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4. The Late 1970s and Early 1980s: Competence Concerns in the Age of Bakke
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86 4 The Late 1970s and Early 1980s COMPETENCE CONCERNS IN THE AGE OF BAKKE One of the most pressing issues facing U.S. higher education during the late 1970s and early 1980s was that of student “competence”—that is, how best to define and measure what it meant for a student to have achieved (or failed to achieve) a certain level of educational attainment or proficiency. Of the many contexts in which issues of competence were being debated at this time, the most famous was the 1978 Supreme Court case University of California Regents v. Bakke. Bakke centered on the claim of a white medical school applicant, Allan Bakke, who argued that he had been denied admission to medical school at the University of California–Davis (UC-Davis) because a number of spaces within the Davis program each year were reserved for racial and ethnic minorities who were not competent according to usual measures such as test scores or undergraduate class rank. When the case came before the Supreme Court, UC-Davis stood as the plaintiff, arguing that it had fairly and justly considered issues of race as part of its overall assessment of student competence to enter graduate school. Davis stressed its desire to use its existing policies for determining competence as a means to admit, support, and graduate minority physicians who “are likely to return to those disadvantaged 87 The Late 1970s and Early 1980s areas from which they came” (qtd. in Schwartz 16). Meanwhile, Bakke stood as the defendant, arguing that Davis’s policy was unconstitutional because competence with respect to medical school admissions ought to be determined in entirely color-blind fashion. The court offered two separate decisions in the case, each decided by a 5–4 vote. In the first of these decisions, the court ruled the specific Davis admissions program to be unconstitutional, finding that it had utilized a race-based quota to discriminate between non-white and white applicants in terms of their overall admissibility.1 In the second of these decisions, however , the court ruled that some level of race consciousness could be constitutional , asserting that mainstream colleges and universities must have the freedom to pursue “the attainment of a diverse student body” (Regents . . . v. Bakke 311) in ways that could include “the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin” (320). This principle was important in the case of medical school admissions because “physicians serve a heterogeneous population. An otherwise qualified medical student with a particular background— whether it be ethnic, geographic, culturally advantaged or disadvantaged— may bring to a professional school of medicine experiences, outlooks, and ideas that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates to render with understanding their vital service to humanity” (314). But this principle was perhaps even “greater . . . at the undergraduate level” (313) because undergraduate students needed exposure to “the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples” (313). In these important ways, the Supreme Court did seem to be promoting at least some level of race consciousness within one of the most important discussions of student competence of the time period: race could matter to admissions at the undergraduate level under certain circumstances. Importantly, however, as the court continued to outline what exactly it meant by “competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin,” it articulated some key limits to its apparent race consciousness. It asserted that “race or ethnic background may be deemed a ‘plus’ in a particular applicant’s file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats” (317). This notion of race as a “plus” imagined “each applicant as an individual in the admissions process. The applicant who loses out on the last available seat to another candidate receiving a ‘plus’ on the basis of ethnic background will not have been foreclosed from all [3.236.64.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:13 GMT) 88 The Late 1970s and Early 1980s consideration for that seat simply because he was not the right color or had the wrong surname. It would mean only that his combined qualifications, which may have included similar nonobjective factors, did not outweigh those of the other applicant. His qualifications would have been weighed fairly and competitively, and he would have no basis to complain of unequal treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment” (318). Furthermore, the court asserted that this logic of race...