2/ After Bakke won his SCOTUS case in 1978 (which ended the use of *open* racial quotas in college admissions), he was finally accepted into UC Davis’ medical school. He graduated and eventually began practicing medicine. He kept a low profile and did not give interviews.
3/ Years later, the NY Times, still reeling from Bakke’s victory, published a long and glowing account of a “prosperous” UC Davis medical school graduate named Patrick Chavis, noting how he had benefited from the old school affirmative action quota system.
4/ The story of Dr. Chavis also appeared on television shows, and Senator Ted Kennedy called him a “perfect example” of affirmative action. It was even suggested that Dr. Chavis had accomplished more than Dr. Bakke, who graduated a few years after Chavis from UC-Davis.
Here is Dr. Chavis. Looks cute, doesn’t it? 
6/ But Dr. Chavis was not nice: he was a terrible and spectacularly incompetent doctor, and perhaps, if that’s possible, an even worse human being. If the Times reporter had done his job and asked just a little, he would have been heard.
7/ At the very least, the reporter could have at least bothered to go down to the courthouse and dig up records showing that Dr. Chavis had been sued for malpractice twenty-one times and had paid settlements on some of those requests.
8/ But when the NYT has a thesis as important as this, it usually doesn’t want to be hampered by conflicting evidence or cognitive dissonance.
9/ The most outstanding aspects of the history of the medical career of Dr. Chavis included botched operations at his clinic that killed patients and left others in permanent pain and, quite surprisingly, hid a patient in his home for two days after he nearly bled to death at his clinic. .
Patients later said they were afraid to report him because of his celebrity.
11/ With an obviously dead patient and a notoriously missing doctor on their hands, the California Medical Board of California finally acted. Later that year, they revoked Dr. Chavis’ license.
Special weight was given to this last article.
13/ A tape recording surfaced of Dr. Chavis singing “liar, liar, pants on fire” to his patients as they screamed in agony, an extremely idiosyncratic way, so to speak, of calming them down and expressing disbelief at his claims of unbearable pain
14/ All told, the Medical Board of California filed 90 charges of misconduct and “gross negligence”—probably fair to call it a swipe of the Hippocratic Oath—against “the perfect example” of affirmative action.
But wait, it actually gets weirder, PREDICTABLE, weirder.
Because, you know, racism.
16/ That’s right, the truly lousy doctor and even lousy human being, now, quite simply, Mr. Patrick Chavis, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his race card, blaming his bad fortune on a particularly virulent strain of structural oppression: “white envy.”
You’d think so, but no, this time the suspiciously quiet Times didn’t feel the need to send a reporter to Cali to capture the thoughts and feelings of its former front page.
18/ So what happened to Allan Bakke? Dr. Bakke is retired, ending his career as he began it, quietly and with integrity: as an anesthesiologist at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic.
Postscript: Patrick Chavis was killed by carjackers on the streets of Hawthorne, California in 2002 at the age of fifty. He had gone out for an ice cream cone.
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