On Affirmative Action

Finding guidance in the words of two great American Adamses

Affirmative Action

ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Finding guidance in the words of two great American Adamses

Nandini Patwardhan

---

Editors’ note: The Supreme Court will issue its decision about Affirmative Action in the coming days. At issue is (1) Whether the Supreme Court should overrule Grutter v. Bollinger and hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions; and (2) whether Harvard College is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by penalizing Asian American applicants, engaging in racial balancing, overemphasizing race and rejecting workable race-neutral alternatives. In anticipation of SCOTUS’s ruling, we present this proposal for a reimagined Affirmative Action from a regular JFBT contributor.

---

John Adams (1735–1826), the second president of the Unites States, wrote to a friend:

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

A later Adams, James Truslow Adams (1878–1949), coiner of the term “American Dream,” wrote in an article:

There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.

I love the above quotes by these two American Adamses because they provide inspiration and clarity for moving forward as we await the Supreme Court’s decision on Affirmative Action (AA).

I believe there is a continued need for AA. However, I also believe that it needs to be implemented so that it is targeted to reach in and sweep up the people who have been egregiously left behind despite the last several decades of AA.

Here are my proposals for an AA for the twenty-first century. The criteria I propose envision AA as a combination of reparations for past injustices and investment in the country’s future:

1.      Only American citizens who are descendants of enslaved people (ADOS) and descendants of Native Americans should be eligible.

2.      The parents or grandparents of all other groups came to the US willingly and stayed willingly. They and their descendants are not owed any special considerations—reparations, reward, or investment. Note that this criterion would exclude the children of black immigrants who, by some estimates, currently comprise as much as two-thirds of Harvard's black student cohort. This directly eats into opportunities available to ADOS and Native American students who should be the first priority of a new and improved AA.

3.      AA should be based on socio-economic class. Only children of families that earn less than a certain multiple of the US median income should be eligible. Note that this criterion would exclude the likes of President Obama’s daughters.

4.      AA should be like a magic key that works just once. A candidate should not be able to use the key if his/her parents or grandparents used it. A given candidate should be able to use the AA magic key just once in his or her education and career journey. It may be used at the undergraduate level, or the graduate level, or for the first job—not for more than one of these entry points.

5.      In addition to AA in accordance with the above criteria, there should be no more legacy admissions preferences.

6.      There should also be no more sports-based admissions preferences. Eliminating preferences for legacies and athletes will (a) maximize the opportunities for the target group and (b) focus on their academic / career empowerment. These priorities must always remain front-and-center if we are to even the playing field.       

7.      AA should mean more than getting one’s foot in the door. The burden of the high cost of education falls more heavily on students whose families have lower incomes. So, every student (AA-eligible and otherwise) who graduates with a STEM major should get their college cost fully or partially reimbursed. This is a way to address the country’s chronic shortage of STEM workers while also incentivizing students to prepare for and choose STEM majors. The icing on the cake is that these professions are more lucrative.

8.      College entrance is far too late to give a leg up to AA-eligible students. Programs should be implemented that start as early as first grade. One idea might be to assign a federally funded mentor for pods of 3-4 students each. This mentor will work with the pod all the way through K-12, fostering an academic coaching and mentoring relationship that goes beyond both Big Brothers/Sisters (and similar programs) or subject-level tutoring. Retirees like me (and others who volunteer for SCORE and similar organizations) are looking for opportunities to be useful that don't require a full-time commitment. Hire us to be the grand-mentors for these youngsters. 

9.      The original rationale for AA was two-pronged: (1) no quotas and (2) selecting the AA candidate when that candidate was one of several roughly equally prepared candidates. The new AA framework would return to this rationale. Since AA students will have received active support and can therefore be expected to be adequately prepared, each year every interested / motivated AA student should be guaranteed a spot in a college that best matches his or her preferences in terms of location, choice of major, and preparedness index (SAT or something else). Such an implementation will make it possible for AA students to avoid “mismatch” and enroll in the college where they are most likely to succeed.

The new and improved implementation of AA should not compromise on merit and excellence. It should focus on developing competence and mastery along with perseverance, resilience, and self-regulation.

Finally, it is important to remember that having the privilege of doing work of one’s choosing and achieving to one’s fullest potential is not guaranteed to happen in one’s own lifetime. It may take generations, as John Adams recognized so well in the eighteenth century:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

In that spirit, the new and improved AA framework should put students on the path to self-realization, not automatically at the pinnacle of it. They will start the journey and because they have been empowered to do so, their children or their children’s children will be more likely to reach the peak of achievement.

As in the quotation from James Truslow Adams, above, the new AA framework should make it possible for our most left-behind fellow citizens to learn both how to make a living and how to live.

And, as in the quotation from John Adams, above, ultimately, AA is not just about these beleaguered citizens individually. It is about our democracy and it is about what kind of society we want to live in.

---

Nandini Patwardhan is originally from India but has now lived in the US for four decades and currently resides on Oakland, California. She is a retired software engineer and a passionate nonfiction writer, whose work was awarded the San Francisco Press Club Award in 2020 and 2021. Her 2020 biography of Anandi Joshee (1865–1887), titled Radical Spirits: India's First Woman Doctor and Her American Champions, won the Benjamin Franklin Award in Biography. She has published with Journal of Free Black Thought here, here, here, and here. A version of this essay previously appeared on her Substack. Follow her on Twitter and visit her website.