The Secret Betrayal: 1944-1947

...They pointed to studies indicating that if admissions were based on test scores and grade-point averages, the rate of minority enrollment would drastically decline -and there is, indeed, much truth to this claim, as Sindler documents...

...Whatever else it was, the Court's judgment certainly was not a ringing endorsement of Bakke's claim that his race should not be held against him...

...Four Justices, led by Justice Brennan, subscribed to the remarkable claim that there was really no discrimination against Bakke, since without admissions quotas for minorities he and other whites would simply be benefitting from the legacy of past discrimination (that now leaves minorities less qualified in objective terms...

...It is a tribute to the quality of Sindler's book that it can still revive a sense of the drama and importance of the Bakke case...

...Above everything else, Mr...

...Nor does he seek to intimidate readers with moralistic rhetoric or guile them with facile analogies...

...Though justly critical of the Court's various dodges, Sindler does not simplify the different arguments advanced-both on and off the Court -to justify explicit and official racial preferences...

...Anti-Bakke spokesmen often argued that this would give professional schools a perfect excuse to relax their efforts on behalf of minority admissions...

...There is no question that minority enrollments in professional schools (as well as in undergraduate colleges) have increased dramatically in the last decade...

...As everyone knows, Bakke got his place in medical school-but just barely...

...Whether or not' 'hypocritical'' is the right word for admissions officials who give extra consideration to minority applicants, there is little doubt that the practice will continue in one form or another...

...It is hard to see how this could be preferable-except if one sought above all a special acknowledgement of white guilt, a special badge of shame for white institutions (even at the price of affixing a different badge of shame on minority applicants...

...It is an indication of how much the civil-rights movement has degenerated that it is prepared to jettison our shared ideals of equal opportunity- even at the level of principle-to maintain its dogmas of white guilt and its myth of white intransigence...

...But Sindler does not make more of the result than it deserves...

...Four Justices argued that racial preference in admissions was unlawful under the 1964 Civil Rights Act-though, as Sindler points out, their refusal to touch the constitutional issue was more than a little pointless when five of their colleagues had already staked their decisions on novel constitutional interpretations...

...But there is certainly something remarkable about the near-hysteria with which anti-Bakke forces regarded the possibility of his legal vindication...

...It was never credible that a decision for Bakke would force professional schools to rely solely on test scores, or make schools subject to discrimination charges for accepting a higher proportion of minorities than their numbers among college graduates would warrant (as is now actually the case with law schools in aggregate...

...Civil-rights spokesmen warned that they might not be able to control the resulting outburst if the Court struck down special minority admissions programs...

...Though no federal agencies have yet applied any significant pressure on professional schools to increase minority enrollments-and certainly have not imposed the kind of quota system practiced by Davis-many people apparently prefer to see recent gains in minority enrollment as simply the product of force...

...On the other hand, many people accused the California Supreme Court of requiring hypocrisy and subterfuge in ruling that the ends of minority admissions programs could be achieved with less drastic means than explicit racial criteria...

...But he does insist that all the elaborate arguments for racial preference imply a decisive break with traditional notions of equal opportunity...

...But professional schools hardly need an excuse to back out of programs they were never required to adopt-and the ubiquity of these programs (official and unofficial) hardly suggests they are looking for one...

...It is a notion that unblinds justice to social realities, to be sure, but arms it with a battle-ax in the process...

...Bakke got his place in medical school because Justice Powell, in a tortured opinion that sought to straddle the gap between these blocs (and inevitably wound up in mid-air), held that race might be a legitimate admissions criterion in some circumstances, but that the Davis quota system gave it too much legitimacy-or too much of something...

...Anti-Bakke spokesmen insisted (often shrilly) that this progress would be undone if the Supreme Court upheld Bakke's reverse discrimination claim...

...some even suggested that the University of California had contrived the case for this very reason...

...Why was there so much to fear, then, from a Supreme Court endorsement of the principle that race ought never to prevent the evaluation of a candidate's individual merit...

...Is it really better for institutions-or for minorities-to have minority candidates judged in an altogether separate category from everyone else, as a matter of official policy...

...They condone, he argues, a paternalism toward minorities or an imputation of collective guilt to whites-either of which he rejects...

...While Sindler's analysis of the moral and legal arguments is always carefully done, it is his account of the political passions aroused against Bakke that should stimulate the most reflection...

...Sindler is too much of a scholar (or perhaps too much of a gentleman) to speculate about motives...

...But this simply demonstrates the extent to which professional schools have leaned over backwards to advance minority admissions...

...If the Supreme Court had issued an emphatic denunciation of Davis explicit quota system-whereby minority candidates were judged not only by different criteria, but by a different process with a separate committee-this could not have prevented professional schools from quietly making more generous evaluations of minority applicants in practice...

...That Bakke's case aroused so much national controversy is indeed more disturbing than the disingenuousness it evoked from the Supreme Court...

...Sindler's book is a valuable record of how much the public consensus on civil rights has already disintegrated...

...For, as civil-rights leaders should know better than anyone, the most emphatic decisions of the Supreme Court may mean little if not supported by a firm public consensus...

...Again and again journalists assured us that the case would produce the most important High Court ruling since Brown v. Board of Education...

...And when the Supreme Court finally put in its word, the confusion of the Justices was quickly drowned in the ensuing babble of television specials, learned symposiums, and "new angle" pieces in smart magazines-all scrambling to impress a bewildered public with the "true meaning" of the Court's nearly meaningless, splintered "judgment...

...This was not what Bakke sought in his suit, not what the California Supreme Court had ruled in upholding his claim, nor what anyone had seriously argued for...

...Solemn voices from the academy, one after another (and another, and another), professed to agonies of conscience over the moral and constitutional dilemmas posed by the case...

...Even before the Supreme Court rendered its decision last year, the already high-pitched controversy over "reverse discrimination" had provoked more outside organizations to volunteer "friend of the court'' briefs in this case than in any previous case in the history of the Court (as Professor Sindler informs us...