OPINION: It's time for a pivot on affirmative action

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of "Debating Affirmative Action: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Inclusion."

As colleges gear up for the new fall, their incoming freshmen classes will, once again, reflect the work of admissions officers committed to affirmative action. But this fall, colleges are also going to have to deal with increased scrutiny of their affirmative action programs.

Conservatives have opposed affirmative action in higher education ever since the 1978 Bakke case, when the Supreme Court held that race or ethnic background may be deemed a "plus" for an applicant seeking college admission. But these days, the most telling criticism is coming from centrists and liberals, who believe that affirmative action - which in higher education goes under the neutral-sounding name of diversity - has become unfair to the poor, and frequently fails to reach those whom it was originally intended to help the most: African-Americans victimized by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

For affirmative action's defenders, this is a decisive moment. In the past, they were quick to write off conservative critics as closet racists. But this is hard to do for centrists and liberals, who continue to believe there are students who need a boost when it comes to getting into college.

Typical of the criticism now being directed against affirmative action is a blistering essay, "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," that Virginia's Democratic senator, James Webb, published last month in The Wall Street Journal. At the core of Webb's essay is his belief that affirmative action now treats whites as a privileged monolith who in the past uniformly benefited from discrimination.

This view of white people, Webb points out, is historically inaccurate - even in the South. That doesn't mean, he insists, that America should abandon affirmative action. African-Americans still suffering from the vestiges of government-sanctioned racism should benefit from affirmative action. But the directives working on their behalf need to take in the vulnerabilities of many poor and working-class white Americans, too.

Webb's concerns over the misuse of affirmative action are, significantly, similar to those voiced by Barack Obama before he became president. Like Webb, Obama worried that color had become synonymous with the need for special academic breaks, and he sought to distance himself from that equation. He wanted the country to make subtler distinctions about who should benefit from affirmative action.

In a May 2007 interview on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," then-Sen. Obama was asked if his daughters should receive affirmative action preferences when they applied to college. "I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged," Obama replied. Then he added, "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

A few years earlier, Henry Louis Gates, the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American Studies department, had also expressed concerns about affirmative action's ability to help those most in need. At a meeting of Harvard's black alumni, Gates noted that a majority of Harvard's black graduates were West Indian and African immigrants or their children (and to a lesser extent children of biracial parents), while only about a third of Harvard's black students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in the United States, the descendants of slaves.

Gates' point was not that Harvard should start discriminating against immigrants. His point was rather that Harvard could not be content with the way its affirmative action programs were working out. Affirmative action at Harvard was not primarily benefiting those whose historic disadvantages it was designed to compensate for.

How do we deal with this situation? The most obvious solution is to put more emphasis on the socioeconomic status of all students when it comes to college and university admissions by making sure that, regardless of their color, students who have suffered from poor and overcrowded schools are given special consideration.

With only 3 percent of the students in the most selective colleges and universities in the country coming from the bottom socioeconomic quarter, such a policy would go a long way toward righting current wrongs and the racial antagonisms affirmative action now fosters.

The problem is getting institutions of higher learning to break with the past. In their landmark 2009 study on race and class in elite colleges, "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal," Princeton University professors Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford made a horrifying discovery about the role income currently plays in college admissions: "The admission preference accorded to low-income students appears to be reserved largely for nonwhite students."

Why? Taking in low-income, white students has no direct payoff. When colleges admit more poor white students, their overall SAT scores, an important measure of status, go down. But their scholarship expenses rise, and their diversity numbers, the single greatest indicator to the public that they are socially sensitive institutions, remain unchanged.

What it will take for colleges to revamp their current affirmative action policies is anybody's guess. A change of heart is always a possibility. So are the rulings of a conservative Supreme Court, which in cases involving the public schools of Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., has taken a dim view of using racial assignments of any sort to increase diversity.

But in the near future, the most likely source of change will come from the growing influence of centrist and liberal critics of affirmative action - those who believe that the policy, if it can be reformed, still has a vital role to play in democratizing American education.