SOUNDING BOARD is an outlet for opinions on good and crazy things going on at home (wherever I may be). All are welcome. You are not expected to bring anything except your common sense & sense of humor.
'If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.'
-Robert X. Cringely (from geek wisdom)
SOUNDING BOARD
Friday, January 17, 2003
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A critical affirmation of affirmative action
President George W. Bush called the University of Michigan's admissions policies as fundamentally flawed and resolved to challenge it before the Supreme Court. President Bush was particularly referring to the university's policies that award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race and establish numerical targets for incoming minority students. Read the full text of his speech.
As this is one of the most contentious debates in international politics, it is necessary to define affirmative action and its implications.
Cahn (The Affirmative Action Debate. 1995. New York: Routledge, Inc., p. xi) defines affirmative action as “taking appropriate steps to eradicate the then widespread practices of racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination”. Newman (Affirmative Action and the Courts. In: F.A. Blanchard and F.J. Crosby, eds. Affirmative Action in Perspective. 1989. New York: Springer-Verlag., p. 32) makes specific reference to affirmative action as “… any race- or sex-conscious employment practices devised with the intention of redressing past racial or gender imbalances and injustices”. Taylor (Reverse Discrimination and Compensatory Justice. In: S.M. Cahn, ed. The Affirmative Action Debate. 1995. New York: Routledge, Inc., p. 9-14) characterizes these measures as reverse discrimination and compensatory justice “carried out by organized agencies of the central government representing the whole people”. The underlying assumption here is that societal injustice can only be corrected by societal compensation.
These definitions share important attributes, namely: (1) society has committed discrimination in the past against a particular group of population; (2) government has adopted an objective of eradicating discrimination; and (3) society needs to take appropriate steps to end discriminatory practices and correct the imbalances that resulted from past discrimination.
These “correction” processes done in the past decades necessitated governments to implement programs that favor a particular population group. This is done by implementing focused programs with targets or quota on skills training, school admissions, employment, military service and public service (Newman, J., 1989. Affirmative Action and the Courts. In: F.A. Blanchard and F.J. Crosby, eds. Affirmative Action in Perspective. 1989. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 35-42). These are the outputs of affirmative action. Thus, for those directly favored by affirmative action programs, we would expect to see an overall increase over time in skills training, school admissions, and employment levels, among others. The experiences of the United States in past decades seem to be consistent with this expectation (Stephanopolous and Edley 1995).
In addition to the rationale presented above, what we should not neglect is the transitory nature of affirmative action programs. It is always necessary to have goals and timetables to correct imbalances, and reviewed periodically. However, one thing should be clear --- whether in the name of affirmative action or not, decisions to give benefits to unqualified over qualified individuals is unconstitutional.
posted by Allan at 2:45 PM (GMT+8)
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