Race Should Not Be a Factor
I don’t usually spend time looking at opinion surveys. But a poll out the other day caught my attention on account of its main finding, which is that race should not play any factor in college admissions.
This was the work of the Marquette Law Poll, a nationwide survey of voters sponsored by the Catholic University law school, and the arresting number is 77, as in the percent of voters who oppose Supreme Court decisions upholding the use of race as one factor in deciding which applicants get in. Preferences typically poll well—I mean badly, as they should, with majorities, once you sort out the questions and answers, substantially opposed to using race in admissions.
The 77 number put me in mind of a number close to that—73. And what do you know—that was from a recent Pew Research Center survey, and it’s the percent of Americans who said colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. The strength of this poll lay in its direct approach to those questioned—there was no possibly diverting reference to Supreme Court decisions.
Pew Research found majorities across racial and ethnic groups in agreement that race should not be a factor in college admissions. The center broke down the numbers: 78% of whites said this, as did 65% of Hispanics, 62% of blacks, and 58% of Asians. There were also large partisan gaps, with Republicans and Republican leaners far more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to take the “should-not-be-a-factor view. Pew calculated the gap at 85%-63%.
The good news in these polls is the enduring appeal of colorblind law. In The Color-Blind Constitution law professor Andrew Kull has chronicled its history: how over a period of 125 years the American civil rights movement first elaborated, then held as its unvarying political objective, a rule of law requiring the colorblind treatment of individuals. In the 1960s there was some backsliding on civil rights, including at colleges and universities that began “using race” to make admissions decisions. But public opinion on this matter has really never fallen away—I think because of the persuasiveness of the arguments in favor of color-blind law. Take with you and read this quote by another law professor, William Van Alystyne, explaining why individuals should be treated without regard to race:
“Individuals are not merely social means; i.e., they are not merely examples of a group, representatives of a cohort, or fungible surrogates of other human beings; each, rather, is a person whom it is improper to count or discount by race.”
