Allan Bakke's Argument For College Admissions

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Now determined to earn admission, Allan reapplied to the University of California Davis again in 1974. This time, he was interviewed twice. Once by a student interviewer who recommended Bakke's admission, and he was interviewed a second time by the chairman of the admissions council Dr. George Lowrey himself who reported that Bakke “had very definite opinions which were based more on his personal viewpoints than on a study of the whole problem” and that “He was very unsympathetic to the concept of recruiting minority students." This earned Bakke a poor evaluation, and for the second time, he was denied admission from the University of California Davis. After being rejected from the medical school for a second time, Allan decided to bring the …show more content…

The case gained popularity across the United States due to the highly controversial topic that it presented to the highest ranking court in the country. Many americans supported Allan Bakke in his argument that the universities policies were both unfair and unjust, denying him of his rights as an american citizen, while many others supported the university's special admissions policy because it allowed for students of minorities to have a guaranteed acceptance into the university. The highly anticipated oral argument of the case took place on October 12 and presented a variety of valid arguments that had to be carefully considered by each of the six justices. The court found that the University’s special admissions program did in fact operate as a racially discriminative program because the applicants of the minorities were rated against one another. Four of the justices sided with Bakke, ruling that the universities admissions policy did violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while the remaining four justices ruled that the race is a permissible criteria to use in higher education admissions. The Supreme Court ordered that Allan Bakke be admitted to the University of California Davis Medical School, and allowed the university to continue to use race as one of the factors in its affirmative action policies. However, the court decided that the University's policy reserving 16 out of 100 seats for racial minorities was both unfair, and no longer permitted because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth

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