Discrimination and Racial Quotas

It is very likely that Timothy Maguire did not, in fact, bother to get his facts straight when he accused the Georgetown University law school of “admissions apartheid” for admitting black students with lower average Law School Admissions Test scores and lower grade point averages than those for white students. As Page points out in his article, factors other than scores and grades are often used to judge the qualifications of candidates for school admissions (and the qualifications of candidates for job hiring and promotions in the workplace).

Maguire is in trouble with the Black Law Students Assn. for citing confidential records. It is the confidentiality of records like the ones in question, however, that leads to a perception of affirmative action in school admissions as a “quota system,” and a perception that promotions and hirings in the workplace are often legally sanctioned discrimination made on the sole basis of race. It was secrecy that led to a perception of Quayle’s law school admission as a case of “buying one’s way in.”

Since other valid and rational criteria are being used to support admissions, the whole process for each student deserves to be publicly aired and defended. I and many others have spent careers defending the principle of equal treatment for all, a principle not inconsistent with affirmative action. We do not wish to see misunderstandings of admissions, hiring and promotion policies pit race against race, and undo the substantial progress toward equality made over the past 25 years. Since the criterion by which students and others are evaluated in this life does not constitute the “dirty little secrets” that some have called it, let’s bring the whole issue into the open. Let’s explain publicly why some are chosen and some are not.

DON WILSON, Los Angeles