A Conflict of Principles

""No state. shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So says the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a document held dear by Carl Cohen, a professor of philosophy and longtime champion of civil liberties who has devoted most of his adult life to the University of Michigan. So when Cohen discovered, after encountering some resistance, how his school, in its admirable wish to increase minority enrollment, was actually practicing a form of racial discrimination--calling it "affirmative action"--he found himself at odds with his longtime allies and colleagues in an effort to defend the equal treatment of the races at his university. In A Conflict of Principles Cohen tells the story of what happened at Michigan, how racial preferences were devised and implemented there, and what was at stake in the heated and divisive controversy that ensued. He gives voice to the judicious and seldom heard liberal argument against affirmative action in college admission policies. In the early 1970s, as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, Cohen vigorously supported programs devised to encourage the recruitment