Affirmative Action Policies
Uploaded by spootyhead on Mar 20, 2007
Affirmative Action Policies
“Any governmental classification or preference based on racial or ethnic criteria must be justified by a compelling governmental interest, and the means chosen by the government to effectuate its purpose must be narrowly tailored to the achievement of that goal.”
“A public employer must have convincing evidence of prior discrimination in its employment practices before it embarks on an affirmative action program.”
Should current laws and regulations concerning affirmative action polices be continued? Affirmative action is designed to stop discrimination in the work place and even out the opportunities for each race but is it really stopping discrimination or are the results of affirmative action helping discrimination exist? Affirmative action is unfair and unjust to well qualified individuals.
Defenders of affirmative action feel that minority groups are at a disadvantage from hundreds of years of discrimination that benefited whites, and that affirmative action levels the playing field in the work force for minority groups. But in no way do these minor arguments for Affirmative action make it right or just to take equal opportunity rights away from a more qualified nonminority individual. What Affirmative action is doing is rekindling the fire between an almost settled hatred among different races. This is too high of a price to pay just to allow some less qualified minority individuals to hold a particular job or position.
At a time when campuses nationwide are struggling with issues of diversity, an Orlando Florida school board created two new law schools at universities with high minority enrollment in an effort to bring more blacks and Hispanics into legal careers without using affirmative action. This fall, the new College of Law will hold its first classes in an old downtown building here as part of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. At the same time, a public law school will open at Florida International University, a Miami institution where half the students are Hispanic. "I don't think of this as a Hispanic law school, I think of it as a diverse law school," said Leonard Strickman, dean of Florida International's College of Law. "The ideal is diversity that happens without having to distort either how people are brought in or how they're trained. And at this campus, in this city, that kind of diversity is implicit." This appears to...