Case Study
A graduate program at an elite research university has been criticized for admitting predominantly white students. The chair of the admissions committee takes these criticisms to heart. She believes that there are several reasons to admit a class with greater racial diversity. First, she believes it is important to use her position of privilege and power to do what she can to correct for past injustices that have held back people of color. She also believes that it is better for the graduate program to have more perspectives represented, and so there is a great value in admitting students from a wider variety of backgrounds.
With this goal of making the program more diverse and inclusive in mind, she introduces a new policy for evaluating applicants. She is wary of implicit bias affecting the way faculty rank applicants. So, instead of asking the faculty on the committee to rank applicants according to the strength of their dossiers, she separates the applications into two groups. The first group contains white applicants and the second group contains applicants who are people of color. She asks the faculty on the committee to rank the applicants in both piles and then admits the top five students from each pile.
-Is this affirmative action policy morally good? Is there anything morally bad about it? Is there anything else this chair should be doing to counteract the white privilege of some applicants?

Question

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The Answer of Case Study
A graduate program at an elite research university has been criticized for admitting predominantly white students. The chair of the admissions committee takes these criticisms to heart. She believes that there are several reasons to admit a class with greater racial diversity. First, she believes it is important to use her position of privilege and power to do what she can to correct for past injustices that have held back people of color. She also believes that it is better for the graduate program to have more perspectives represented, and so there is a great value in admitting students from a wider variety of backgrounds.
With this goal of making the program more diverse and inclusive in mind, she introduces a new policy for evaluating applicants. She is wary of implicit bias affecting the way faculty rank applicants. So, instead of asking the faculty on the committee to rank applicants according to the strength of their dossiers, she separates the applications into two groups. The first group contains white applicants and the second group contains applicants who are people of color. She asks the faculty on the committee to rank the applicants in both piles and then admits the top five students from each pile.
-Is this affirmative action policy morally good? Is there anything morally bad about it? Is there anything else this chair should be doing to counteract the white privilege of some applicants?

Case Study A Graduate Program at an Elite Research University Has Been