Michael Dorf, a constitutional law expert, former law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and professor of law at Cornell University, discusses the Supreme Court’s upcoming review of Michigan’s Proposal 2, which bars race as a factor in admitting university student applicants.
Dorf says:
“The Michigan case presents a superficially easy question. The Supreme Court has held that states are rarely even permitted to engage in race-based affirmative action, so how can a state ballot initiative forbidding such affirmative action be unconstitutional, as the court of appeals held?”
“However, underneath the surface lies the legacy of the civil rights era, when the high court rightly saw that state and local efforts to entrench opposition to remedying race discrimination itself amounted to a kind of race discrimination and de facto disenfranchisement. This case thus affords the Roberts Court yet another opportunity to reverse civil rights-era precedents in the guise of honoring them.”
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Noliwe Rooks, professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University and author of “White Money/Black Power: The History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education,” comments on the Supreme Court’s re-examination of the role of race in college admissions.
Rooks says:
“Since the 1970s, Affirmative Action programs and policies have done more to level the playing field and make entry into the middle class possible for women and underrepresented minorities than has any other single government program or policy.
“There is simply no other political program that has such widespread support from so many quarters of American society and yet so little support amongst our citizenry, given that only about a third of American citizens support it. It is one of those issues – like ending slavery in the 19th century, voting rights for women in the 1920s and civil rights during the 1960s – that will never win an American Idol-style popularity contest, but is nonetheless the right thing to do for the country as a whole. “Such disparate voices from across the political aisle as Barack and Michele Obama, Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell are unequivocal when they say that without it they would not have risen to the heights they did. Some in the U.S. military say that a diverse military is a national security issue, over half of the members of the top Fortune 100 companies say that abolishing Affirmative Action would hamper their ability to compete globally, and top public and private universities say that the program makes it possible for them to train a diverse citizenry for leadership and entrepreneurial opportunity. How can something that almost the whole of our leadership class says is necessary for them to compete globally not be more universally embraced? “Ending Affirmative Action would, in the name of fairness, harm the whole in order to ease the conscience of the few.”
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