Affirmative Action and Higher Education Two people stand in a room looking at a vibrant painting and receive a completely different image. This is something we all know can happen. It is our different perspectives that also make us valuable to each other. When we try to solve a problem or create a new idea, we need each other to bring forward considerations and concepts that would otherwise never come to fruition. This concept is something that most of us understand in theory, yet it never ceases to confuse and confound us if someone draws a conclusion tangential to ours when presented with the same information. This situation is at the heart of the discussion about affirmative action. Policies that some see as righting past wrongs are seen by others as creating a level playing field or even instigating a new phase of unjust discrimination. Part of this confusion is due to the fact that the range of opinions changes not only between people, but also over time. Policies that once seemed necessary may, within a few decades, seem excessive. When Justice Powell, along with the rest of the U.S. Supreme Court, issued the decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke in 1978, he attempted to provide a rationale for affirmative action in higher education that did not rely on punishment for a race; However, over time, modest progress in improving minority representation in schools has combined with the frustrations of a new generation to create a current situation that places past policies under new political and legal scrutiny. When the Bakke decision was issued, standards were set for what affirmative action programs should look like. Specifically, it was referring to the Harvard trial (Schauer 592), but abstractly it was more generic… half the document… ronicle. November 5, 1998. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/11/05/MN16107.DTL.National Center for Policy Analysis. “Racial preferences do not help students graduate.” House of Ideas. June 11, 1997. http://www.ncpa.org/pd/affirm/pdaa/pdaa12.html.Regents of the University of California. “Text of Resolutions SP-1 and SP-2.” Online representations. Summer 1996. http://violet.berkeley.edu:7000/R55/regents.html.Schauer, Frederick and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. The philosophy of law. Harcourt Brace College Publishers: Austin. 1996.Sparks. District Judge. Hopwood vs. Texas State. August 19, 1994. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/hopwood/hoptxt.htm.Sowell, Thomas. American Business Institute for Public Policy Research. “Bad Count Against Education.” AEI on the problems. August 1997. http://www.aei.org/oti/oti7919.htm.