Resolution:
“All Affirmative Action programs in public colleges and universities that are based on ethnic-racial composition should be abolished."

For the affirmative:

Peter H. Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale University, where he served briefly as Deputy Dean. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1979, he was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1977-79), Director of the Washington Office of Consumers Union (1972-77), and consultant to the Center for Study of Responsive Law (1971-72). He also practiced law in New York City (1965-68) and holds degrees from Cornell (B.A. 1962), Harvard Law School (J.D. 1965), N.Y.U. Law School (Ll.M. in International Law 1966), and Harvard University (M.A. in Government 1969). In spring 2017, he is a visiting professor at Berkeley in the law and public policy schools, as he was in the previous three springs.

His major fields of teaching and research have been tort law; public policy; immigration, citizenship, and refugee law; groups, diversity, and law; and administrative law. He has published hundreds of articles on these and a broad range of other public policy topics in a wide variety of scholarly and popular journals. His newest book, A Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues That Divide Us, has just been published by Princeton University Press. It focuses on poverty, immigration, affirmative action, campaign finance, and accommodating religious exemptions from secular social policies.

Earlier books include Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (2014); Understanding America: The Anatomy of An Exceptional Nation (2008) (co-editor with James Q. Wilson); Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples (2006)(with Richard J. Zeckhauser); Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics (2006); Foundations of Administrative Law (editor, 2d ed., 2004) Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Harvard/Belknap, 2003); The Limits of Law: Essays on Democratic Governance (2000); and many others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


For the negative:

Michael Meyers, BA, JD, is president and executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. A Rutgers-trained lawyer, Meyers is the protégé of civil rights icon Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist whose studies the United States Supreme Court cited as the basis for its unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overruled the odious doctrine of “separate but equal”; the High Court decision declared “separate is inherently unequal” and unconstitutional whenever government requires separate facilities and treatment of students in the field of education on the sole basis of the child’s/student’s race (skin color). Meyers assumed his post at the helm of the New York Civil Rights Coalition in 1991 following his nine years on the national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—as the NAACP’s youngest ever Assistant National Director—and immediately after serving as Special Assistant to the Chancellor of Higher Education, with the New Jersey Department of Higher Education. Meyers is a former vice president and long time member of the executive committee and national board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on which he served for nearly 25 years. Meyers also served for years as the ACLU’s national Affirmative Action Officer, resigning after the ACLU achieved its affirmative action goals in staff hiring and board diversity. He served even longer on the board of directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). Nat Hentoff, the famed author, journalist and civil libertarian, has described Michael Meyers as “Long a civil rights and civil liberties lion.”