The Case Against Affirmative Action 1/14/17

David Sacks' and Peter Thiel's "The Case Against Affirmative Action" is an article about the negatives of affirmative action in Stanford and how the real problem it is that people are trying to solve a problem that no longer exists; the problem being that admissions officers are racist when accepting students into Stanford, they're not. The authors state that Stanford's admissions office cannot right the wrongs of history, but its mission is still to admit the best class of students it can find. The sole criteria being individual achievement; not just grades and test scores but also "accomplishments in athletics, music, student government, drama, school clubs and other extracurricular efforts." They feel that race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference should not have a place on this list; "these are traits, not achievements." Sacks and Thiel say that if diversity were really the goal, students should get admitted based on unusual characteristics, not based on race. The authors ended their article by making a good point. "A Stanford without affirmative action will be a Stanford in which the question of who belongs here will no longer need to be answered. It will no longer need to be answered because it will no longer need to be asked."

I absolutely love the way Sacks and Thiel ended the article. Affirmative action has caused and promoted discrimination to the extent that students in Stanford are questioning who belongs in the school and who is there due to some sort of diversity matrix. Without affirmative action people will know that all the students at Stanford genuinely deserve to be there. After doing research on the issue of affirmative action, I feel that affirmative action was established with the correct mindset but it was carried out wrong. I think diversity is very important; it helps show people different perspectives on things. But there are other ways to achieve diversity without basing it on race. There will always be racist people in the world but forcing a school to admit students, who may not even belong in the school based on their achievements, because they come from a minority is not right and it's definitely not necessary. We already have diversity, in schools and in work places; even our president is from a minority group and he became president because he was most qualified not based on his race. While affirmative action was developed to level out the playing field, it gives way to discrimination and makes it unfair to the people who are denied a spot in school or work because a person of a minority took their spot, and not because he/she is more qualified. Like Sacks and Thiel said, "It is a strange cure that generates its own disease." Affirmative action was put in place to diversify and include minorities but when students start to suspect that other students were admitted because they come from a minority, the very racism and discrimination that affirmative action was created to stop, occurs. It gives the impression that minority groups just can't compete, and that's not true.