Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

 During President Lyndon Johnson's presidency (1963-1969), he began implementing affirmative action in order to open up more opportunities for African Amercians. Affirmative action banned discrimination such as intelligence tests to determine eligibility of minorities in the workplace and introduced racial quotas. By having these quotas, it created more diversity and brought increased wealth to the African American communities. 

(civilrightsmovement.blogs)

In 1978, Allan Bakke, a white man, filed a lawsuit against the University of California at Davis because of racial quotas. Not only had Bakke applied multiple times, but he had excellent credentials-better than the racial minority students at the school.  He claimed that these racial quotas resulted in him experiencing ‘reverse discrimination.’

(faculty.polytechnic.org)

University of California at Davis had reserved 16% of their admissions for minority students. Because Bakke was denied because of his race, he used the civil rights act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to support his case.

The Supreme court sided with Bakke that the quotas were discrimination, but also added that race could be a factor in admissions. This decreased the effectiveness of affirmative action because without quotas, not all businesses would have diversity since some of the minority applicants might not have the same credentials as the other employees, but bringing diversity into the workplace or school is important and the more diversity is implemented the farther down the line will success go. In addition, it would help people to bring financial resources into their minority community. 

During the mock trial, something I noticed from the side representing the Board was that Bakke may have not gotten in for other factors. For example, he was 25, and had gotten rejected from every other school he applied to. This is especially important because he was applying to medical school, which is already extremely competitive and he may just not have had the credentials to make it to the school. This is an interesting argument because it brings up the question of the validity of Bakke’s “reverse racism.”

(wix.com)

In this case, not only was the effectiveness of affirmative action weakened, but race ended up becoming a factor in the admissions process. This is still true today, but diversity was still lessened at the time of the case because without affirmative action, business and schools were still discriminating. 

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bakke-decision

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_regents.html

http://landmarkcases.c-span.org/Case/27/Regents-Univ-Cal-v-Bakke

http://faculty.polytechnic.org/gfeldmeth/1363a.html

https://bpettewa.wixsite.com/homepage/single-post/2016/11/25/bakke-v-board-of-regents-significance

https://civilrightsmovement.blogs.wm.edu/2015/02/18/allan-bakke-the-applicant/