that the Office of Admissions’ website reports that 62 percent of BU’s freshman class is white, it’s debatable whether or not this is a racially diverse class.
A more important question, however, is whether racial diversity is valuable at all. Students who have diverse opinions and experiences are valuable additions to our student body. Racial diversity, however, does not necessarily correlate with these more meaningful forms of diversity.
If BU wanted to use affirmative action to make it easier for guys to get into this school and to even out our gender ratio, I might not object. But in most cases, affirmative action promotes racial diversity that comes at the expense of non-minorities and doesn’t guarantee diversity in the areas where it is truly important.
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