Affirmative action necessary in flawed system

BY SUSANNAH RUTHERGLEN

Things don't look good for affirmative action in American universities. Last month, a federal appeals court told the University of Georgia that its admissions policy, which gives a numerical preference to non-white applicants, is unconstitutional. And during the past several years, affirmative action policies have died at the hands of appeals court judges in Michigan, California, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

JENNIFER BARTA/YH

There is something fundamentally wrong with this war over whether or not affirmative action should exist—the battle has nothing to do with affirmative action itself. We're at a point today where most of us agree that "diversity"—going to school with people of different experiences and perspectives—is a goal worth pursuing.

But after this point in the discussion, we go astray. Instead of addressing the deep problems that make diversity so hard to achieve these days, we attack the attempted remedy. We criticize affirmative action, without pondering the highly flawed system that necessitated it in the first place.

That system can be seen through a lot of lenses, but I'll go with my favorite: the SAT. At the University of Georgia, as at many large public universities, the test is an "objective" yardstick by which every applicant is judged blindly. Yet the SAT is really an emblem for the way American education has gone wrong. It is deeply, essentially corrupt: even the Educational Testing Service, which writes the test, has admitted that it discriminates against the poor and minorities.

The SAT discriminates in two ways. First, as some Yale students will surely attest, it isn't difficult to buy one's way into the 1400s if one has the necessary funds, be it for Kaplan courses or vocabulary drills. Secondly, and more profoundly, the test is written in the quite specific idiom of the Western educational tradition.

Everybody knows that a certain kind of education in our country—perhaps at a small, rigorous school where Shakespeare and Euclidean geometry are taught—will trump any Kaplan course. Access to this type of education has always been eminently more available to white and affluent students than to anyone else.

No one is asking the ETS to write the SAT in Spanish or Ebonics, or to eliminate elements of the Western canon from its repertoire. But the test is so blatantly discriminatory that it begs for redress. In a past version, for example, the test included the word "regatta," a stock item perhaps in the vocabulary of a boy from Newport, but not perhaps in that of an inner-city Los Angeles student.

In 1971, Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court issued yet another powerful challenge to the SAT. He argued that it clothes coarse predictions in deceptively precise numbers. "The numbers create an illusion of difference tending to overwhelm other factors," he wrote.

This "illusion of difference" that Jane with her 1250 is smarter than Joe with his 1240 is a creature of the standardized test's own pretensions: it fancies itself a scientific lab instrument, dispensing predictions about performance that are utterly empirical and precise. Of course, it does no such thing.

Understandably, the goal of admissions preferences has always been to circumvent rather than to attack head-on this deceptive and unjust means of judging aptitude. Admissions offices "cover up" the scores of students who best show up the test's prejudices. They try not to challenge the SAT, because that might also involve challenging the entire system by which we learn and teach, and by which we define academic achievement.

But maybe it's time to do just that. If we're so intent on criticizing affirmative action, perhaps we should spend at least a little time thinking about what it addresses.

The issue that affirmative action attempted to address was, and to a large extend remains, our collective failure to give millions of poor and minority students the resources they need to learn. That's a scary thought. It might lead us to chuck the SAT altogether, to devote much more time and money to public schools, to focus on urban development.

I would like to think that opponents of affirmative action are gunning for exactly this kind of solution. They insist that admissions preferences do nothing to promote diversity, so surely they have some broad and brilliant plans for how we might better do so. Do those plans involve more and better educational opportunities for minorities, or do they involve the word "regatta"? 

Susannah Rutherglen is a junior in Trumbull.

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