Letter: Affirmative action a moral, not a legal question

When I first arrived at Duke in the summer of l958, African-American students were not part of the University community. Only after some years of agitation did their exclusion end, the chair of the Trustees having earlier announced that Duke would neither be the first nor the last institution to integrate. Educational apartheid was the rule in many of this country's schools at that time, a point overlooked by James B. Duke professor of psycholical and brain sciences John Staddon in his March 21 essay in the Daily Dialogue.

I am sure Staddon is also aware of the role that famalial background and social traditions play in securing admission to colleges such as Duke's. Given a longstanding pattern of discrimination, a failure to adopt remediating admissions policies would simply perpetuate the pattern. Whether affirmative action improves education is a secondary issue. I can cite evidence contrary to that on which Staddon relies, but this would miss the main point: until ethnic parity in educational and economic opportunies is achieved, those who have been the victims of discrimination are owed the minor advantages affirmative action affords. The issue is a moral one, I would argue, irrelevant to the legalistic challenges Staddon raises.