That could happen soon. For the first time since the Bakke case, which banned outright quotas like those at Davis, the Supreme Court is wading into an emotional dispute over affirmative action at universities. Any day now, the court is expected to decide whether the University of Michigan’s minority-recruitment efforts violate federal law. Mindful of the Bakke decision, which allows schools to consider race as a “plus factor” as long as they avoid quotas, admissions officers at Michigan tried to rely on a “point” system for undergraduates that awards extra credit to minorities. At its law school, Michigan aimed for what it called a “critical mass” of minority students, but not a set quota. Now the court is considering whether those efforts went too far. Depending on how the court rules, the decision–which could have sweeping consequences for public universities, private colleges and even employers–could preserve the murky status quo, eliminate the use of –race in admissions altogether or chart a new course somewhere in between.
Whatever the justices decide, the true impact may not be clear for years–or even decades. That’s clear from talking to the class that started it all–the students who graduated from medical school with Allan Bakke in 1982. NEWSWEEK revisited the final class admitted under the old quota system. Though Bakke himself did not respond to repeated interview requests, 19 of his 97 fellow graduates spoke out, many for the first time. Bakke, 38 when he finally entered Davis, has retired from his anesthesiology practice, but many of his classmates are now at the peak of their careers. Some benefited from Davis’s special-admissions program. Others were hurt by it. They’ve come forward to discuss how their views have changed in the 25 years since Bakke landed in their lecture hall. Like most Americans, all have complicated–and sometimes contradictory–feelings about what role, if any, race should play in deciding who gets in and who doesn’t.
Sylvia Shaw, for one, needed the extra help that Davis offered. The first in her family to graduate from college, Shaw can trace one set of great-great-grandparents back to slavery. After she finished at Loyola Marymount with a B average, she was rejected at every medical school to which she applied. She took a year off to do a research fellowship and, when she applied again, Davis offered her a spot. Despite the Bakke controversy, Shaw felt welcome at Davis. “They wanted you to get in and stay in,” she says. “They kind of coddled you because of the rarity of an African-American in medical school.” Now chief of endocrinology at Rancho Los Amigos, a rehabilitation hospital in Los Angeles County, she treats mostly minority and indigent patients. “If you don’t groom doctors of various ethnic communities, who’s going to care for those communities?” Shaw asks.
That was exactly the type of question Davis had hoped to address with its minority-admissions program. Established shortly after the school was founded in the late 1960s, the program had a good record of admitting minorities. But after Bakke, Davis struggled. Though Davis had battled the lawsuit all the way to Washington, critics complained it had fought halfheartedly, and the school gained a reputation as racist. “Davis had a lot of trouble getting applicants,” says Dr. Faith Fitzgerald, Davis’s associate dean of student affairs at the time. In the fall of 1980, no blacks and just a handful of Latinos enrolled.
Not only did the school have to contend with an image problem, but, like other schools, it also had to find a way to recruit minorities without quotas. First, Davis switched to a special-admissions committee that evaluated all the minority students, weighing race as one factor without aiming for a quota. Later, even before California’s Prop 209 banned the use of race in admissions in 1996, the school began hand-reading every application–now more than 3,000 for 93 places–without giving race extra weight. After intensive recruiting, the number of minorities has slowly increased; now more than half the students are nonwhite, but most are Southeast Asians.
On his first day of classes in 1978, Bakke took a middle seat in the lecture hall, as far from the prying TV cameras as possible. Even students who disagreed with his politics were sympathetic to his desire for privacy. “We huddled against the news media,” says Steve Edelman, a white endocrinologist now at U.C., San Diego. Bakke turned out not to be an ideologue, just an unassuming guy who wanted to be left to his studies. “All Bakke wanted to do was be a doctor,” says Fitzgerald. “He didn’t want to be a social cause.” Since Bakke was older than most other students, he rarely socialized with them. And only one could remember ever broaching the subject of affirmative action. Jose Bolanos, a Salvadoran native who’s now an OB-GYN, recalls being invited to dinner at the home of a white adviser who tried to spark a debate between Bakke and a group of Hispanic students. Bolanos was furious, but the students–including Bakke–were all too polite to argue. “Nobody really talked about it,” Bolanos says.
Like Shaw, Bolanos decided to practice in an underserved community. He now delivers 25 babies a month in San Jose–all of them Hispanic. “We didn’t go into Beverly Hills to practice,” he says. “We’re on the front lines doing what we really want to do.” Not all minority doctors serve the poor–and not all whites retreat to the suburbs. Bakke’s class was particularly altruistic: 60 percent went into primary-care medicine, less lucrative than other specialties.
In the competitive 1970s, Bakke wasn’t the only white student who had trouble getting into med school. Robert Miller conducted research, collected stellar recommendations and earned a 3.92 GPA from San Francisco State. He was rejected by 20 med schools. Just two weeks before classes started in 1978, Davis called to offer Miller a spot. Later, he heard he was accepted after a minority student angry about Bakke dropped out. If he had dwelled on it, he might have felt like “the best applicant with the wrong skin color,” Miller says. At the –time, he was just grateful to get in. Now an eye surgeon in Davis, Miller supports diversity in medicine, but doesn’t think race should be the deciding factor. “It offends me. It’s giving somebody credit for something they had no part in doing for themselves,” he says. Miller thinks affirmative action “steals motivation from people.” He believes it would be more equitable to reward applicants who’ve overcome adversity, putting economic diversity ahead of race.
Other white members of the Bakke class are equally conflicted. James Wolosin had a 3.9 GPA at U.C., Santa Barbara, good MCAT scores and a record of volunteer work. When he was rejected by 40 med schools, it was devastating. (Davis accepted him the next year.) “I don’t have any problem giving an extra boost to people as long as they’re qualified,” says Wolosin, a gastroenterologist. But as he is keenly aware, “if you give a disadvantaged student a spot, you run the risk of hurting someone else’s aspirations.”
Asian students weren’t normally given preference at Davis, but Jean Katow was an exception. She had gone to an all-black high school in South-Central L.A. “I might have been in the top of my class, but it was nothing compared to the white areas,” she says. She struggled to keep up in college and had to reapply to med school after getting rejected the first time. Finally Davis admitted her as a “disadvantaged” minority–despite the fact that Asians weren’t underrepresented. Katow sympathized with Bakke’s desire to get into medical school, but she also supported affirmative-action plans–even though they generally work against Asians. “They make up for past wrongs,” she says.
Some minority students weren’t aware they got any extra help. Bill Downey doesn’t know whether he was admitted through the special program. “I knew I was going to do what I had to do to succeed once I got there,” says Downey, an African-American pediatrician now practicing in Las Vegas. The nephew of a Tuskegee airman, Downey earned a master’s in nutrition before entering Davis, where he thought he “stuck out a little bit.” He worries that affirmative action “pits people against each other.” If applicants are unqualified, “you’re just setting them up for failure.” He favors reframing affirmative action around economic status. “You have to give people a chance but you have to do it in a reasonable way,” Downey says.
The tension over affirmative action made many minority students uneasy. Michael Silvas felt pressure to succeed even before Bakke showed up. A Latino Army vet who’d served in Vietnam, Silvas started med school in 1977 but fell into Bakke’s class after taking a year off. “I was pointed at as an affirmative-action candidate who was taking somebody else’s place,” Silvas recalls. Now a family-practice physician in San Bernardino, Silvas still favors affirmative action. “I’ve learned to take help wherever you can get it,” he says.
But the next generation may see things differently. Silvas’s eldest daughter, now 20 and a junior at U.C., Santa Barbara, did not apply for any minority programs on her college applications. “It’s like a pride thing,” he says. “She felt like she needed to do it on her own.” Christine Hrountas, a white OB-GYN who supports affirmative action, also worries that preferences could hurt her teens. “I’m a firm believer we need diversity, but then I think my kid may not end up going to the best school,” she says. “It’s confusing.”
And then there’s the question of whether the next generation really needs an edge. Shaw’s second-grade son recently won his school science contest–a feat Shaw says her own parents could have never helped her accomplish. “We couldn’t say that our kids need affirmative action,” she says. Now it’s up to the court to decide whether anyone else’s kids still do.
