Speech concerning the debate over the Supreme Court case Bakke v Regents and affirmative action, given at Paschal's Motor Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia, 1977 November 29 (1 of 5)

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The sick, care for the dying, and to promote the general health. The unspoken argument in this case is that the lower GPA and MCAT scores of some of the Special Admissions Students at Davis permitted unqualified students to enter the school, students who, if they graduated at all, would be medical dumbbels or butchers.

The facts do not support this argument.

The special students at Davis had MCAT scores that equal the National average in 1950. If today's student is unqualified, then surely so is every practicing Physician who received his education before then.

But to suggest that the special students are unqualified to become medical students is to suggest criminal behavior on the part of Admissions Committees, or to suggest that minorities are racially unable to qualify for a Medical School education in the United States.

One important point to remember -- there is little correlation

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Between applicant's test scores and their subsequent performance as medical students. A study of 1,088 students in fourteen classes at the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco concluded that there is virtually no relationship between these scores and Medical School grades. Other studies, moreover, have concluded that high MCAT scores do not always accurately indicate which students will be most effective in clinical situaitons. Comparisons between student test scores and their subsequent performance as physicians have yielded similar findings.

If test scores mean relatively little among otherwise qualified applicants,, then the deterring factors of acceptance must be based on the applicant's potential for fulfilling the goals of the school and society at large. Logically, minority applicants are probably better qualified to fulfill one of the most important of these goals: providing medical service to minority communities.

If minority admissions programs are characterized as giving

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the advantage to underqualified minority applicants because of their skin color, the programs do seem to reek of "reverse discrimination." But try this description: "a certain number of minority students are admitted each year because their life experience as members of minorities in this country makes them better qualified than white applicants to meet the important university goal of training doctors to work in minority neighborhoods."*

The principle of goals and preferential treatment is well established. In Carter v. Gallagher, (452 F. 2nd, 315 8th Cin. 1971)), a federal court, finding the Minneapolis Fire Department had discriminated against minorities, ordered the department to hire one minority person of every three who qualified until at least twenty minority workers had been hired.

Similar goals have been ordered in numerous other cases, and in Rios v. Steamfitters Local 638 (501 F.2d at 631-32), the court states: "Affirmative action is essential . . . to place

*The Bakke Case: Are Racial Quotas Defensible?, by Charles Lawrence III, Saturday Review, 10/15/77.

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eligible minority members in the position which the minority would have enjoyed if it had not been the victim of discriminaiton."

The Courts have given sanction to affirmative action based on Race. Society demands that the diffeerences in education, income, and life chances between the majority and the minority be diminished and eliminated, and where these inequities are created by Race, the Courts permit Race to be used as a standard in developing the remedy.

To ask that these programs be destroyed is to ask minority Americans to voluntarily accept a position as a permanent underclass, never able to stand equally with their fellow Americans.

The legacy of 300 years of slavery, segregation and then discrimination is not ended overnight.

Affirmative action must be pursued if we are ever to be a nation with liberty and justice for all.

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The Special Admissions Students who were admitted in 1973-- when Bakke was refused-- demonstrate clearly that their Race alone was no qualification, and that the standardized tests which normally would have kept them out of medical school were no test at all of their ability to become doctors.

Ovel Knight graduated this year. He received his class' highest honor, the Senior Class Award. He was a special admissions student.

Only one student in the whole class of 100 earned both a Medical Degree and a Master's Degree in Public Health-- he was Pat Harris, a Black student, one of five children in a family that lived on $3,000. a year of Federal Assistance, who completed four years of college in three, and graduated from Davis in the top of his class, as did each of the five Black Special Admissions Students who graduated in 1977.