Does UW take the discrimination cake ... or should I say cheese?

Is there discrimination in the land of cheese? Yes, said an advocacy group based in Falls Church, Va., that seeks to promote a “colorblind society.”

The Center for Equal Opportunity claims that the University of Wisconsin–Madison uses drastically different standards when deciding admission for African-American and Latino students than they use when reviewing applications for white and Asian students.The group released a report Tuesday that analyzes admission data from the school itself.

An examination of class rank and SAT scores collected found that the odds are 576-1 favoring African-American applicants against white applicants. The odds are 504-1 favoring Hispanics in the same comparison.

The center’s chairwoman, Linda Chavez characterized the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s admission standards as “the most severe undergraduate admissions discrimination that CEO has ever found in the dozens of studies it has published over the last 15 years.”

But university policies that favor specific racial or ethnic groups are not new. In a 2003 Supreme Court case, Gratz v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan was told it must abolish a policy that made it easier for underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to gain admission to the university.

In the unconstitutional formula, those underrepresented groups were given 20 extra points toward admission in a 150-point system, where 100 points were required to gain admission. As a point of comparison, applicants with perfect scores on the SAT were only awarded 12 points.

While the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action policy was struck down, others have remained.This is because not all affirmative action policies are unconstitutional. The court ruled against the University of Michigan in Gratz v. Bollinger because its formula was too mechanistic.

However, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 landmark Supreme Court affirmative action case, the court found that using race as a factor in admissions in some cases can serve as a compelling government interest.

Regardless of what the courts have to say about the constitutionality of such policies, I personally find them antithetical to not only the many American ideals that stress hard work and merited achievement, but also to the dream Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned for America on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In his 1963 speech, King said he yearned for that day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Unfortunately, that day has yet to come, as there are still many institutions, such as the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that wish to continue to do the very thing King found so abhorrent and fought against his whole life: namely, institutionalized discrimination. Blatant discrimination aside, however, these policies send a fundamentally bad message.

When a university places more importance on race than it does on academic achievement, as the University of Michigan did, it is implicitly stating that diversity is more important than academic achievement — a value I presume most universities would not be likely to espouse publicly.

In an even more staggering instance of mission departure, though, Sandra Day O’Connor, who cast the deciding vote in another 2003 Supreme Court affirmative action case, this time in support of the school, said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Her statement is not staggering insofar as it acknowledges that institutionalized racial preferences exist and are constitutional despite laws such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and various amendments to the U.S. Constitution, but instead because it reveals the court’s affirmative action rulings are indeed a form of judicial activism.

She argued that since racial minorities have a history of oppression in America and policies such as affirmative action serve to repay those oppressions, the policies are constitutional because they serve that court-approved “interest.” Well, I might add, if the government’s interest is fighting injustice with injustice and not with a renewed effort to ensure fair and equal treatment under the law, what really is the government’s interest?

Perhaps O’Connor or the University of Wisconsin-Madison might be able to tell you.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu