Let’s remind ourselves of good in affirmative action

More than a decade after his death, Arthur Fletcher’s contribution to society is embroiled in controversy.

In 1969, this civil servant laid the blueprint for affirmative action as applied by the first Republican administration to accept it. As President Richard Nixon’s assistant secretary of labor, he implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan, which required companies to make efforts to hire minorities and women in order to receive federal contracts in naval shipping yards.

In the years that followed, the principle would spread and morph in all sorts of institutional settings. And it would form one of the core grievances of the new right and become a prominent theme of racist invective.

Americans better get ready for a fresh chapter in the war over affirmative action. The New York Times reported last week on an internal hiring memo within the Justice Department and surmised a new project was afoot to sue universities found to be discriminating by race in their admissions practices. Discriminating against white applicants, that is.

That’s all it took. Mere mention, even speculatively, of race-based affirmative action policies in college admissions and the ax that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be grinding for them and the culture war machine wound itself up to rehash a debate we’ve had regularly for decades now.

It was that way during Fletcher’s lifetime.

Fletcher was a rare breed, an African-American Republican. The son of a Buffalo Soldier, he served under four presidents: Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He died at 80 in 2005.

Fletcher hated the discord that surrounded affirmative action. He never intended it to be about diversity, although he well understood the need. He didn’t intend for his model to be focused on creating multicultural student bodies or for it to include quotas or provisions that have since been declared unconstitutional by numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

What he wanted to ensure that racial bias did not close access to jobs that received government funding.

“I would be wasting my time trying to pursue some la-la land where discrimination doesn’t exist,” Fletcher told me in 2003. “I’m more concerned with how we go over it, around it and through it.”

Yet, in many respects, we’re closer to the version of the program that Fletcher envisioned at its impetus than the ones that followed.

We live in a globally integrated time. Students must be prepared for it. And they will never get there if their only experiences are among peers who are of the same race, class and particular set of cultural influences.

Let affirmative action, in the narrowly tailored way it is practiced today, be scrutinized and held to account.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about the value to society and the justice of colleges admitting the children of alumni by legacy. Or of the rich buying their children admission to Harvard. Funny, no one is complaining about those practices.

Fletcher had a good concept, one that was based on fairness, opportunity and national interests.

So bring on the debate about affirmative action — so we can remind ourselves why it is such a good idea.