Let's Debate Affirmative Action

   Cheryl Hopwood did not come from an affluent family. Raised by a single mother, she worked her way through high school, community college, and California State University at Sacramento. She then moved to Texas and applied to the University of Texas Law School, the best law school in the state and one of the leading law schools in the country. Although Hopwood had compiled a grade point average of 3.8 and did reasonably well on the law school admissions test (scoring in the 83rd percentile), she was not admitted. 
   Hopwood, who is white, thought her rejection was unfair. Some of the applicants admitted instead of her were African American and Mexican American students who had lower college grades and LSAT scores than she did. The school had an affirmative action policy that gave preference to minority applicants. In fact, all of the minority students with grades and LSAT scores comparable to Hopwood's had been admitted.
   Hopwood took her case to federal court, arguing that she was a victim of discrimination. The university replied that part of the law school's mission was to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the Texas legal profession, including not only law firms, but also the state legislature and the courts. "Law in a civil society depends overwhelmingly on the willingness of society to accept its judgment," said Michael Sharlot, dean of the law school. "It becomes harder to achieve that if we don't see members of all groups playing roles in the administration of justice." In Texas, African Americans and Mexican Americans make up 40 percent of the population, but a far smaller proportion of the legal profession. When Hopwood applied, the University of Texas law school used an affirmative action admissions policy that aimed at enrolling about 15 percent of the class from among minority applicants.
   In order to achieve this goal, the university set lower admissions standards for minority applicants than for nonminority applicants. University officials argued, however, that all of the minority students who were admitted were qualified to do the work, almost all succeeded in graduating from law school and passing the bar exam. But that was small comfort to Hopwood, who believed she'd been treated unfairly, and should have been admitted.

   Hopwood's challenge to affirmative action was not the first to find its way to court, nor would it be the last. For over three decades, the courts have wrestled with the hard moral and legal questions posed by affirmative action. In 1978, in the Bakke case, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld an affirmative action admissions policy of the medical school at University of California at Davis. In 2003, a closely divided Supreme Court ruled that race could be used as a factor in admissions in a case involving the University of Michigan Law School. Meanwhile, voters in California, Washington, and Michigan have recently enacted ballot initiatives to ban racial preferences in public education and employment.
   The question for the courts is whether affirmative action hiring and admissions policies violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. But that gets a tad technical, so let's set it aside and focus directly on the moral question : Is it unjust to consider race and ethnicity as factors in hiring or university admissions ? 
   To answer this question, let's consider three reasons that proponents of affirmative action offer for taking race and ethnicity into account : correcting for bias in standardized tests, compensating for past wrongs, and promoting diversity. 

               CORRECTING FOR THE TESTING GAP 

   One reason for taking race and ethnicity into account is to correct for possible bias in standardized tests. The ability of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and other such tests to predict academic and career success has long been disputed. In 1951, an applicant to the doctoral program in the School of Religion at Boston University presented mediocre scores on the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) . The young Martin Luther King, Jr., who would become one of the greatest orators in American history, scored below average in verbal aptitude. Fortunately, he was admitted anyway. 
   Some studies show that black and Hispanic students on the whole score lower than white students on standardized tests, even adjusting for economic class. But whatever the cause of the testing gap, using standardized tests to predict academic success requires interpreting the scores in light of students' family, social, cultural, and educational backgrounds. A 700 SAT score from a student who attended poor public schools in the South Bronx means more than the same score for a graduate of an elite private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But assessing test scores in light of students' racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds does not challenge the notion that colleges and universities should admit those students with the greatest academic promise ; it is simply an attempt to find the most accurate measure of each individual's academic promise. 
   The real affirmative action debate is about two other rationales--the compensatory argument and the diversity argument. 

                COMPENSATING FOR PAST WRONGS

The compensatory argument views affirmative action as a remedy for past wrongs. It says minority students should be given preference to make up for a history of discrimination that has placed them at an unfair disadvantage. This argument treats admission primarily as a benefit to the recipient and seeks to distribute the benefit in a way that compensates for past injustice and its lingering effects. 
   But the compensatory argument runs into a tough challenge : critics point out that those who benefit are not necessarily those who have suffered, and those who pay the compensation are seldom those responsible for the wrongs being rectified. Mant beneficiaries of affirmative action are middle-class minority students who did not suffer the the hardships that afflict young African American and Hispanics from the inner city. Why should an African American student from an affluent Houston suburb get an edge over Cheryl Hopwood, who may actually have faced a tougher economic struggle ?
   If the point is to help the disadvantaged, critics argue, affirmative action should be based on class, not race. And if racial preferences are intended to compensate for the historic injustice of slavery and segregation, how can it be fair to exact that compensation from people such as Hopwood, who played no part in perpetuating the injustice ?
   Whether the compensatory case for affirmative action can answer this objection depends on the difficult concept of collective responsibility : Can we ever have a moral responsibility to redress wrongs committed by a previous generation ? To answer this question, we need to know more about how moral obligations arise. Do we incur obligations only as individuals, or do some obligations claim us as members of communities with historic identities ? We'll discuss this in greater detail later, so I'll set it aside for now.