President Bush, tone deaf to irony, chose Martin Luther King's birthday week to oppose affirmative action. His position on the Michigan case now before the Supreme Court seems high-minded until you look at the specifics.
"I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education," Bush declared. But he termed the Michigan system an unconstitutional "quota system" that amounts to "racial discrimination."
The University of Michigan uses a point system in its admissions based mostly on academic achievement. To increase minority representation, it awards extra points to African-American, Hispanic or Native American applicants.
Bush favors an alternative approach of the kind used in Texas, Florida and California, where the state university system automatically admits the top academic students from each high school -- the top 4 percent in California, the top 10 percent in Texas and the top 20 percent in Florida.
These systems, like Michigan's, also get minority applicants into elite state universities. In each state, that was precisely the intent. But which approach is better and fairer policy?
On the one hand, there's something to be said for "class-based" affirmative action. A student, black or white, who has overcome adversity deserves more of a break than one with gentleman's C grades who grew up in privilege. But the California-Texas-Florida systems are a crude version of class-based affirmative action. If you're near the top of your high school graduating class, you get admitted, even if you can barely read. The cynical idea seems to be: Let's get some minority students into the state university, and never mind whether they are the best prepared minority students.
These systems, perversely, achieve racial diversity in college admissions by relying on the fact that many high schools remain racially isolated and often academically weak. In fact, a recent study by Harvard's Civil Rights Project found that the percentage of minority high school students in substantially integrated schools has been declining since about 1980 and is now back down to about 30 percent -- the level of the late 1960s.
So which minority student should be admitted -- one in the top 10 percent of a very weak high school with dismal SATs or one who finished just below the top 10 percent at an academically rigorous one? The College Board has experimented with far better ways of crediting applicants who overcame adversity to create a kind of affirmative action based on social class, giving bonus points for a variety of life achievements. This approach also nets lots of disadvantaged minority kids who are prepared for college.
Class versus race is a tricky public issue. But like so much else about Bush's presidency, his stance on the Michigan case isn't about devising the fairest solution to a challenging dilemma. It's about signaling and posturing, pandering to the right while pretending to be a moderate.
University admissions, of course, have never relied solely on pure academic achievement. And if anyone in the United States should be aware of that, it is George W. Bush.
The future president had a weak record in high school, but his family connections got him into Yale. He didn't do very well there, either, but he next got into the Harvard Business School. If his name had been George W. Tush, forget it.
Bush's middle name should be Legacy. Every step of his career, from his college and graduate school admissions to his "success" in the business world to his entry into politics, was greased by who he was and not by what he achieved on his own.
The larger scandal here is not that universities pursue all kinds of diversity, including race, but the prevalence of "legacy" admissions, which overrepresents academically feeble but socially connected applicants like Bush. If we're going to rely solely on academic prowess, let's make a clean sweep of it.
For a century after Emancipation in 1863, quotas were used to sharply limit the number of blacks at most universities. Only since the late 1960s have universities made special efforts to recruit minorities, who are still underrepresented in the elite professions and corporate boardrooms.
If it weren't for affirmative action, Bush would not be able to boast of such stellar African-American appointees as Colin Powell (who politely but unmistakably distanced himself from his boss' position on affirmative action). Maybe by 2063 we will be able to conclude that the United States is at last such a colorblind society that we can retire affirmative action. But as King pointed out in 1963, we haven't yet realized the dream.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect.
This column first appeared in yesterday's Boston Globe.
