38:38 Well, let's say this. To begin with I actually had something to do with the implementation of what was known as affirmative action but it really is not like what the Supreme Court was dealing with recently in fact the opinion written by Justice Roberts more closely approximates the original conceptualization of affirmative action In the late mid 1960s when I was at UCLA, we had a situation where we had 145 full-time black students. 73 undergrad...73 grad students and 72 undergrads and that was fewer than they'd have in UCLA in the 1930's That was out of some 60 thousand plus full time student
39:28 So what we looked at was general admissions, which were stated in the catalog as a competitive assessment of grade point average aptitude tests and or other factors that indicated an ability to succeed. That's what they were using at major universities around the country to get athletes in. We said, in conjunction with other minorities, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans et cetera, Why don't we use this same standard for everybody and not just limited to athletes. So if you've got somebody who has a demonstrated situation which may be predicated on race but produced the result that was race neutral
40:16 Let them in. You want to see what they have done, did they have to work? Was the situation they grew up in one that imposed a hardship that they overcame? If you let them in will they maximize the fallout to their respective communities?" Now at that time California's constitution adopted in 1851 had a specific mandate for the University of California to deliver leadership training in all ethnic groups, all fields science industry you name it. So what happened is we put this in place now somewhere around 1971 we had some black students up in UC well trying to get in UC Berkeley Medical School they party too much
41:11 They came from affluent black families and they did not have anything that came out of their black experience that gave them a hardship. And they should've done just as well as the mainstream student when it came to grade point average and aptitude test, so they did not want this application of other factors to indicate an ability to succeed that it worked so well in terms of producing academic successes. What they wanted was just to have one factor, meaning they're black without anything else that's race neutral coming out of it and what they sought was to get away from what they were calling a political test which was what does everybody else get out of you going to school? In other words the university itself
42:09 society in general, your own people. What do they get out of this when you go to school? In other words if you demonstrated by the things you have involved yourself with, by the hardships you've overcome that you will keep pushing for other people and not just be selfish well they didn't want that so they collaborated with UC Berkeley and some of the white students and what they wanted was just that in on essentially a quota, which would say because you are black you have the highest scores amongst the black applicants. But without anything else being demonstrated, you do not match regular admissions
42:54 See, before that the affirmative action admittees actually matched the ordinary admission standards. That's why they used to have this thing about what are your extracurricular activities when you turned in an application to a college or university? That said they completely disregarded the California Constitution. They phrased things in a language that set up Bakke, that said reverse discrimination is a no-no—which it's not. I mean it is and should be—and that we and other parts of the state were trying to keep them from doing. We said this is bogus don't go there you're going to set up a negative precedent
43:42 So since then, the language and the way the whole issue has been cast is not the way it started. Which is these students match regular admission criteria just take one aspect of that admission process that is ordinarily reserved for athletes and apply across the board now it's simply somebody gets in because they were black interestingly enough Clarence Thomas was admitted to Yale Law School under an affirmative action program. I didn't, I got in through the front door and same thing with law school and i had such high scores all across that they were trying to recruit me in various places so they could bring me in to set up the parameters for
44:31 the new kind of affirmative action program. Interestingly enough, Clarence Thomas got in a little academic difficulty at Yale and he seems to have spent his first summer between being a first year law student and then second going around the country speaking against the affirmative action programs that he got in under So what we have seen over the years is a complete misstatement of the concept. And in actuality, what Justice Roberts says in his majority opinion Black students, brown students, red students, yellows students were saying back in the 60's was what we wanted as affirmative action. So the clock has been turned back and a lot of nonsense has been stripped out of the way because I don't think it right to select somebody in because of what their color is without showing that they have some negative impact on their circumstances and then they've overcome it