Like co-conspirator David Bernstein, I think it wasn't unreasonable for Justice Clarence Thomas to believe that he got into Yale Law School without the aid of affirmative action. It is important to remember that Thomas was in the top two percent of his undergraduate class at Holy Cross. When I was a student at Yale Law School in the 1990s, I had numerous white classmates who had gotten in by virtue of being in the top 1-2 percent at undergraduate institutions of the same caliber as Holy Cross, and in some cases ones significantly less prestigious. Admittedly, I don't have any aggregate statistics; but I certainly met quite a few such students during my time at YLS. I was able to meet a significant percentage of the other students at YLS at the time, due to the school's small size; so the people I met were probably a roughly representative sample of the YLS student body. Most of the white YLS students from non-elite undergrad institutions did not have anything in their backgrounds comparable to Thomas' inspirational story of growing up in poverty in a broken home (Thomas' father left his family when he was an infant, and Thomas was raised by his grandfather).
Assuming that Thomas had a good LSAT score, the combination of his record at Holy Cross and his life story might well have been enough to get him admitted to YLS were he white. Based on my observations, he might have gotten in on that basis in the 1990s - a time when admissions standards were probably slightly higher than in the 1970s because by that point Yale had regained its standing as the generally acknowledged no. 1 law school (a position it had arguably lost to Harvard in the 70s).
As liberal constitutional law scholar Mark Tushnet documents in this article, Thomas' opposition to affirmative action is not based on the view that it is intrinsically unjust to whites, but on his belief that it does blacks more harm than good in the aggregate. For reasons I discussed in detail here, it therefore would not be unethical for Thomas to benefit from affirmative action while personally opposing it. In fact, however, it is possible that Thomas had good reason to believe that he might have gotten to YLS even without the benefit of affirmative action. If that conjecture is right, then affirmative action was a net loss for him in that phase of his career (though it probably helped him later in the Reagan Administration). Its existence led potential employers and others to doubt his abilities, without helping him to get into Yale.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Clarence Thomas, Yale Law School, and Affirmative Action:
- Did Justice Thomas Know He Was Admitted to Yale Because of His Race:
- Frank Rich, Clarence Thomas, and the Missouri Assistant Attorney General:
The point that all this bemoaning of Affirmative Action seems to completely overlook is that if there had been no affirmative action as there was none for over 100 years after slavery (oh I guess there will be someone who will talk Reconstruction as being affirmative action in this discussion - whatever), the number of African-Americans in any predominantly or historically white law school or top law school would have been zero or maybe one every blue moon (as it had been in the past). The same would have been true for Hispanics, Native-Americans, maybe to a lesser extent for Asians, but certainly for white women. The reason is that, absent any political will to change, the status quo would have remained as it was - keeping minorities, particularly blacks, out.
The thing that seems to escape many of you is that excellently prepared blacks simply were not admitted to majority law schools. Does anyone here remember the experience of Thurgood Marshall with the University of Maryland?
And when we step back to the high school etc schools, particularly the private schools like the Sidwell Friends in Washington DC, the Carteret School in West Orange, New Jersey etc, as I have said before, the anti-black racism was profoundly intense to keep blacks out. I walked you through all that in other posts. I was there as were my parents. I know precisely of what I speak. I mean I am the son of a U.S. Foreign Service Office having a hard time being allowed to go to these schools. If you can not see just how vicious anti-black racism was then, then you are just in denial.
For law schools, what changed is that in 1960-61 there were admissions officers at top white law schools like Columbia and Yale and Harvard who came to the realization that it was absolutely essential for this country to have more black lawyers. I know one of them Frank Walwer who was Associate Dean of Admissions at Columbia back then and he told me the story. You can see that in my article, "The Color Line in International Commercial Arbitration: An American Perspective" in the American Review of International Arbitration in 2004 at Columbia.
Walwer and the other Associate Deans went about increasing numbers slowly but surely. This was way before affirmative action (a Nixon creation) was even on the table.
If you deny the 100 odd years from slavery and all the benefits given to generations of whites who had parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who were permitted to go through the feeder schools to these prestigious institutions etc, then you are just masking way too much of the history.
Of course, Justice Thomas was a beneficiary of a racial preference - both at Holy Cross and Yale. Why? Because he is black and those schools rarely if ever had blacks in them until there was a commitment made to add more blacks than had ever been at these schools in their history.
Those who say - oh he would have been admitted - simply forget that blacks WERE NOT ADMITTED - PERIOD. That is the essence of it - except maybe one every 20 to 40 years.
I see my classes here where I teach and that need to have more minority lawyers remains essential.
As to guilt feelings of anyone who has received some kind of preference, that reminds me of what I say to students who have a friend in the business somewhere. I tell them to use whatever they have to help them get where they want to go, because everyone else is using whatever they have.
People lay trips on you all the time. If you allow people to lay trips on you about affirmative action, then you are allowing yourself to be played. The thing to do is to do your best. Before affirmative action, there was something else about being black or a woman or something. If just goes with the territory. If you feel really guilty about it, then quit your profession and do something that does not use the degree.
Sorry. Clarence Thomas is free to bemoan affirmative action all he wants as are others. I will always say I am grateful for those persons of many colors who took the chance on me at every step of the way from first grade up through Harvard Business School. I am a beneficiary of affirmative action and I greatly appreciate the opening up of a very closed society that affirmative action permitted for me. I feel absolutely no guilt about it. I just try to do the best I can with what I have.
Peace,
Ben
Just like libertarians working at state funded schools.
I will only note 2 things:
1. There is nothing in this post "bemoaning affirmative action" - a policy that I am not categorically opposed to, and that I believe private institutions such as YLS should be free to pursue. I do not agree with Thomas' view that AA has done blacks vastly more harm than good (though AA defenders, I believe, greatly overestimate its benefits).
2. There is an obvious difference between ending discrimination against minorities (which many schools practiced prior to the 1960s) and instituting affirmative action or other preferences in their favor. Absent affirmative action, there would be many fewer members of some groups at top schools, but there certainly would be more than "zero or maybe one every blue moon."
Exactly right, though the reasoning in the two cases is slightly different. See my post on that subject here.
It is the difference between equal opportunity and equal results. It is not a privilege or a preference to not discriminate against someone - to assign no meaning to race, ethnicity, or gender. It is a privilege (or discrimination, depending on which side you are on) to use preferences in admissions.
For fun: the median LSAT for Yale's class of 2010 is a 173; the median GPA is a 3.89. (Data are from Yale's admissions site.) While we can barely even speculate on how those numbers compare to the 1970s, it does not seem strange that someone in the top 2% of his class at a reputable school, with a strong LSAT score, would be admitted.
You make some interesting points, but I'm confused as to what argument you believe yourself to be addressing. Do you believe you're describing affirmative action?
This is better understood as passive action in contrast to the previous policy of negative action -- i.e., previously some were automatically barred on the basis of race, religion, etc. when in fact none should be barred if they are capable of meeting a set of uniformly-applied standards.
Contrawise, affirmative action carries the baggage of quotas and meeting them, with the possibility that someone who has not met the uniformly-applied standards will be un-barred anyway on the basis of race, relgion, etc.
In some cases it is. But not in all cases. I think, given roughly comparable grades and test scores (or even slightly lower ones), most admissions officers would give preference to an applicant who had grown up in poverty or other adversity over one who had not.
Thus, the applicants are not at the same starting point.
What I find interesting is that George Bush clealry benefited from affirmative action for children of alums and donors and for people who went to prep school, but clearly he does not feel that it was a bad thing for him; he sent one daughter to Yale &certainly having a dad who was Governor of Texas/President of the United States was a plus in the admissions process.
And Bill Clinton may have gotten a bit of an edge in getting into Yale because he was from Arkansas.
1. What we might call racial disaffirmation -- keeping out qualified black applicants.
2. Admitting qualified applicants without regard to race.
What you have described at elite schools in 1960-61 could have been (2.)
It might or might not have been (3.) -- admitting underqualified applicants because of race.
(Of course, (1.) can also be described as (3.) for white applicants. There was certainly a lot of that going on.)
The most admirable policy would be the middle way -- (2.)
Or maybe because he had been a top student at Georgetown and was a Rhodes Scholar. Those are difficult credentials to see around.
I can't speak for law school admissions because I don't know, but as far as undergraduate admissions at Universities like Yale and Harvard, the process is stacked against residents of Arkansas (indeed much of the midwest) because of geographic preferences in the admissions process.
Of course, legacy preferences for George Bush were much stronger than legacy preferences today, so I am not really answering your question. I suppose that at the time when Bush attended Yale, most of his classmates were from similar prep school backgrounds, so he was not part of some underqualified groups who had received special preferences.
Any evidence for this?, that's one hell of a claim.
That's a bit like saying that the 19th amendment was only intended to help women, so therefore a state could deny males the right to vote without violating it.
As for Clinton, no reason to think that his Arkansas background mattered in his case. (Geographical diversity at Yale Law School in the late '60s?) He was, afterall, a Rhodes Scholar, and that still means something. Ethically challenged perhaps, but definitely smarter than those who needed some help to get in where they were admitted.
If he submitted a race-neutral application most people would STILL see him as an affirmative-action admit. So he is expected to subvert the system by purposefully hiding his race and eschew the benefits of affirmative action while suffering all its ill-effects.
I'll concede the point because I can't now find the source I was thinking of.
Basically, it described admissions policies for Harvard that set recommended numbers of students for each area of the country, and of these numbers a significant higher percentage were reserved for residents of the Northeast, and In particular students at some of the well known prepatory schools. Whereas a similar number was allocated to several states in the middle of the country.
As I said I cannot presently find this source, and it may have been speaking historically, but I have the distinct memory it implied this existed to the present.
In it's place, I would note that that of the actual class it appears 47% come from the Mid Atlantic or New England areas
Arkansas is AR, not AK, that's Alaska.
Because the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment addresses the subject squarely: nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Had the Framers wanted only to end discrimination against blacks, they would have said, "nor deny any black person the equal protection of the laws."
Perhaps some originalists/strict constructionalists may disagree, but I don't think that original intent should trump the plain meaning, esp. when the plain meaning gives an entirely different reading. One of the canons of original intent is that the Framers meant what they said.
Are people still arguing about that sort of thing?
Look, you own a house and you take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction. Butas a matter of public policy you believe that such deduction is a bad idea and should be abolished. Are you a "hypocrite" for taking the deduction? No way. If/when public policy changes you'll follow the law.
Much as I dislike Thomas, it's childish to argue that he is a hypocrite etc etc because he took advantage of a law which applies to all even though he doesn't agree with it.
So as a general rule people should be allowed to ignore laws they don't agree with? That would be the inverse.
If he submitted a race-neutral application most people would STILL see him as an affirmative-action admit. So he is expected to subvert the system by purposefully hiding his race and eschew the benefits of affirmative action while suffering all its ill-effects."
I didn't claim they should opt out. I simply suggest they should have that option should they choose it.
As far as people thinking thay are AA, having the transcript and diploma marked NON-AA would allow the person to demonstrate to people who mattered that he was a NON-AA. These might include prospective employers.
The way we currently operate, some minorities are denied the opportunity to compete head-to-head with the best. That sure sounds like the bigotry of low expectations. No matter what they have accomplished, and no matter how hard they have worked, we still don't think they can handle the big leagues.
And there is no reason for the applicant to hide his race. He can stand up on his two feet and say he is a black man, is ready to compete head-to-head with the competition, and wants no racial preferences. That's what the Asian minorities do.
Those would be the same areas where are located Exeter, Andover, St. Pauls, Choate, Groton, Deerfield, Lawrence, Milton, Loomis, and many other elite boarding schools, that have long been "feeder" schools to the Ivies; as well as a great many elite day schools in and around Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, Washington, etc., and decidedly superior public schools in and around those same cities. Those are also areas with socioeconomic stats, of the sort that so closely correlate with college admissions, like wealth, percentage of college graduates, etc., tend to be considerably higher than AR and some of the rest of the "middle" of this country. (Stanford, not so bad a school, most likely has a greater percentage of students from west of the Mississippi than does Harvard and the other Ivies. And a lesser proportion of students from AR than from states like CA and WA.)
I don't know what you read, but I think you must have drawn some very mistaken inferences from whatever it was. I can't imagine Harvard worrying that it would wind up with too many students from AR, though they and the other Ivies certainly worried that if they didn't factor in "geographic diversity" and admitted too many on the basis of academic merit alone, they would wind up with too many from NY, and pari passu too many Jews.
When I was applying to college, I did not feel in the least advantaged to be doing so from the Mid-Atlantic, if only because there were so many highly competitive students around me. And I don't think our children were in any advantaged either, except as they benefitted from growing up in the sort of community that sends many of its children to those elite schools. It would have been an advantage to be applying from AR. (And Harvard takes home-schooled students too.)
[PS: Would the best time to see Lexington in all of its glory be about two weeks from now?]
(*) Unless that mention was left out of the index of my edition of the book; I'm certainly not going to re-read the entire book to find any mention of Bakke.
(Mea cupla! I was on autopilot.)
Leaves are starting to turn. As a native New Englander, I just don't think that Virginia can compare, so "all of its glory" is still a bit lackluster, IMHO. My guess, though, would be this coming weekend (12th - 14th) or the following.
This always irks me since I am a graduate of Holy Cross in the same era. I can absolutely state that his admission was not an act of affirmative action, but of fulfilling a mission of education Catholics. (It used to be educating Catholic men, mostly Irish Catholic men for historical reasons, but it is now both men and women.)
Clarence Thomas had already been in a seminary and his academic potential was well known. He was referred to Holy Cross because it is an intellectually rigorous Jesuit college, not because it had a quota for black students. The first graduate of the school, James Augustine Healy, would have qualified as "black" under today's standards. He was born on a Georgia plantation in 1830 to a slave woman. Four of his brothers also attended and his brother Patrick was the first black Ph.D. in the country.
Granted, since he had an Irish name, you might also consider him Irish, but the legacy of admitting bright students who also happen to be black is strong at the College.
I graduated several years before Justice Thomas. The College always had a good relationship with Ivy League graduate and professional schools and it was not unusual for a top graduate to go to Harvard or Yale. In those days Catholic men (the Kennedy family being an exception) with good academic standing in high school went to Notre Dame, Georgetown, Holy Cross, Boston College, or Fordham. The church made it very clear that it frowned upon non-Catholic schools.
To say that Justice Thomas was a beneficiary of AA is misreading history, at least at Holy Cross, and if he had the chops at the College (you did not get a free pass there academically, no matter who you were), then he was qualified for Yale Law school. If Yale took his race into consideration (a reasonable assumption) it only added to what he already had.
I don't pretend that this is representative of most AA students. But it does happen.
Last time I looked, the general Ivy admissions broke down as follows:
1. academic admits
2. affirmative action
3. legacy
4. sports
Of the four groups, AA admits were the second most qualified, yet everyone seems to act as if they belong in a special category 5.
In general, through the 1990s they were better qualified than the legacy admits. I don't know how things are in the 2000s, I suspect that the legacies are gaining on them.
It helps in becoming a Rhodes Scholar to be from a small state, much like it helps in getting into a military academy.
Just FYI
Thurgood Marshall was a leading Supreme Court advocate during the middle third of the twentieth century--the field general of the litigation component of the movement for civil rights and racial equality. He subsequently served as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, and as Solicitor General--the third ranking position at the Department of Justice--at the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court.
Since Justice Marshall's appointment, seven presidents have submitted twenty-one nominees for forteen Supreme Court vacancies. For thirteen of those vacancies and twenty of those nominees, no black person appears to have received serious, "short list" consideration. In other words, blacks need not have applied to succeed to any seat not vacated by the resignation or death of a white justice.
Clarence Thomas had moved up through the Republican ranks by being a toady, first to John Danforth and then to George Herbert Walker Bush. Because of affirmative action, Judge Thomas was nominated to succeed a civil rights giant, whose briefcase Thomas would have been unworthy to tote. When his confirmation was in doubt, however, Clarence Uncle Thomas was quick to play the race card--invoking the spectre of lynching--when all he was accused of was trash talking to another member of his own race and boasting of the size of his appendage, and all he had at risk was the denial of a promotion within the judicial ranks. A "high-tech lynching", indeed!
As a justice, Clarence Thomas has been mediocre. As a man, he is quite loathsome.
1. We don't know if Thomas was helped by affirmative action in getting into Yale without knowing his LSAT scores.
2. The 14th Amendment contains a clause that expressly authorizes Congress to pass laws to enforce its provisions:
Section. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
As I vaguely recall from my Con Law class many years ago, there is a very respectable view that this provision was intended to authorize Congress to pass remedial legislation to help the freed slaves economically and in other ways akin to affirmative action. NOTE to NeuroDoc: While you are right that the "framers" were the ones who enacted the original constitution in 1789, I believe the poster is referring to the persons who drafted and passed the 14th Amendment following the end of the Civil War as the "Framers" of that amendment.
Thomas got into Yale due to affirmative action. Alas, this hard-working an brilliant mans efforts were devalued, due to the "stigma" of affirmative action. Luckily, it all turned out ok. By hard work, luck and the fact he went to Yale, Thomas became a Justice on the SCOTUS. How does this show that affirmative action is bad?
The Left's view makes even less sense:
Thomas, a lying ingrate, has affirmative action to thank for his lofty position. As a result of affirmative action we now have an angry, misogynist with a second class intellect on the SCOTUS. How does this show that affirmative action is good?
Errr... do you have stats? My understanding is that, at most schools, legacy admits have SATs that are within 20 points of non-legacy admits. My alma mater, last I checked, has a negligible difference. Likewise, for non-DI schools, sports admits are on par with their peers. In many ways, it is not a good comparison to compare athletes with non-athletes, as the latter have more time to study during the day.