Letters Letters to the Editor Discrimination not the issue in admissions lawsuit You are to be applauded for the full coverage you have given to the affirmative action suit. At the outset I hope we can agree that places for freshmen are a limited resource. Accordingly, it must be allocated in some fashion.
Allocation necessarily implies the making of distinctions, the primary meaning of discrimination.
Indeed, making reasoned, open-minded distinctions must be a primary goal of the Michigan experience. What is at issue is not discrimination but rather the criteria by which the allocations are determined and the relevance to the task of those criteria. Let us acknowledge that each of these criteria involves discrimination in both senses of the word. Thus an a priori judgment that discrimination is an absolute evil in every case clearly doesn't yield a workable policy for the real world. A second factor, however, has not been mentioned so far in the discussions you reported.