Save Affirmative Action in Education!

The US Supreme Court is currently deciding on the future of affirmative action in America. Most people around the world know about US affirmative action in education, and some (including my fellow students from a university law course) will know about its beginnings in the 1950s with the court case "Brown vs Board of Education". Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who wanted to study in her home state university, recently took the case to court following a rejection, on what she (or her lawyers) argued was a constitutionally unfair result following a university's attempt to fulfill race quotas.

I find this affirmative action case worrying for two reasons. First, take a stroll on Harvard square, as I did last week. 95 % of students are white. 4 % are Asian. There may be one or two black people. I'm sure the statistic is slightly more favorable on paper, but this was my impression. A professor at Harvard told me that the case is even more striking among professors. Out of 200 professors in his school, only one is black. (Very few are women).

Second, I think the case illustrates our current times. Professors and teachers are becoming open about their criticism to the "problems of heterogeneity". Just two days ago, I had to listen to our children's' international school's management sight about "those people who do not understand our language". And they are saying this to me, a foreigner here in Germany!

Does this mean that affirmative action has been a failure? No, it means that university's and school's find loopholes to select their preferred candidates. Was it Yale or Princeton that introduced personal interviews after WWII to ensure that Jewish students are practically banned from selection? It's hypocritical PR to select one black and Asian student to ensure that photo-ops present a "ethnically heterogeneous" student body, and behind their backs bicker about "cultural problem cases".

The root causes of racial inequality in education go much deeper than university admissions. But to give up "up" here at the university level is worrying, especially as the education levels below, with school busing and vouchers and whatnot is an utter mess.