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The June 1998 episode of Price of Paradise brought together two guests to debate the future of affirmative action, using admissions at the University of Hawaii Law School as a concrete reference point. Joanne Punu, Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions at the UH Law School, argued that diversity in legal education remained an unfinished goal and that race-conscious admissions policies were still necessary to achieve it; she expressed concern that the Fifth Circuit's Hopwood decision, if upheld by the Supreme Court, would move the country back before that goal was reached. Mary George, a former State Senator, maintained that affirmative action was, at its core, a form of discrimination, and that equality—not diversity—should be the governing standard; she contended that improving selection criteria rather than granting group-based exemptions was the appropriate remedy for past inequality. The two agreed that testing was imperfect but drew different conclusions from that fact. The episode turned on whether diversity in professional education is itself a sufficient legal and moral justification for differential treatment.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
