Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998
Affirming Affirmative Action
By Ronald Dworkin
The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions
by William G. Bowen, by Derek Bok
Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $24.95
For over thirty years America's best universities and colleges have used race-sensitive admissions policies to increase the number of their black, Hispanic, Chicano, Native American, and other minority students.[1] Conservative writers and politicians have attacked this policy of 'affirmative action' from its inception, but the policy is now in the greatest danger it has yet faced—on two fronts, political and legal. In 1995, by a 14 to 10 vote, the regents of the University of California declared that race could no longer be taken into account in admissions decisions at any of the branches of that university. In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 209, which ratifies and broadens that prohibition by providing that no state institution may 'discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.'[2]
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