Thank You
A link to
"Living with Quotas"
has been emailed to your friends.Most E-mailed articles:
Abstract –
SEVERAL MONTHS ago, former President Gerald Ford spoke to a politicalscience class at my university. During the question period that followed he was asked for his views on the Bakke case, and replied that he was op- posed to "arbitrary numerical quotas." Thereupon the class broke into what the local newspaper termed "vociferous applause."
A few days later I was interviewed by a young journalist who thought the story might be worth pursuing. He had himself been so disbelieving of the original press account that he had sought out and listened to the tape made during the former President's appearance. Sure enough, he told me, the applause had been enthusiastic, so much so that he would describe it as turbulent. He was dumbfounded. Is that what the students really felt? At Michigan-of all places-the founding campus of SDS? What did it mean? Was I as surprised as he was? I told him I would not have expected the students to have made public their private feelings, but was not at all surprised by the direction and intensity of those feelings; that most students in my experience have come to despise "affirmative action" because of the double standards it imposed, and which victimized them; furthermore, that most of the faculty I knew were equally scornful because of the duplicities these programs have come to involve; and that to my certain knowledge many in the administration hoped, in private, that the Court would hold for Bakke and thus rescue them from their own cant. And that, I said, was the story he ought to write. He ought to reflect upon his own surprise, and recognize that the press had made almost no effort to discover whether racial-preference programs-after nearly a decade in place-had in fact fulfilled their promises, and what faculty and students now thought about them. Why such indifference to reality? What was at work, I suggested, was a strong wish not to know, to sustain a state of self-deception.
© 2010 Commentary Inc.
