EDITORIAL
BAKKE The complexities of the Supreme Court ruling in the reverse-discrimination case of Allan Bakke will be years in the sorting out, yet its basic meaning is already apparent. In simplest...
...If specific numerical quotas were to be outlawed, and diversity to be achieved through the sophisticated means of a Harvard, then it was easy to picture affirmative action being effectively tied in knots by groups that had neither the imagination, nor the will, nor the interest in diversity that Harvard and similar educational institutions have, almost by reason of what they are...
...Much as we sympathize with the point of view, we are persuaded that the Court ruled sagaciously and in manner that will ultimately expand rather than contract opportunities of every kind for the disadvantaged...
...It was a worry easy enough to harbor...
...We applaud it...
...The AT&T decision, for instance, appeared to reinforce government's powers to use goals, timetables and other prods, short of course of fixed quotas, to end discriminatory practices in industry...
...Thus a double-track corrective to discrimination seems in the shaping, and maybe even more before the need for affirmative action is ended in the country...
...Diversity belongs to the nature of a university, or should...
...the pundits are grappling yet with the nuances of their narrow votes and the multiple concurring and dissenting opinions...
...In this sense, Bakke is the most important civil-rights pronouncement made by the Supreme Court since Brown vs...
...In this context it is interesting to note that the Court has agreed to hear next year the case of a woman who claims that her sex .has kept her from being admitted to two Illinois medical colleges...
...On quick first reading we feared that the Court had paid lip-service to a principle--affirmative action--then, by citing the "illuminating" example of Hazard University, had put the principle out of reach so far as broad application was concerned...
...We must confess, however, that that wasn't our initial reaction to Bakke...
...This narrow victory and guarded approval for affirmative action disappointed many who felt that the injustices of two hundred years should allow for the boldest interpretations of what is permissible under law, even to the extra-constitutional...
...In simplest terms, the ruling is a defeat for rigid quotas of any sort and a go-ahead to affirmative-action programs which would remedy a legacy of racial discrimination in this country through a balancing of factors that include consideration of race, but in a context of many categories and types of criteria...
...Bakke will not have the immediate impact of Brown, but it is likely to be no less important in the long range, and as good for the souI of the nation and its people...
...But, as Justice Brennan stated in his opinion, none of this should mask the central meaning of what ,the Court ruled on June 28, 1978: "Government may take race into account when it acts not to demean or insult any racial group, but to remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice, at least when appropriate findings have been made by judicial, legis, lative or administrative bodies with competence to act in this area...
...Bakke, accordingly, isn't the final word, but it is an historic first word to what the future will be in the United States...
...Board of Education o/Topeka, the 1954 school desegregation decision...
...The Justices were deeply divided on the case...
...the same is not true in the trades or other fields Commonweal: 451 Our concern, we are happy to say, was dispelled within days of Bakke, when the Court ruled in four less celebrated cases, all widening the implications of the Bakke decision and all in favor of affirmative action...
...The most important was a ruling upholding a 1973 consent decree that required AT&T to hire more blacks, ethnics and women...
...The special significance here was the suggestion that the Court would continue to view affirmative action programs in employment in a different light from the universities...
Vol. 105 • July 1978 • No. 14
