Affirmative action

None of these points holds for racial classifications in affirmative action in employment and education, in transracial adoptions, and in electoral redistricting. In each case other individuals or groups are directly impacted or are denied something on the basis of race. In most cases, the preferences are not based on objective, scientific physical differences but on claims about the fairness of selection criteria, about compensation for past wrongs, about diversity for educational purposes, about distributive claims based on the... 

In Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the famous Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in education, the state gave as one justification for racial preferences for minorities in medical school the need to improve minority health care (Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 1978). No justice of the United States Supreme Court bought that argument, for it was... 

The author of this passage, a professor of English literature at a major university, argues that affirmative action is a necessary part of the college admissions process. 

Since the 1960s there has been a sea change in university admissions. Key Supreme Court decisions and federal laws made equal opportunity the law of the land, and many institutions of higher learning adopted policies of affirmative action. The term affirmative action was first used in the 1960s to describe the active recruitment and pro-... 

IV motion of minority candidates in both the workplace and in colleges and universities. President Lyndon Johnson, speaking at Howard University in 1965, apdy explained the reasoning behind affirmative action. As he said, You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line in... 

In recent years, affirmative action programs have come under public scrutiny, and some schools have been faced with charges of reverse discrimination. Preferential treatment of minority applicants is seen as discrimination against qualified applicants from the majority... 

According to the passage, the greatest danger of abolishing affirmative action in college admissions is... 

The author gives all the following reasons for continuing affirmative action in college admissions EXCEPT that it... 

Let me begin by telling you what, in my legal opinion, affirmative action does not and cannot lawfully require. It does not require an... 

Affirmative action is still a developing area of regulation with many of its precise requirements not yet definitively resolved in either an administrative or judicial sense. I strongly suggest that in dealing with specific problems and questions on affirmative action at your institution, you first obtain the opinion of your counsel concerning the precise requirements of affirmative action and then make the necessary decision with an understanding of what affirmative action actually does and does not require, as well as what is otherwise best for your institution. 

The largest number of interviewee doctoral recipients (two-fifths) came from Cohort III. This period (1965-1974) marks the beginning of the implementation of many affirmative action programs (Higginbotham, 1998 Wilson, 1996). 

National surveys have consistently shown growing support by whites for integration. In 1942, only 30% of white respondents supported school integration in 1970, the figure was 74% and by 1991, 93% of white respondents expressed support. History has shown that just as changes in attitude can mobilize public support to rectify racial inequality, the process can also work in the opposite direction. Consider, for example, the case of affirmative action nationwide surveys conducted in the mid-1990s showed increasing resistance by whites (Schaefer, 2000). 

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