Research paper on affirmative action in college admissions

Research paper on affirmative action in college admissions

The Graduate Center, The City University of New York Established in , the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) is devoted primarily to doctoral studies and awards most of CUNY's doctoral degrees. An internationally recognized center for advanced studies and a national model for public doctoral education, the Graduate Center offers more than thirty doctoral programs in Affirmative action opens doors in the organization while managing diversity opens the culture and the system. Managing diversity does not replace affirmative action; rather, it builds on the critical foundation laid by workplace equity programs. Affirmative action and managing diversity go hand-in-hand, each reinforcing the gains of the other Affirmative action as a practice was partially upheld by the Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger (), while the use of racial quotas for college admissions was concurrently ruled unconstitutional by the Court in Gratz v. Bollinger (). Affirmative action often gives rise to controversy in American politics

Affirmative action - Wikipedia

Research paper on affirmative action in college admissions those steps involve preferential selection—selection on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity—affirmative action generates intense controversy.

The development, defense, and contestation of preferential affirmative action has research paper on affirmative action in college admissions along two paths. One has been legal and administrative as courts, legislatures, and executive departments of government have made and applied rules requiring affirmative action. The other has been the path of public debate, where the practice of preferential treatment has spawned a vast literature, pro and con.

Often enough, the two paths have failed to make adequate contact, with the public quarrels not always very securely anchored in any existing legal basis or practice. The first spike encompassed controversy about gender and racial preferences alike. This is because in the beginning affirmative action was as much about the factory, the firehouse, research paper on affirmative action in college admissions, and the corporate suite as about the college campus.

The second spike represents a quarrel about race and ethnicity. This is because the burning issue at the turn of the twentieth-first century is about college admissions. At selective colleges, women need no boost; African-Americans and Hispanics do.

Inaffirmative action became an inflammatory public issue. But what did this mandate amount to? The Executive Order assigned to the Secretary of Labor the job of specifying rules of implementation.

Through these contractor commitments, the Department could indirectly pressure recalcitrant labor unions, who supplied the employees at job sites. Its predecessor, Order No. At first, university administrators and faculty found the rules of Order No. The number of racial and ethnic minorities receiving PhDs each year and thus eligible for faculty jobs was tiny. Any mandate to increase their representation on campus would require more diligent searches by universities, to be sure, but searches fated nevertheless largely to mirror past results.

Unlike African-Americans and Hispanics, women were getting PhDs in substantial and growing numbers. Some among the professoriate exploded in a fury of opposition to the new rules, while others responded with an equally vehement defense of them. For several decades Anglo-American philosophy had treated moral and political questions obliquely.

First, John Rawls published in A Theory of Justicean elaborate, elegant, and inspiring defense of a normative theory of justice Rawls Properly understood, affirmative action did not require or even permit the use of gender or racial preferences. Affirmative action, if it did not impose preferences outright, at least countenanced them. Among the yea-sayers, opinion divided between those who said preferences were morally permissible and those who said they were not.

The essays by Thomson and Nagel defended the use of preferences but on different grounds. Thomson endorsed job preferences for women and African-Americans as a form of redress for their past exclusion from the academy and the workplace. Preferential policies, in her view, worked a kind of justice.

Nagel, by contrast, argued that preferences might work a kind of social good, and without doing violence to justice. Institutions could for one or another good reason properly depart from standard meritocratic selection criteria because the whole system of tying economic reward to earned credentials was itself indefensible. Justice and desert lay at the heart of subsequent arguments. Preferential hiring seen research paper on affirmative action in college admissions redress looks perverse, they contended, since it benefits individuals African-Americans and women possessing good educational credentials least likely harmed by past wrongs while it burdens individuals younger white male applicants least likely to be responsible for past wrongs Simonresearch paper on affirmative action in college admissions, —19; Sher; Sher81—82; and Goldman—1.

What rights were at issue? Defenders of preferences were no less quick to enlist justice and desert in their cause. Justice and individual desert need not be violated. Likewise, James Rachels defended racial preferences as devices to neutralize unearned advantages by whites. Given the pervasiveness of racial discrimination, it is likely, he argued, that the superior credentials offered by white applicants do not reflect their greater effort, desert, or even ability.

Rather, the credentials reflect their mere luck at being born white. Rachels was less confident than Warren that preferences worked uniformly accurate offsets.

Reverse discrimination might do injustice to some whites; yet its absence would result in injustices to African-Americans who have been unfairly handicapped by their lesser advantages. If racial and gender preferences for jobs or college admissions were supposed to neutralize unfair competitive advantages, they needed to be calibrated to fit the variety of backgrounds aspirants brought to any competition for these goods.

Simply giving blanket preferences to African-Americans or women seemed much too ham-handed an approach if the point was to micro-distribute opportunities fairly Sherff. To many of its critics, reverse research paper on affirmative action in college admissions was simply incoherent.

Neither he nor other critics thought so. Principle must hold firm. Alan Goldman did more than anyone in the early debate to formulate and ground a relevant principle. Using a contractualist framework, he surmised that rational contractors would choose a rule of justice requiring positions to be awarded by competence. On its face, this rule would seem to preclude filling positions by reference to factors like race and gender that are unrelated to competence.

Goldman explained the derivation of the rule and its consequent limit this way:. Where can such an unyielding principle be found? I postpone further examination of this question until I discuss the Bakke case, below, whose split opinions constitute an extended debate on the meaning of constitutional equality.

The terms of the popular debate over racial and gender preferences often mirrored the arguments philosophers and other academics were making to each other. Critics of preferences retorted by pointing to the law.

And well they should, since the text of the Civil Rights Act of seemed a solid anchor even if general principle proved elusive. In face of the plain language of Titles VI and VII, research paper on affirmative action in college admissions, how did preferential hiring and promotion ever arise in the first place? How could they be justified legally? The federal courts had to do that job themselves, and the cases before them drove the definition in a particular direction.

Many factories and businesses prior toresearch paper on affirmative action in college admissions, especially in the South, had in place overtly discriminatory policies and rules. If, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the company willingly abandoned its openly segregative policy, it could still carry forward the effects of its past segregation through other already-existing facially neutral rules.

The objective of Congress in the enactment of Title VII…was to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees.

What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers research paper on affirmative action in college admissions employment when the barriers operate invidiously to exclude on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification. Since many practices in most institutions were likely to be exclusionary, rejecting minorities and women in greater proportion than white men, all institutions needed to reassess the research paper on affirmative action in college admissions range of their practices research paper on affirmative action in college admissions look for, and correct, discriminatory effect.

Against this backdrop, the generic idea of affirmative action took form:, research paper on affirmative action in college admissions. The point of such affirmative action: to induce change in institutions so that they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act. However, suppose this self-monitoring and revising fell short?

In early litigation under the Civil Rights Act, courts concluded that some institutions, because of their histories of exclusion and their continuing failure to find qualified women or minorities, needed stronger medicine. In all these cases, the use of preferences was tied to a single purpose: to prevent ongoing and future discrimination. Courts carved out this justification for preferences not through caprice but through necessity. They found themselves confronted with a practical dilemma that Congress had never envisaged and thus never addressed when it wrote the Civil Rights Act.

The dilemma was this: courts could impose racial preferences to change foot-dragging or inept defendants and by doing so apparently transgress the plain prohibition in Title VII or they could order less onerous steps they knew would be ineffective, thus letting discrimination continue and by doing so violate their duty under Title VII. Reasonably enough, the federal courts resolved this dilemma by appeal to the broad purposes of the Civil Rights Act and justified racial preferences where needed to prevent ongoing and future discrimination.

Thus, preferential affirmative action in the workplace served the same rationale as the non-preferential sort. Its purpose was not to compensate for past wrongs, offset unfair advantage, appropriately reward the deserving, or yield a variety of social goods; its purpose was to change institutions so they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act. In the s, while campuses were embroiled in debate about how to increase African-Americans and women on the faculty, universities were also putting into effect schemes to increase minority presence within the student body.

Very selective universities, in particular, needed new initiatives because only a handful of African-American and Hispanic high school students possessed test scores and grades good enough to make them eligible for admission. These institutions faced a choice: retain their admissions criteria unchanged and live with the upshot—hardly any African-Americans and Hispanics on campus—or fiddle with their criteria to get a more substantial representation.

Most elected the second path. The Medical School of the University of California at Davis exemplified a particularly aggressive approach. It reserved sixteen of the one hundred slots in its entering classes for minorities. In and again inAllan Bakke, a white applicant, was denied admission although his test scores and grades were better than most or all of those admitted through the special program. He sued. Inhis case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakkereached the Supreme Court.

The Court rendered its decision a year later U. An attentive reader of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act might have thought this case was an easy call. So, too, thought four justices on the Supreme Court, who voted to order Bakke admitted to the Medical School.

Led by Justice Stevens, they saw the racially segregated, two-track scheme at the Medical School a recipient of federal funds as a clear violation of the plain language of the Title.

Four other members of the Court, led by Justice Brennan, wanted very keenly to save the Medical School program. To find a more attractive terrain for doing battle, they made an end-run around Title VI, research paper on affirmative action in college admissions, arguing that, whatever its language, it had no independent meaning itself. It meant in regard to race only what the Constitution research paper on affirmative action in college admissions. The Brennan justices persuaded one other member, Justice Powell, to join them in their view of Title VI.

His vote, added to the four votes of the Stevens group, meant that Allan Bakke won his case and that Powell got to write the opinion of the Court. To paraphrase Powell:. Did any or all of them specify a compelling governmental interest? Did they necessitate use of racial preferences?

As to the second reason, Powell allowed it more force. A state has a legitimate interest in ameliorating the effects of past discrimination. Even so, contended Powell, the Court.

And the Medical School does not purport to have made, and is in no position to make, such findings.

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The Graduate Center, The City University of New York Established in , the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) is devoted primarily to doctoral studies and awards most of CUNY's doctoral degrees. An internationally recognized center for advanced studies and a national model for public doctoral education, the Graduate Center offers more than thirty doctoral programs in Nov 15,  · College Life, College Survival, Research Paper Resources Last modified December 10, You’ll most likely be writing a lot of research papers while in college, so it is important to master the skill of finding the right research paper topics Dec 03,  · Texas College Admissions: The Top 10 Percent Law Before Grutter was decided by the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reviewed the race-based admissions policy at Texas