Reverse discrimination
Reverse discriminationReverse Discrimation
Table of Contents
Introduction and Background…………………………1
The Issues and Arguments for each side……………….2
The Opinions and Decisions of the Supreme Court……….4
My Personal Opinion and Arguments……………………5
Relevance to Current Issues…………………………6
Conclusion………………………………………..7
Introduction and Background
In 1973 a thirty-three year-old Caucasian male named Allan Bakke
applied to and was denied admission to the University of California Medical
School at Davis. In 1974 he filed another application and was once again
rejected, even though his test scores were considerably higher than various
minorities that were admitted under a special program. This special
program specified that 16 out of 100 possible spaces for the students in
the medical program were set aside solely for minorities, w hile the other
84 slots were for anyone who qualified, including minorities.
What happened to Bakke is known as reverse discrimination. Bakke
felt his rejections to be violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the
14th amendment, so he took the University of California Regents to the
Superior Court of California. It was ruled that “the admissions program
violated his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th
Amendment”1 The clause reads as follows:
“…No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor without due
process of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.”2
The court ruled that race could not be a factor in admissions.
However, they did not force the admittance of Bakke because the court could
not know if he would have been admitted if the special admissions program
for minorities did not exist . Bakke disagreed with the court on this
issue and he brought it before the California Supreme Court.
The California Supreme Court held that it was the University’s
burden to prove that Bakke would not have been admitted if the special
program was not in effect. The school could not meet this requirement, and
Bakke was admitted by court order. However, the University appealed to the
Supreme Court for “certiorari”, which was granted, and the order to admit
Bakke was suspended pending thCourt’s decision.3 The Issues and Arguments
for Each Side
“Bakke was the most significant civil rights case to reach the
United States Supreme Court since Brown v. Board the Education of Topeka,
Kansas.”4 The special admissions program at Davis tried to further
integrate the higher education system because merely removing the
barriers, as the Brown case did, did not always work. In short, Bakke was
questioning how far the University of California Medical School at Davis
could go the try to make up for past racial discrimination and segregatio
n.
The arguments for and against the special admissions program are
complicated. The arguments for special admissions are as follows: Because
of...
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