Peter Schrag

Peter Schrag

Major civil rights organizations, supported by briefs from an array of education groups, were in the U.Due south. Supreme Court this month seeking to overturn Michigan's Proposal two – a clone of California'due south Proposition 209 – banning affirmative action in public pedagogy, employment and contracting.

Among the challengers' supporters were the San Francisco and Los Angeles school districts and the president and chancellors of the University of California.

If the Court agrees with them, thus jeopardizing Suggestion 209 and laws like it in several other states, they may come up to regret it.

Their arguments are reasonable – and in many cases familiar:

  • That without considering race in their admissions decisions, universities like UC and the Academy of Michigan, the police's chief target, can't achieve the ethnic and social diversity on their campuses that'due south essential to their educational objectives and to a healthy society.
  •  That veterans, alumni legacies and others can go to university officials to secure preferential treatment, merely African Americans, Latinos and other minorities have no recourse but the costly and difficult route to a land constitutional amendment. That in itself is racial discrimination and thus a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
  •  That accented prohibitions are simply too rigid and leave universities (and employers) with too fiddling flexibility.

At bottom, nonetheless, this case concerns not the constitutionality of affirmative action, but the question – raised during oral arguments by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could exist the swing vote once more – of why it'due south unconstitutional for voters to ban affirmative action when the regents or the legislature accept the right to do the same thing.

Michigan'south Proposal 2, passed by voters in 2006, was in large measure the work of Ward Connerly, the Sacramento businessman and former UC regent who was the primary sponsor of Proposition 209 and several like it in other states. If information technology'south struck downwards – unlikely given the court'southward conservative leaning – information technology will jeopardize the laws in other states as well.

That could generate no end of backfire. Among other things, it would further reduce the chances of Congress passing an immigration reform beak legalizing the nation's xi million undocumented immigrants. Legalize them, conservatives volition argue, and let them immediately get to the front end of the line as well?

And given the nation's quickly changing political demographics, it could well set off biting battles in California and other states with Latino pluralities, equally legislators printing universities to tweak academic standards to attain ethnic parity on their campuses. In California in 1992, the California legislature even passed a bill, vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson, that would have pressured UC to seek ethnic parity not just in admissions but as well in graduation rates.

In its Bakke decision in 1978, the courtroom held that the University of California and other selective educational institutions could consider race as one "plus" factor in admissions.

But at many institutions, including California's, that "plus" soon grew to a large margin every bit measured in formal academic qualifications, ofttimes at the expense of other minorities – Asians particularly – who got no racial preferences.

Until some Asian parents got a federal court lodge in 1999 to cake the practise, San Francisco'southward indigenous quotas prevented countless highly qualified Chinese-American students from admission to its selective loftier schools, Lowell in detail, in favor of academically less qualified "nether-represented" minorities.

Given that history, it's especially ironic that San Francisco's complaint about the pernicious effect Proposition 209 has had on its African American and Latino children says not a discussion about Asians, for over a century themselves victims of vicious discrimination, or most the federal court decision (Ho. five. San Francisco Unified School District) that ended the quota organization. Do even liberals want to return to that?

In the majority white nation of the 1960s, where minority African Americans had suffered three centuries of slavery and Jim Crow and where desegregation was withal more a hope and fifty-fifty less a reality than it is now, the need for race-conscious affirmative action seemed self-evident and fully justified.

A half-century later, a multi-ethnic society with millions of mixed-race individuals makes it more questionable with each passing day. Should the son of a wealthy Argentinian or a Mexican lawyer go a preference over the daughter of a Kentucky coal miner just because he has a Latino name? Ever more Californians are born to parents of different ethnicities; in what category do they belong?

The amicus brief filed by UC's chancellors and president (Mark Yudof, the final president, not Janet Napolitano, the new one) makes much of the fact that subsequently race preferences ended in UC admissions – actually start concluded by a vote of the regents in 1995 – enrollment of African Americans and Latinos declined sharply. And when measured by the ethnicity of high school graduates, as they debate, it's never recovered at Berkeley or UCLA, UC'southward most selective institutions.

But it is sharply up at campuses like UC Riverside and the relatively new UC Merced, where (in 2010) at that place were nearly twice as many Latinos as whites. And equally the UC officials' brief notes, intensified color-blind outreach programs (and, despite ascent tuition, generous financial aid policies) have brought the system's overall enrollment of students from depression- and moderate- income families to record levels.

In 2010, 39 percent of UC students had federal Pell grants, far more than any other major university, public or private, in the country.

None of that produces disinterestedness at many levels of the nation's education system, or the quality social and educational programs – in health care, preschool, teacher training – that other nations provide. Merely information technology does bespeak that raising indigenous percentages on a few campuses addresses, at best, only a tiny fraction of the issues.

Considering Berkeley and UCLA can't take race into consideration, they undoubtedly lose some desirable prospects to selective universities that can. But that will be a loss mainly on the selective campuses, non for the students who cull to go elsewhere, or for the nation'due south pool of talent. And in a multi-multi-ethnic state like California, where whites are now likewise a minority, affirmative activeness could become an ever-more divisive issue. For a society of so many colors, only color-blind will work.

…

Peter Schrag is the one-time editorial folio editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of "Paradise Lost: California's Feel, America'south Time to come" and "California: America's High Stakes Experiment." His latest book is "Non Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America" (University of California Printing). He is a frequent contributor to the California Progress Report.

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