Unchain our schools! (Bird's Eye).(racial preferences)

As this issue of The American Enterprise is flowing through newsstands, the U.S. Supreme Court will old oral arguments on two court challenges to racial preferences at the University of Michigan. The Court's decision will come in June, and could be historic.

Michigan uses a point system to decide which students get in. Currently, any applicant who is black, Hispanic, or Native American automatically gets 20 points. Whites, Asians, Arabs, and others get nothing.

That is un-American. It is also unfair. A hundred points will generally get you into Michigan, so those 20 racial points lend a huge advantage. A student who pulls off a perfect SAT score gets only 12 points. Under Michigan's affirmative action rules, 64 percent of black applicants will be admitted with an academic record that would give a white applicant, identical in every way except skin color, only a 1 percent chance of being admitted. (Calculations by social scientists Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai.)

America is thus in the ugly business of sorting people crudely by race. Ask an advocate of preferences how he can possibly defend this method of discriminating and he'll tell you that the ends justify the means: Campuses must be "diverse." And without affirmative action, black people wouldn't be able to go to college.

You will often hear activists say that "there are more African Americans behind bars than in college," with the suggestion that this surely justifies "emergency" measures. That claim is utter disinformation--representing either statistical ignorance or a blatant attempt to mislead. There are presently 1.8 million college-age blacks on campuses; about 200,000 are in prison.

It's a scandalous--and slanderous--misrepresentation to suggest that for blacks the only alternative to the slammer is special preferences. Black Americans are quite capable of making steady progress the old-fashioned way. In 1980, 42 percent of black high school grads went to college; today that's 62 percent, virtually the same as for whites.

After Ward Connerly convinced Californians to ban racial preferences in their state university system a few years ago (you'll find an interview with Mr. Connerly on page 18), agitators insisted that blacks would disappear from our campuses. They were badly mistaken. More than five years after their affirmative action crutches were taken away, young black Californians very much continue to walk the ivy pathways. Minority enrollment on the eight campuses of the University of California system is now 20 percent--up from 18 percent in the last year that preferences were used.