COLUMN LEFT : Affirmative Action? Not on Thomas : The concept of preference is due a reexamination after this nomination is rejected.

Suddenly, it’s all the rage to benefit from affirmative action and then denounce it afterward. But unlike Clarence Thomas and other members of my generation who want to shut the doors that society opened to us, I want to declare myself a grateful and unapologetic recipient of affirmative action.

When I applied to college and graduate school, affirmative action did not exist. But for most middle-class women, the problem was not obtaining an education, it was gaining a chance to use it. Sputnik, more than feminism, opened university doors to American women. In the late 1950s, Cold War fears sparked a national crusade to turn schoolchildren--boys and girls--into scientific Cold Warriors. In the 1960s, universities happily accepted young female undergraduates. The problem was that few places seemed thrilled about hiring us afterward.

I’m especially unapologetic because the obstacles we encountered were formidable. As daughters of the ‘50s, we quietly regarded the hidden injuries of gender as personal problems. With no available language, we simply called them “life.” Later, they went by other names: rape, sexual harassment and sexual discrimination.

I’m not sorry I entered the job market just as employers began recruiting minority males and women of all races. By then, there were plenty of women and they were plenty good. It was a common adage that a woman had to do twice as well to get half as far. If I was the best woman for the job, I figured they all had done pretty well.

Judge Clarence Thomas, Richard Rodriguez, author of “Hunger of Memory,” and Stephen Carter, author of “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” feel differently. They all have argued that affirmative action stigmatizes an individual. (Is there a gender difference here? Do men feel less adequate when they receive help?) Colleagues, they maintain, rarely regard an affirmative-action recruit as an equal. Maybe so. Carter, a conservative law professor at Yale University, worries about being viewed as the “best black,” rather than as the best legal scholar in his field. But that is the price one pays as a pioneer. Until there is a critical mass, one needs to develop a thick skin. The “best black,” in any case, is likely to tower over the hordes of mediocre scholars.

This is not to suggest that there are no problems with affirmative action. Carter argues--correctly, I think--that affirmative action mostly benefits the middle class, rather than the truly disadvantaged. Within academia, this is certainly true. As hundreds of universities compete for the same “different voices,” they simply reshuffle scholastic stars whose salaries rival those of major-league athletes.

To help those most in need, Carter offers an alternative model that he calls an “affirmative-action pyramid.” The role of preference declines as one moves upward. The greatest help, for example, is given to those in the primary and secondary grades. At the university level, Carter suggests that “preferential financial assistance . . . might actually be a more logical and efficient solution than preferential admission.” When one’s training is completed, he argues, “the case for preference evaporates. The time has come, finally, to stand or fall on what one has actually achieved.” Then, as one moves up the career ladder, all preference should disappear. It is time to “stand proudly on one’s own record. The preference cannot go on forever. Sooner or later, talent and preparation, rather than skin color (or gender) must tell.”

Which brings us to the nomination of Clarence Thomas. By Carter’s definition, President Bush has engaged in precisely the kind of affirmative action that he--along with Thomas, Carter, and Rodriguez--has publicly opposed. Affirmative action gave Thomas the opportunity to obtain an education and a law career. At the age of 43, however, it is Thomas’ “talent and preparation”--not his life story or skin color--that should be evaluated for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas has neither distinguished himself as a judge nor proved himself an especially original thinker. Even worse, he has repudiated so many of his long-held principles that many rightly questioned his integrity.

Here is an opportunity to rethink affirmative action. Let us begin by condemning President Bush’s hypocritical nomination of an unqualified and undistinguished candidate for Supreme Court justice. Then, let’s have a serious debate about how to assist the truly disadvantaged.