The Bakke Decision & Preferential Treatment Issue

The Bakke decision of the Supreme Court upheld the California Supreme Court decision which held that white student Allan Bakke had suffered illegal discrimination as a result of the specific University of California at Davis preferential treatment program which set aside a certain number of spots for "minority" group members. Bakke was admitted to Davis as a result of the Supreme Court decision, but the Court "reversed (the California) court's prohibition against taking race into account in any way" (Dworkin, 1985, p. 304).

Powell, writing the decision of the court, focused on the issue of Constitutional (rather than statutory) grounds, specifically the equal protection provided by the Fourteenth Amendment. He "held that the equal protection clause forbids explicit quotas or reserved places unless the school in question can show that these means are necessary to achieve goals of compelling importance, and he held that Davis had not met that burden of proof" (Dworkin, 1985, p. 305).

On a legal basis, then, the Court found that preferential treatment was a legitimate way to institute racial diversity in college. Although Powell and the Court left the means up

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give some measure of preferential treatment to minorities in college entrance considerations, as long as non-minorities are not themselves discriminated against. The moral issue then moves to the consequences of such preferential treatment on a social level. If the preferential treatment is meant to right social wrongs, then it can be seen as an effort to diminish racial differences overall, specifically racism itself. Will such preferential treatment effect such improvements? Will such programs fulfill this moral imperative and diminish tension among the races? Dworkin presents a reasonable argument in this regard. First, he notes that the United States is a nation which is exceedingly racially conscious to begin with. Any preferential treatment program will not intensify that consciousness much. Dworkin emphasizes the point that the morality of preferential treatment rest on the belief that discrimination against minorities is itself immoral. If we believe that it is immoral to punish a person with educational disadvantage because of his color, then we must believe that an action designed to remove or correct that disadvantage is moral---again, as long as that action does not put another individual or group at a disa
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Approximate Word count = 1471
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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