Take a few sticks of butter, some chocolate and a can of frosting, mix in a few hundred angry protestors, top with a dollop of racial tension and heat at high temperature until combustion, and you get the recipe for disaster that was UC-Berkeley last week.

Seizing the opportunity to satirize the new pro-affirmative action legislation that was under debate in the California state legislature last week, the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) enthusiastically held what they termed an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” last Tuesday. The sale was intended to protest Senate Bill 185, which has since been passed by the state legislature and now awaits Governor Jerry Brown’s approval. The bill would allow the state university system to consider race and gender when making admissions decisions.

Using the weapon of satire, the bake sale charged differential prices to consumers based on ethnicity and sex. White students seeking to purchase yummy cookies and cupcakes were charged $2, while Asians had to fork over a mere $1.50, Hispanics $1, African Americans $0.75 and Native Americans a quarter. Women of all races received a 25-cent discount (the noble efforts of several Native-American women to abscond with truckloads of free cookies were, alas, rebuffed.)

If attention was the BCR’s goal, then it succeeded rather brilliantly. Not surprisingly, the bake sale immediately aroused the hysteria of UC-Berkeley students and administrators alike, triggering instantaneous paroxysms of outrage from the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, various pro-affirmative action student groups and a horde of counter-protestors who all wore black and pretended to die en masse in front of the bake sale table — all of which was, of course, precisely the kind of sensationalist response the bake sale was designed to elicit. The mainstream media soon swooped in to gleefully cherry-pick the most deliciously nasty quotes from the ensuing shout-fest, and voila: instant, glorious national attention for the Berkeley College Republicans.

If a similar event ever occurs at Stanford, I would hope that we could be better than that — that we would respond with reasoned argument rather than substance-less shouting to a provocation clearly designed to spark the latter, that we could take advantage of a rare opportunity to have a tough, painful but ultimately rewarding discussion about race and class and that we would be confident enough in the soundness of our arguments to conduct them in a civil manner.

But until then, let’s start by addressing the BCR’s main point (and how to begin the conversation that Cal could have had last week). Is taking account of race and gender in university admissions decisions really analogous to, and as manifestly unjust as, differential cookie pricing? It depends, I think, on what precisely affirmative action is designed to achieve.

If we take at face value Justice Powell’s calculus in Bakke, which held that affirmative action is legal insofar as it promotes the state’s justified interest in improving the quality of learning within university walls, then race and gender would seem to be reasonable factors to include in a holistic admissions review. Students at a university composed solely of Asian females or Hispanic males or whites or whoever would surely suffer from an impaired ability to learn about worlds and perspectives different from their own — worlds and perspectives invariably colored by race, experience and culture.

If we consider affirmative action a vehicle for righting past wrongs or redressing the lingering effects of bygone discrimination, however, the logical landscape changes a bit. Race, I think, is not necessarily the most accurate or useful proxy for disadvantage. Some African-American, Hispanic and Native-American families have happily broken through the walls that were once (and, in many cases, are still) imposed on them by society. There are now a fair number of doctors, engineers, lawyers and businesspeople of minority descent, and many of them have provided their children with a terrific education, a happy and stable upbringing and productive extracurricular opportunities. If we consider affirmative action a means to help those in need, these children do not require the same assistance that their less fortunate minority compatriots do — or, for that matter, less fortunate Caucasian and Asian ones. Stamping all racial minorities, regardless of actual need, with the same badge is thus not a particularly efficient or effective way to help.

A better and more finely tuned policy, if intended to balance an unbalanced playing field, would take a family’s economic condition, the employment status of the parents, the child’s quality of schooling and other relevant factors into account, rather than race. Imagine a Venn diagram with two intersecting circles, one labeled “minority students” and the other labeled “students in need.” These circles would overlap, but they would not be equal in size or coterminous. Now imagine a third circle, labeled “students helped by affirmative action.” I would propose that a just policy must place this circle precisely over the “students in need” circle, capturing all minority students (and white students) who need help and leaving out those, of whichever race, who don’t.

Miles would welcome your comments or suggestions on this week’s column, as it is an especially controversial topic. Feel free to continue the conversation at milesu1(at)stanford.edu.