The current legal challenge to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy should force Georgetown to re-evaluate its own murky and unclear policy. Consider what Jamie Briseno, senior associate dean of admissions, said about the School of Foreign Service: “To the extent that the dean’s office … might feel that if would be good to have gender parity, they might take that into account. We don’t say to them, ‘for every male add an additional point,’ we just say that it would be good to have some gender parity, but it doesn’t need to come out perfectly. Just take it into account, just like you would take race into account.”
So affirmative action means that gender and race are taken into account. But what does that mean? Strictly by the numbers, the SFS would favor a male over a female if the two were roughly equal. But does that ever happen?are two candidates really that equal in academic preparation, extracurricular involvement, life experiences, intellectual development? Gender shouldn’t just break the tie; it needs to be seen as more important than some other characteristic.
That’s what affirmative action means. Affirmative action also means more aggressive recruitment of minorities and low-income students generally. But in the admissions process, affirmative action means that race and gender are seen as more important than at least some admissions criteria.
But this isn’t an effective policy. If the goal is to remedy past wrongs, the admissions advantage should be granted to low-income minorities?not well-off minorities that already benefit from current policies. The degree of emphasis placed on diversity, however, has been limited by earlier decisions, such as the case that ended affirmative action in Texas’s public universities as well as earlier University of Michigan cases.
What Georgetown must do is base its affirmative action policy on two pillars: recruitment and financial aid. Students of color must be encouraged to apply and low-income minorities must know that they have a reasonably good chance of getting aid.
