Affirmative Action Documents

1. Perspectives: Affirmative Action
Modified
Document A: Is Affirmative Action for Me?
By Negassi Tesfamichael
When I apply to college this fall, I will mark the box labeled "Black or African American" on the
Common Application. I wonder whether I should qualify for affirmative action.
I defy many black stereotypes. I grew up in a quiet suburb, where I have never faced a dangerous
situation. My parents have been happily married for 18 years. I attend private school, and my
standardized test scores rank in the 90th percentile. I never have had an encounter with the law.
(My worst offenses are overdue library books.)
So, should affirmative-action efforts apply to me?
Many opponents of affirmative-action programs would say that I have economic advantages and
that people who are well off underscore why colleges nationwide should dissolve the kind of
race-based considerations that Abigail Fisher, a white student, claimed kept her out of the
University of Texas.
Some aspects of my life are influenced by but not unique to my race: We speak multiple
languages in my home, and not all college applicants get to see this country through an
immigrant's lens. I have also had experiences that are only about my being black.
Many supporters believe that affirmative action is needed for the benefit of minority students
who could not otherwise move up in society or to make up for wrongs done to past generations.
Yet as President Obama said in May to graduates of historically black Morehouse College,
"We've got no time for excuses."
Who today really thinks that they can survive in the 21st-century workforce with no ability to
communicate and collaborate with people different from themselves? There should be some
appreciation for the diverse backgrounds of all Americans. As a student trying to learn and grow,
I appreciate views that help me see the world more clearly.
I understand that many would say that people like me don't need any sort of affirmative action.
Some of us surely could get into a college without efforts to ensure diversity.
The writer will be a senior at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee.

2. Document B: Supreme Court Must Realize Affirmative Action Doesn't Improve Education
By Douglas A. Kahn
The Supreme Court has permitted affirmative action, but with limitations. The judicial decisions
on this issue have focused on the educational value of having diversity in the student body. But I
have observed from my experience that racial diversity has no effect on educational quality and
is not the real rationale for the affirmative action policy.
In my view, the true rationale for affirmative action comes from the view that it is problematic. If
Americans are to live harmoniously together, all parts of society should participate in its
important functions. That justification explains why preference is really given to minorities:
They also should be able to participate in the American dream.
There is a case for diversity's benefiting student life outside of the classroom. But even there, the
benefits are not so substantial as to justify a large-scale program that rests on utilizing race or
ethnicity as a factor in choosing a student body. Moreover, socializing students is not the main
function of a university.
A university education is primarily an intellectual activity. If the faculty believed that diversity
was important, they would seek to have an intellectually diverse faculty. But most universities
devote little-to-no effort to add faculty members who hold diverse political and ideological
views.
Another rationalization made for affirmative action is to compensate for past injuries done to
specific groups. While there is no disputing that great wrongs were done to African-Americans
in the past, the people who benefit from affirmative action are not the ones who have directly
suffered those past wrongs.
While racial discrimination continues to exist, it is reduced from and evolved from what it once
was. There is reason to doubt that racial discrimination today is any more of a problem than
discrimination against many other groups who are not included in affirmative action programs -
women, people of certain religions, people with disabilities, or people with low socio-economic
status.
In my view, while it served its purpose, it is no longer needed. African-Americans occupy
important positions in this country. The president of the United States, members of the cabinet
and Congress, a member of the Supreme Court, and numerous judges and officials are African-
Americans.
Douglas A. Kahn is the Paul G. Kauper Professor of Law at the University of
Michigan Law School.

3. Document C: Race Matters
By Lee C. Bollinger
Abigail Fisher's claim that the University of Texas unconstitutionally considered race in putting
together its incoming undergraduate class -- resulting, she argues, in her exclusion from the
student body.
Experience shows that underrepresented minority students in American colleges and universities
would decline significantly and the costs would be substantial without Affirmative Action.
We know this based on the impact of a 1996 California ballot stopping any consideration of race
in admissions policies in the state's public higher education system; two years later, the number
of African American, Latino and Native American freshmen attending UCLA and UC Berkeley
had fallen by more than 50%, and the rates at which underrepresented minority students applied,
were admitted and enrolled had declined at every UC campus. The reasons are reflecting
performance gaps on standardized tests, effects of racial discrimination and the sharp inequality
of educational opportunity in our nation's increasingly resegregated public schools.
And, if we are to succeed in encouraging our students to appreciate the complexity of the modern
world, to question their inherited assumptions and to understand that wisdom is found frequently
in unexpected places, then a variety of viewpoints must not only be present on our campuses but
also given voice. By recognizing the importance of student body diversity and sanctioning the
consideration of race in a holistic approach to admissions, the Grutter decision authorized
universities to apply their unique expertise in making this judgment.
This issue must be viewed against the sweep of American history. For decades, public and
private efforts to overcome discrimination and racial separation have been embraced by the U.S.
military and corporate leaders. This consensus emerged from the landmark ruling in Brown vs.
Board of Education and the irreversible changes it set in motion bringing the nation closer to its
founding ideal of equality. The distance the United States has traveled in building a more
integrated society is one of our nation's greatest achievements, recognized with admiration by
countries around the world confronting their own histories of racial and ethnic discord. American
colleges and universities have been at the very heart of this transformation, and they must be
allowed to remain there.
Credit: Lee C. Bollinger is president of Columbia University. As president of the
University of Michigan, he led the litigation defending its law school and
undergraduate admissions policies in the 2003 Supreme Court cases
Grutter vs. Bollinger and Gratz vs. Bollinger. Claude M. Steele, dean of
the Stanford University School of Education, is the author of "Whistling
Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us."

4. Document D: The Unraveling of Affirmative Action
By Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.
Jareau Hall breezed through high school in Syracuse, N.Y. Graduating in the top 20% of his
class, he had been class president and a successful athlete, and he sang in gospel choir. He was
actively recruited by Colgate University in rural New York, one of the nation's top liberal-arts
colleges.
None of Colgate's recruiters mentioned to Mr. Hall that his combined math and verbal SAT
scores were some 250 points below the class median -- let alone that this would put him at great
risk of academic difficulty.
Arriving at Colgate in 2002, he quickly found himself struggling in class, with far more rigorous
coursework than he had ever faced. "Nobody told me what would be expected of me
beforehand," recalls Mr. Hall, now 28. "I really didn't know what I was getting into. And it all
made me feel as if I wasn't smart enough."
To make things worse, recalls Mr. Hall, "I was immediately stereotyped and put into a box
because I was African-American. And that made it harder to perform....There was a general
feeling that all blacks on campus were there either because they were athletes or they came
through a minority-recruitment program and might not really belong there." Shaken by the
experience, Mr. Hall dropped out after his freshman year. He eventually returned to Colgate and
graduated in 2007.
There are, of course, a great many students who are admitted under affirmative action and go on
to successful careers, just as there are a significant number of black and Hispanic students at elite
schools who get in without any preference.
For more than 40 years, the debate over affirmative action in admissions has focused on whether
it amounts to unfair and unconstitutional reverse discrimination against whites (and now Asians).
There is now increasing evidence that students who receive large preferences of any kind --
whether based on race, athletic ability, alumni connections or other considerations -- experience
some clear negative effects: Students end up with poor grades (usually in the bottom fifth of their
class), lower graduation rates, extremely high attrition rates from science and engineering
majors, substantial self-segregation on campus, lower self-esteem and far greater difficulty
passing licensing tests (such as bar exams for lawyers).
The most encouraging part of this research is the parallel finding that these same students have
dramatically better outcomes if they go to schools where their level of academic preparation is
much closer to that of the median student. That is, black and Hispanic students -- as well as the
smaller numbers of preferentially admitted athletes and children of donors -- excel when they
avoid the problem of what has come to be called "mismatch."

5. Jareau Hall's experience is representative of scenes that play out every fall at selective schools
across the country. Black and Hispanic high-school seniors are actually more likely than similar
whites to aspire to careers in science and engineering (which, along with technology and math,
make up the so-called STEM fields), as first demonstrated by Dartmouth psychologist Rogers
Elliott in 1996, and since confirmed in other studies.
This same dynamic turned up when several leading educators wanted to find out why so few
black students went on to become professors. Funded by the Council of Ivy League Presidents,
sociologists Stephen Cole and the late Elinor Barber surveyed thousands of young African-
American students entering a broad cross-section of selective schools. The 2003 Cole-Barber
book, "Increasing Faculty Diversity," concluded that large racial preferences and the ensuing
mismatch led directly to lower grades and diminished intellectual self-confidence. They found
that promising young black students who wanted to become professors abandoned their
academic aspirations in droves, while similar black students who weren't mismatched were far
more likely to stay the course.
Interviews that we and our colleagues conducted with dozens of black and Hispanic
administrators and former students revealed a striking theme: Almost all of them complained that
blacks are stereotyped on campus as being weak students. It is, of course, not surprising that the
large performance gaps on campus that highly correlate with race tend to foster -- rather than
undermine -- racial stereotypes. Indeed, scholars at Harvard and University of California, Los
Angeles have shown that students who are aware that they have received a racial admissions
preference are more likely to think that they are being negatively stereotyped, and those students
appear to do worse academically because of that perception.
What can be done about the problem of mismatch? Most obviously, we need dramatic
improvements in elementary and secondary schools to narrow the racial gaps in academic
achievement. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average black
12th-grader is on a par with the average white eighth-grader. That project will take decades.
Meanwhile, mismatched students can benefit from remedial academic support programs. Mr.
Hall's return to Colgate was successful, he recalls, in part because he made a point of consistently
communicating with his professors and working closely with his guidance counselor. Mr. Hall
ended up graduating with a 2.5 GPA overall and about a 3.1 in his major, African studies.
Colgate is a good school, he says, but he now believes he would have preferred a college that
was, among other things, "more diverse and in an urban area."
Mr. Taylor, a legal journalist and author, and Mr. Sander, a UCLA law
professor and economist, are the authors of "Mismatch: How Affirmative
Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't
Admit It," published this week.