In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson first used affirmative action in his Executive Order 11246, which would require federal contractors to take action for employees to be treated equally without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. In 1967, Johnson expanded the order to include affirmative action requirements that would benefit women. With all this said and with all the advancements of the United States since these edicts, there is still quite a distance to go.
This is more than evident in the University of Michigan case. Last Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to uphold the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action admissions policies in Grutter v. Bollinger.
Just as important as the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., was in 1954 to combat the Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld “separate but equal,” such is the case in Michigan.
In studying the two cases, closing arguments were surrounded around the Bakke case. In Bakke, the Supreme Court decided that race could and should be a factor so that more universities would be a place likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism.
If the case in Michigan were to become another Plessy case, this would have been a defeat not just to affirmative action, but a slap in the face of diversity that has been proven to enrich the learning experience. Without having legislation and conditions that would provide equal opportunity and access, universities would cease having diverse communities and entering classes with exceptionally qualified individuals.
Ohio State prides itself on diversity and scholarship. The entering freshman class was not only one of the most diverse, but it had the highest competitive standardized test scores and class ranks. Mixed with exceptional personal talents, unique work or service experience, leadership potential, maturity, demonstrated compassion, a history of overcoming disadvantage, ability to communicate with the poor, and/or other qualifications deemed important by admissions that all contribute to diversity, thus not limited to race.
Only several years after the decision was made, the University of California Regents decided to vote unanimously to repeal SP-1 (the decision to not have affirmative action as a practice), thus reversing the ban on affirmative action in the UC system. It was not just the protest of many that motivated the regents to take this action, but it was the result of their former actions that had to be reversed because of its consequences.
For example, the number of women faculty who were hired in universities in California drastically declined due to the lack of affirmative action policies. The number of women faculty hired by the UC system had declined from 37 percent of new hires in 1994 to only 27 percent in 1998. The UC faculty was only 23.5 percent female, with women concentrated in non-tenured positions, despite the fact that 48 percent of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens in 1998 went to women.
This provides evidence that without proactive hiring practices that consider race, gender, and other underrepresented groups, those groups would not only lack presence, but also begin to disappear.
University of Michigan and other universities across the country had to see that unless there was a framework that provided affirmative action, not only would entering freshman classes lack diversity and cultural pluralism, but also the faculty and staff would reflect the same disparity.
Patricia Cunningham is a senior in sociology and women studies. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].
