ll (Woods 102). Also, James Q. Wilson in the winter 1996 issue of The New Republic takes affirmative action to mean the selecting of persons based on their group membership (23).
             Nicholas Lehman writes that affirmative action today refers to " stuff that helps black people." By this, he says that affirmative action today has come to mean everything from "preferential college admissions to the way news is covered to what's hung in museums to corporate promotional practices" (84).
             According to Nicholas Lehman, affirmative action started out as Executive Order 10925. Lyndon Johnson, the incoming vice President asked Hobart Taylor Jr., the lawyer son of one of his friends, to work on a draft of an executive order that would ban discriminatory hiring by Federal contractors. Taylor later said that he "was searching for something that would give a sense of positiveness to performance under executive order, and I was torn between the words 'positive action' and the words 'affirmative action.' . . . And I took 'affirmative action' because it was alliterative" (40).
             Even during Johnson's proposal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the issue of racial quotas was controversial. Said then-Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, "... I know what will happen if the bill is passed. I know what will happen if there is a choice between hiring a white man or hiring a Negro both having equal qualifications. I know who will get the job. It will not be the white man" (Lehman 40).
             The people who seek to abolish affirmative action claim that more qualified students are being displaced by less-qualified students. But there are no more or less
             qualified students, only students who can benefit from attending a university such as Michigan get a chance, and no one knows in advance who they are.
             The opinions that accompany the various Supreme Court cases concerning affirmative action have been perplexing, and, at times, contradictory. Woods Geraldi...