Two weeks ago, the U.S Supreme Court in a ruling that involved Harvard and the University of North Carolina ended affirmative action. In the majority opinion by the Supreme Court, an academic paper written by Robert Steinbuch, a law professor at the UA Little Rock Bowen School, was quoted by Justice Clarence Thomas.
During a panel discussion on Arkansas Week, Steinbuch said his paper used data to analyze the effectiveness of race-based admissions programs at law schools.
“What the paper shows is that the success rate for example Blacks passing the bar, after graduation, I should say the failure rate is double that of whites,” he said. “It’s not because they’re Black, but because they are admitted with insufficient credentials and we’re not telling the students this when we take their money.”
Bailey Fairbank, an assistant professor in the University of Central Arkansas’ political science department, who was also part of the Arkansas Week panel, said the U.S Supreme Court shouldn’t have undone affirmative action. She said there can be a misunderstanding about how schools implement affirmative action programs.
“When we say race based, it means that this person is getting into school because of their race and ethnicity. That’s not the case, any college that is doing that defeats the purpose of evaluating a candidate for admission into colleges. It is a holistic process, you’re using so much more than that to determine this,” she said.
Fairbank said when states like California and Michigan banned affirmative action programs, the universities in those states had less diverse student bodies.
