The 1997-98 Supreme Court term doesn't even begin for another two months, and already the New York Times is using its news pages to instruct the justices about their most important pending case. This fall, the court will hear Piscataway Board of Education v. Taxman, the notorious affirmative- action litigation involving a highschool business-education teacher who lost her job on grounds of "diversity," solely because she is white.
This case is a no-brainer. Sharon Taxman is going to keep her job. And if the court issues its ruling on any ground of principle, workplace affirmative- action programs all over the country will be subject to reverse- discrimination claims.
Can't have that. Enter the Times and its Supreme Court correspondent, Linda Greenhouse. Her August 4 story is essentially a long memo to Sandra Day O'Connor, always the Supreme Court's swing vote on affirmative action. Greenhouse's sources in America's leading law schools admire O'Connor's " subtle, fine-grained position" -- like that of retired justice Lewis Powell, whose convoluted opinion in the case that began the Supreme Court's reversal of affirmative action, 1978's University of California Regents v. Bakke, Greenhouse obviously admires and hopes O'Connor will emulate.
The New York Times is enamored of Bakke because the case invented the "diversity" excuse for racial preferences. Indeed, though Powell's decision allowed Allan Bakke finally to enter medical school, defenders of racial preferences have long held up one Dr. Patrick Chavis, who supposedly took Bakke's original spot, as a model of why "diversity" in university admissions is a good thing. Chavis, you see, became an ob-gyn in the poor L.A. suburb of Compton, while Bakke went off to white-bread Rochester, Minn. Sen. Edward Kennedy and Tom Hayden, among others, have been fond of making this comparison.
But as Jeff Jacoby reported in the Boston Globe last week, Chavis had his medical license suspended earlier this summer by the Medical Board of California. Three of his liposuction patients suffered massive bleeding after Chavis operated on them. One died. Looks like the diversity crowd will need to find a new poster boy.