[Chancellor]

Quote by: CoffeeSaint No, the idea of affirmative action is that it examines potential instead of past achievement. If you have two runners trying out for a team and they have equal times, but one has terrible form and the other has good form, who do you take? Answer: the one with terrible form, because if you coach him to improve his form, his time will improve, while the other one has maxed out already, or at least can't improve as much. The same holds if the one with poor form is only slightly behind the one with good form; the potential of the runner with less training is greater, and so he is the better choice, despite the difference in past performance.

I would take the one with good form: it's a false assumption that because he has good form he cannot improve his time.

Affirmative action was intended to make up for a systemic lack of advantages, primarily the lack of educational funding and a poorer learning environment, that tends to afflict minorities more than whites. If an inner city student has SAT scores, say, 100 points below those of a suburban kid, the inner city kid might be the better choice.

It doesn't matter what was "intended," the fact of the matter is that it communicates a wrong message to blacks: that you are inherently inferior and, therefore, need special help. It is also a false assumption that the person with the lower SAT scores is necessarily going to be the better choice. By the way, I was one of those kids who grew up in one of those poorer learning environments and I still managed to graduate in the top 10 percent of my high school class without really having to put much effort into it. Maybe some of these kids would have to work harder at it but they're just as capable of success. That you're raising the issue of poorer learning environment has nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity, it has to do with economic status and you cannot prove that merely being poor is going to so negatively impact a student's potential that he needs special help in the form of lower test scores or otherwise lower qualifications to succeed. You most certainly can't prove that so-called "minorities" are so negatively impacted by being a minority (meaning their inherent characteristics, not how the majority population has treated them) that they need special help in the form of lower test scores or otherwise lower qualifications to succeed.

The problem with affirmative action is it, like the Three Strikes law and others that make intelligent decisions unnecessary, should never be mandated. A reasonably intelligent admissions officer should be able to take such things as poor educational environment into account without having the federal government force him to do it. One could also see affirmative action as racist in that it assumes that minority students are the ones who have less educational support -- except the fact is, the vast majority of poor learning environments are predominantly non-white.

So-called "poor education environment" is an economic issue, not a racial one. But why should an admissions officer have to take that into account? If you have the grades, if you have the test scores, that should be sufficient. So what if a poorer school district didn't have the computers or the brand new textbooks that the wealthier school district might have. Students were able to learn quite adequately before there even were such things.