Politics: Bush's record on African Americans
From the DNC web page. My favorite part:
Bush appeals to misleading, racially loaded "quota" fears to justify opposition to affirmative action. When Bush announced that he would oppose the University of Michigan in its case before the Supreme Court, he inaccurately said Michigan's admissions policies "amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race." The New York Times reported that Bush chose the racially charged word "quota" because of the negative reaction the word elicits in polls.
For those of you who don't know much about the UofM policy, nothing even remotely resembling a 'quota' existed. Also, no part of the admissions policy penalized anyone for their race.
3 comments:
it would be interesting to see demographic information for the past 10 years or so and see how similar the numbers are. numbers for the medical and law school are probably more revealing because of the smaller classes and the greater possibility of fluctuation. my money is on a relatively constant percentage of racial groups in each year. just because no one is stupid to make an official policy using the word "quota" it doesn't mean quotas don't exist. michigan cleverly uses the term "critical mass".
mikey
Did you ever even read the system? If ANYTHING, one COULD say (which Bush did) that the Michigan system rewarded people unfairly for their race. I think it's ridiculous to say that, necessarily, someone was thus punished for their race--someone could and will make the argument, but I simply don't think it holds.
A quota system is typically a system which is coercive and instituted by an external body, which isn't the case here. Given the the fact that connotation and denotation ARE important aspects of language, I have to entirely disagree that 'critical mass' and 'quotas,' the way the public views these words, are wildly different ideas and thus incomparable.
Given a sufficiently large population with an 'objective' (whether that objectivity was fair or not is another argument altogether) criteria--and the point system was objective, if flawed--of course the statistics are going to look approximately the same. I doubt that in 1983 that 20% smarter black kids were born. For instance, the ratio of male to female doesn't change much in a ten year period either, and I don't think you'd say that's the result of a quota system, but the simple imposition of an objective criteria on a sufficiently large population.
dude i already mentioned how the main college would have similar numbers due to the sheer size. that's why i said it would be interesting to look at law and med schools, which is more prone to annual fluctuations if there wasn't a LOOSELY predetermined quota system in place. and i disagree with your assertion that critical mass is not simply a euphemism for quota, and there are quite a few supreme court justices who feel the same way.
what's the point again? anyway, i'm not saying affirmative action is wrong. i'm just saying it's not fair. if people would just admit that admissions is not an inherently fair or merit based process then i would shut up. :)
mikey
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