The topic we all think we understand: Affirmative Action

I think there are two possible routes to substantive improvement here.

First, most of the statements made about California in this draft would be more or less directly transferable to any discussion about any other state's situation in its higher education system. Two elements are present in California's context that are relevantly special: the Prop 13 limits on the use of property taxes in financing public education, and the Prop 209 prohibition on race-conscious decision-making in, among other roles, public education. Prop 13 took California from among the highest ranked states in public education outcomes to among the lowest. After a quarter century under the effects of Prop 209, comparative effects should also be visible in relation to states, like NY, with large public higher education systems and no barrier to affirmative efforts to include all the public in the state's system of higher education. We are now half a century into the open enrollment system in the City University of New York, and that too might provide relevant points of comparison.

Second, I think the draft can be improved by more carefully separating the goal, which—as you point out in an opening illustration that can be compressed—is the attainment of real social and economic equality from the remedial means, referred to as "affirmative action," largely developed in the 1960s. Although critics in the libertarian and socially conservative strands of American political conversation often decry "equality of results" instead of "equality of opportunity," the actual purpose of public education is precisely to achieve equality of outcome. Every child in society should have an equal education at the public's expense, and that education should be sufficient to offer all children the knowledge and skills they want to acquire to suit them for the lives they want to have. Continuing education should be equally available to all citizens throughout their lives, priced according to their individual ability to pay, so as to offer all an equal opportunity to learn, to think and publish, and to retrain and reskill themselves as they see fit. We can be sure that this level of acceptance of the public sphere's duty and value to the people will not be realized in my lifetime, though it could be in yours. In the meantime, we not only competitively allocate places in the higher educational system, but we do so on the basis of plainly unjust failures to provide equal primary and secondary education. Those unjust inequalities subsist in relation to historical inequalities of many sorts, as well as presently-existing social discrimination systems in a society becoming rapidly more unequal in distributions of income and wealth.

Naturally, remedial arrangements shaped sixty years ago in the then-existing social and technological context will have some continuing value now, and likewise they will be largely outmoded and in need of replacement. Fighting with the "colorblind society" advocates over "quotas" and "preferences" might not be worth it in an information society context. UC as a whole and its component campuses can use far more advanced data-modeling systems to admit their students, in which a large number of components none of which are prohibited under Prop 209 are combined to create admissions profiles. Such a system could produce precisely the admissions distributions that make each class representative of California, without running afoul of Prop 209 or judicial rulings to similar effect. Or, like social democracies in Europe such as the Netherlands, we could conduct lotteries among all applicants for the fixed number of available places. (This is more equal, but in other respects more socially costly than the much more flexible US public higher education systems.) Focusing on the desired social outcome enables remedial creativity, which is both tactically and strategically important.