The U.S. Supreme Court has startled nearly everyone by agreeing without comment to review the case of Allan Bakke, a white student who charges that he was denied admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis because of reverse discrimination. Like most professional schools across the country, the UC-Davis Medical School has knuckled under to threats from Washington and established an affirmative-action admissions program. For the past decade, Davis has reserved 16 out of every hundred student openings for minorities, thus effectively denying admission to many highly qualified students unfortunate enough to wear the wrong shade of skin. But as Bakke pointed out, many of the minority students admitted were not actually qualified, at times scoring a full thirty points below many of the white applicants they supplanted. Race, said Bakke, was the sole determining factor, and last September the California Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the UC-Davis affirmative-action admissions policy represented “a revival of quotas.” The Regents of the University of California appealed, and the Supreme Court expects to hear the case this October.
The national implications of the Bakke case have been slow to sink in; but in California, civil-rights activists and radicals have been in a frenzy for months. There is a plot here, they say, hatched by the Regents and their allies on Wall Street, to destroy all special admissions programs—the motivation, of course, being imperialism and racism. A university administrator put Bakke up to suing in the first place, they charge, and the university attorneys argued the case with a notable lack of enthusiasm. (There is no evidence for the latter point. A UC admissions officer did, however, suggest to Bakke that he sue, for which advice he was sent to Coventry by his colleagues and superiors, and today works at another university.) Less radical activists, of whom there are few in California, discount the conspiracy theory, but regret the Regents’ appeal. If the Court finds for Bakke, they believe, it could well mean the end of affirmative action, not only in universities but also in industry and government employment. “It might just be,” says one Californian, “that Bakke will be the single most important civil rights decision since Brown.”
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