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Volume CXXXII, Number 18 |
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Bowdoin files brief in favor of affirmative action
JONATHAN PEREZ
STAFF WRITER
Joining 27 other liberal arts colleges, Bowdoin filed a Friend of the Court Brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the role of affirmative action and its place in the college admissions process. Such colleges as Middlebury, Amherst, Oberlin, Wesleyan and Swarthmore filed the brief in response to last December's widely publicized University of Michigan case.
Described as one of "the most significant civil rights cases" of the last 25 years by the NAACP, the case was filed on behalf of two caucasian undergraduate applicants who felt that the University of Michigan denied them spots in their respective classes while minority students of similar academic standing were given positions. The cases argued that current admission policies violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law and represented a form of "reverse discrimination." Making it to the Supreme Court, the cases were voted 5-4 against the University, claiming quota procedures as unconstitutional.
As a response, the current brief being filed states that "private, highly-selective colleges have a compelling educational interest in enrolling highly diverse-including racially diverse-classes, and cannot do so without taking the diversity they strive for into account."
According to an interview with the Bowdoin Sun, President Mills finds a community committed to a "socio-economically, racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse" student body as in line with the tradition of a liberal arts education. He claims that not until a community achieves these criteria will a "genuine plurality of perspectives, experiences and talents" be attained. Yet some disagree.
Braden Anderson-Gram '04 sees "the idea of affirmative action as fundamentally flawed" and that "universities and college admissions processes should not have anything to do with affirmative action." He finds some value it "when it comes to colleges diversifying their communities with student-athletes, artists and different thinkers" but that the process should "have less to do with a student's race and ethnicity and more to do with a student's impoverishment or socio-economic standing." He offers the idea of a third party representative able to watch over the entire process as an alternative, yet finds the proposition practically-speaking, too expensive.
In a much different opinion, Christopher Gaskill '03 embraces the brief, finding "affirmative action as good both benefiting and encouraging diversity on campus ethnically, economically, and intellectually which in the end, contributes to the entire community." In its final arguments the brief concludes that "barring institutions of higher education from maintaining their own admission criteria would violate vital principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy."
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