DeFunis v. Odegaard and Jewish Ambivalence on Affirmative Action

The case involves Marco DeFunis Jr., a white, Phi Beta Kappa college graduate who was denied admission to the University of Washington Law School in 1971. DeFunis's college grades and Law School Aptitude Test scores were higher than those of 36 minority students—blacks, Chicanos, Indians —who were accepted by the law school. DeFunis claims he was the victim of reverse racial discrimination. He asserts that racial discrimination of any kind is a violation of his constitutional right to equal protection of the law. The university claims that “benign” discrimination—discrimination to aid historically disadvantaged minorities—is within the law. It asserts…that it is the duty of the law school both to provide a diversified student body and to help correct the appalling shortage of minority lawyers in the nation.

[The case] has brought the Court and the nation to a painful point in history…. The heart of American ‐ ideology is equality of opportunity and success based on individual merit. From its inception, this nation fought to undo the notion of aristocracy, at least in principle. At the same time the nation was discriminating officially and viciously against blacks and other brown‐skinned groups, denying them a decent education, a decent wage, decent housing and, most of all, equal opportunity.

. . . [N]ow the Court, like much of the nation, finds itself caught between two of its most cherished ideals; It must decide which is more important: to continue to do everything possible to correct the effects of centuries of racial discrimination, or to remain faithful to the American ideal of a strict merit system.

The question is so painful that it has split the traditional liberal alliance of labor, Jewish and civil rights groups. Suddenly most of the Jewish and labor organizations are joined with big business in opposing civil‐rights groups, while the Government itself is split from agency to agency. Indeed, the question is so painful that it has, on occasion, brought to the surface usually repressed feelings of racism and anti‐Semitism.

DeFunis himself is a Jew, though he does not argue that the university discriminated against him because of that. The reason for all the emotionalism over the case is the accumulated resentment, of every white man who believes that a black or a woman was given preference over him in getting a job or a promotion. Business has always disliked affirmative action…. But now business has been joined for the first time by hard‐core labor, predominantly white and male, which fears that affirmative action would take its jobs away. Jews have deserted the old civil rights coalition because they see the DeFunis case as a matter of quotas, and quotas are anathema to Jews because they were used for so many centuries to keep Jews out of universities.