To many, the answer to whether affirmative action is still necessary is simple: yes.
“Colleges and universities are consistently saying that they need to be able to use” some form of affirmative action in admissions and hiring, says Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education.
“Given U.S. history, there is definitely still a need for affirmative action … particularly for higher education admission decisions,” says Dr. Donald Mitchell, an assistant professor of higher education at Grand Valley State University.
“Perhaps now more than ever, affirmative action is needed, given changing demographics and the complex and ever-evolving societal issues we are faced with. And since we are discussing African-American students, race did, and still matters, and I can’t imagine a time when race wouldn’t matter in my lifetime,” adds Mitchell. “I hope the SCOTUS agrees after reviewing the Fisher case in the fall.”
Dr. Juan Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, says that, at its core, affirmative action was about one group of people who were being discriminated against and leveling the playing field for those individuals.
“If you think about why affirmative action was instituted in the first place, it was really a Black and White issue, literally,” says Gilbert, whose efforts to recruit underrepresented minorities into computing sciences have earned him national attention. “The discrimination that was experienced then has morphed and it’s not the same.”
