By Charleston Wang

(Note from Editor: Today the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the highly charged issue of affirmative action in Abigail Fisher v University of Texas. Below is a blog by attorney Charleston Wang who suggests an interesting compromise.)

Recently, the city was jolted by statistics that the percentage of African American students, faculty, and administrators at the University of Cincinnati has been declining. These are followed by protests at the University of Missouri.

The deeper and more expansive question then is what is happening to equal opportunity in education at our universities, and more specifically where is affirmative action going in our nation?

When I was in the first year of law school in 1978, the buzz on campus was University of California v. Bakke.

Allan Bakke was not the first person to challenge affirmative action and will not be the last. Indeed, California, Michigan and Washington have amended their state constitutions to ban the practice of affirmative action. At this moment, there is a coordinated political movement to once and for all end affirmative action through court cases. It should be no surprise that Fisher v. University of Texas is back before the United States Supreme Court for the second time.

I follow with enthusiasm and distress in equal measure of the fact that a number of Asian American groups are joining Abigail Fisher in her effort to get the High Court to strike down affirmative action. A reason is that statistics show that many Asian Americans with perfect academic numerical scores have been rejected by the top universities and they blame their misfortune on affirmative action. The irony and tragedy is that simultaneously the percentage representation of African Americans is still lagging as is the case at the University of Cincinnati.

In the face of hard statistical data, will Fisher prevail this time? A question worthy of the difficulty of a Gordian Knot. Some people are convinced that the time has come for affirmative action. But wait – my suggestion to all universities which use a higher admission standard against Asian American and whose other minority enrollment still lags is for the university to (1) use strict quantitative performance admission when admitting high school graduates in the top half of the academic bell curve, and (2) retain affirmative action as we know it in the other half of the curve. This is called the Tao of Splitting the Bell into Two Equal Halves.

Wise as King Solomon was, he did not get the chance to divide a baby into two, but the academic curve of college applicants is something different! This Gaussian bell, of course, has for the abscissa, the quantitative score of applicants for the first year class and the ordinate gives the number of persons with a certain score. With the stroke of the pen, this bell can be divided into two parts fairly down the distribution median! Problem solved because it appears of me that the work of affirmative action is not yet complete.