Ashley Yong Source 1

Should colleges consider race in admissions?

Jost, Kenneth. "Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions." CQ Researcher 21 Sept. 2001: 737-60. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

The article looks at affirmative action from the view of its progression history, starting with the Gratz v. Bollinger case the University of Michigan flagship Ann Arbor campus. The case set a precedent for how federal judges evaluated affirmative action cases based on how similar college's admission processes were to quota systems. While NAACP Legal Defense Fund associate director-counsel Theodore Shaw says,  “The overwhelming majority of students who apply to highly selective institutions are still white. If we are not conscious of selecting minority students, they're not going to be there,” while Roger Clegg Center for Equal Opportunity general counsel says, “It's immoral. It's illegal. It stigmatizes the beneficiary. It encourages hypocrisy. It lowers standards. It encourages the use of stereotypes.” The article also has a timeline of affirmative action's growth and how certain politicians, court cases and universities handled it and details public reaction to the implementation of affirmative action in the late 1900s, which was generally negative both politically and legally. But, with any poll, results were fickle. People responded well to words like "affirmative action" but not to "racial preferences."

This source makes me think of when I visited my high school during winter break of 2015. I talked to my former Word Processing teacher, a white woman in her 70s, and she brought up the Concerned Student 1950 movement at Mizzou complaining specifically about their demands of affirmative action in hiring. Before I had talked to her, I had been a strong advocate of affirmative action. But, she brought up a point that I found interesting and made me question my beliefs. She said, "If we choose minority students over more qualified white students in the college admissions process, why don't we do the same for white students in college athletics?" After winter break, I brought up what she said to students on my floor. One white student said, "But, black people, who heavily dominate sports like basketball, never did anything to white people to be better at them skill-wise. White people are not just inherently smarter than minorities. It all depends on what opportunities they were presented with in their education, which can largely be based on socioeconomic factors." So this made me question, how is affirmative action "hypocrisy" as Clegg says? Is acknowledging race racist and "immoral"? It makes me think that while some think affirmative action is not legal, about which I have not developed a clear opinion, is it not the moral thing to do? It makes me wonder how people would react to affirmative action/racial preferences if they knew exactly what it entailed. The new idea it makes me question is how can we gauge an unbiased public opinion poll to truly see how the general public feels about affirmative action and, whichever way it swings, should lawmakers take that into account when making decisions? I agree with Shaw as he asserts that diversity in higher education is crucial because not only does it give minority students opportunities they may not have had earlier, but it can give white students a different perspective of the world through different culture and meeting diverse people. It does not lead me to an answer for the research question because it actually poses more questions than it answers and makes me realize the number of different facets of affirmative action and how many things we need to consider when establishing a system, such as public opinion, law, morality, etc.

The new questions this source has led me to ask include, "Should colleges use race-based admissions policies to remedy discrimination against minorities?" "Should colleges use race-based admissions policies to promote diversity in their student populations?" and "Should colleges adopt other policies to try to increase minority enrollment? If so, what system works best and is most fair?" These are important to explore and attempt to answer before we can assess the overarching question/thesis of "What does affirmative action tell us about the stake of minority students in higher education?" Next, I will explore an article on racial preferences, also from CQ Researcher.