Realizing Bakke’s Legacy: Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Access to Higher Education (review)

Realizing Bakke’s Legacy: Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Access to Higher Education, edited by Patricia Marin and Catherine Horn, is a noteworthy and praiseworthy collection of writings by 12 diverse authors with expertise in the areas of law, public policy, psychology, civil rights, access, affirmative action, and education. If the book simply expanded our understanding of affirmative action on college campuses, that contribution in itself would have been significant, but this book offers much more. In reality this book is as much about the future as it is the past. While it provides a historical examination of the infamous 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and the more recent (2003) reaffirmations of the Supreme Court rulings in Grantz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger cases, it also reframes the discussion to include philosophical underpinnings of higher education, appraises the K–16 educational pipeline, and provides a foundation for more inclusive admissions policy and practice.

Realizing Bakke’s Legacy is divided into three parts. In the introduction, Chapter 1 provides the background of the Bakke case and its impact on how institutions have restructured their admission policies and practices as a result. Medical and law school enrollment patterns are used to exemplify the increased access that the Bakke decision encouraged, while at the same time highlighting the complexities of diversity in higher education.

Part 1 (Chapters 2–3) presents the public policy perspectives in the debate of affirmative action, anti-classification and anti-subordination, and how the Supreme Court Justices articulated their differing opinions. Using the Bakke case as a lens for viewing the history and arc of antidiscrimination law, Chapter 2 examines the underlying legal constructions that shape not only the Bakke case but also those that followed. Chapter 3 explores how affirmative action has become a moral disagreement but suggests that, despite these disagreements, higher education admissions currently display more widely acceptable versions of affirmative action than at the time of the Bakke ruling.

Part 2 (Chapters 4–6), presents qualitative data to dissect the contentions that the Bakke decision would promote diversity in college by illustrating how educational inequalities, lack of access within the U.S. K–16 educational pipeline, and the limited attainments of underrepresented and minority students in college have continued long after the Bakke decision.

Chapter 4 discusses how, despite limited support for the value of educational diversity, schools have not succeeded in their efforts to improve access and eliminate disparities throughout the educational pipeline. Chapter 5 presents data illustrating how students navigate the educational pipeline (K–16) toward completing a baccalaureate degree and questions whether the goal of parity in educational achievement among races can be achieved given the current inequities in the U.S. educational system. Chapter 6 moves the discussion past access to describe the relatively understudied area of affirmative action—college completion.

Part 3 (Chapters 7–10) uses public policy at the federal, state, and institutional level from the past 30 years to examine the actual outcomes of affirmative action. Chapter 7 analyzes the significance of these policies on the enrollment characteristics at elite colleges since Bakke. Chapter 8 discusses in depth the racial/ethnic transformation of the legal education landscape during the last three decades and how affirmative action has affected America’s most selective law schools.

Chapter 9 seeks to understand how institutions are making decisions about admissions and their racial/ethnic-related programs and services, by examining the role of the general counsel’s office in that administrative process. Finally, Chapter 10 considers some of the external limits on an institution’s academic freedom and what colleges and universities must do or can do to creatively exercise their autonomy, within the existing parameters, to admit a diverse student body as per Bakke.

The strength of this book lies in its historical review and comprehensive and...