Affirmative Action and Higher Education Essay -- Critical Thinking Essa

Affirmative Action and Higher Education    Two people stand in a room looking at a vibrant painting and receive a totally different image. This is something we all realize can happen. It is our different perspectives that make us valuable too each other. When trying to solve a problem or create a new idea, we need each other to bring forth considerations and concepts that would never occur otherwise. This concept is something most of us grasp in theory, yet it never ceases to confound and confuse us if someone draws a conclusion tangent from ours when presented with the same information. This situation lies at the heart of the argument over affirmative action. Policies that are viewed by some as righting past wrongs are viewed by others as creating a level playing field or even instigating a new phase of unjust discrimination. Part of this confusion is because the range of views not only shifts between people, but also over time. Policies that once appeared to be necessary can, in a few decades, seem excessive. When Justice P owell, along with the rest of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke in 1978, he attempted to give a rational for affirmative action in higher education that did not rely on retribution for one race; however, over time modest progress improving minority representation in schools have combined with the frustrations of a new generation to create a present situation that puts the past's policies under new political and legal scrutiny. When the Bakke decision was handed down it set standards for what affirmative action programs should be like. Specifically, it referred to the Harvard process (Schauer 592), but abstractly it was more gener... ...ronicle. November 5, 1998. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/11/05/MN16107.DTL. National Center for Policy Analysis. "Racial Preferences Don't Help Students Graduate." Idea House. June 11, 1997. http://www.ncpa.org/pd/affirm/pdaa/pdaa12.html. Regents of the University of California. "Text of Resolutions SP-1 and SP-2." Representations Online. Summer 1996. http://violet.berkeley.edu:7000/R55/regents.html. Schauer, Frederick and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. The Philosophy of Law. Harcourt Brace College Publishers: Austin. 1996. Sparks. District Judge. Hopwood v. The State of Texas. August 19, 1994. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/hopwood/hoptxt.htm. Sowell, Thomas. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. "Body Count versus Education." AEI On the Issues. August 1997. http://www.aei.org/oti/oti7919.htm.