In 1964, during the senate debate on the proposed civil rights act of that year, the bills floor manager, Hubert Humphrey, "assured the Senate that nothing in (Title VII of) the bill would permit any official or courtto require any employer or labor union to give prefferencial treatment to any minoryity group." (Lund, Reforming Affirmative Action in Employment) Whatever the intent of senator Humphrey may have been, "federal judges and buearucrats soon proved him wrong by using Title VII to create the elaborate system of quotas and preferences that we see all around us today. This transformation was accomplished through a series of Orwellian distortions of the law, none of which has ever been ratified by the Congress."(Lund) In the years since, affirmative action in its new form has extended its reach to include groups not historically considered disadvantaged, at

Affirmative action programs in university admissions are some of the most contested issues dividing young americans today. If affirmative action in the work place is a competetion for blue collar jobs and promotions, in education it is a function of admission to elite and highly selective undergraduate schools and graduate programs.

Schools, at the very top like Harvard or stanford, ecome institutions able to offer the very best black applicants a range of scholarships and other monies, soak up a huge portion of the relatively few blacks who score in the top range of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The unprepared and under-qualified state of these students often has disasterous effects on the affirmative action beneficiaries. Their graduation rates are considerably lower than their white or asian counterparts. Even worse, many of those who become discouraged when they find they cannot compete would probably have been successful at a less demanding school. "for example, of the 317 black students admitted to UC berkely in 1985, all were admitted under affirmative action criteria rather than academic qualifications. Those students had an average SAT score of 952 compared to the national average of 900 among all black students. However, their SAT scores were well below UC Berkeleys average of nearly 1200. More than 70 percent of t

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