Affirmative action found its way back onto The Daily Californian’s front page Tuesday — this time without the help of a satirical bake sale.
For those of you who aren’t up to date on the latest Proposition 209 news: Students staged a protest on Monday outside a San Francisco courthouse as appeals court judges heard a challenge to Prop. 209, the 1996 measure that banned affirmative action at California’s public institutions. Protesters chanted slogans like “You say Jim Crow, we say hell no!”
Many students at UC Berkeley objected to the student government’s endorsement of the protest, a reminder that affirmative action continues to divide the campus.
Those who advocate the repeal of Prop. 209 are making an extremely weak case to the public, and preposterous comparisons between the Jim Crow South and race-blind admissions policies hardly strengthen it. They could and should be making a substantially more compelling argument.
Nearly all justifications for granting racial preferences in college admissions can be sorted into two broad categories. The first is a case for leveling the playing field — the idea that because racism has done profound harm to minority groups, the only way to ensure that they enjoy equality of opportunity is to give them a boost in the admissions process. The second argument is that a diverse student body enriches everyone’s educational experience.
The level playing field argument has dominated campus discussion at UC Berkeley. Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said in a statement that “The playing field will really only be level once Prop. 209 is repealed.” Salih Muhammad, chair of UC Berkeley’s black student union, said during the Prop 209 protest “we believe this is the court’s opportunity to rectify past wrongs.” Back when the bake sale controversy was burning last semester, this was also affirmative action supporters’ leading defense of their position. Berkeley Law Professor David Oppenheimer’s Op-Ed in the Daily Cal, which suggests that affirmative action be used to reverse the effects of Republican policies that discriminate against African-Americans, is just one example.
It’s surprising that the level playing field argument is so popular on campus even though the Supreme Court rejected it in the 1978 case Bakke v. Regents, just 14 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Supreme Court has allowed affirmative action programs at public institutions to continue — but only “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.
Many of my peers are suspicious of the level playing field argument for affirmative action, as am I. Thirty-seven percent of UC Berkeley undergraduates are eligible for Pell Grants, 53 percent are female, and only around a third are caucasian — this is hardly a citadel of privileged white males, or of students who have not faced adversity. UC Berkeley students recognize that race-based affirmative action policies would necessarily make it harder for white and Asian students to get into Berkeley by displacing them with less qualified, less represented minorities.
Many, myself included, have trouble understanding why admissions officers can’t best evaluate the level of adversity a student faced on an individual basis — considering factors like a student’s income level, the quality of the high school attended and whether his or her parents went to college. Berkeley students are suspicious of using race as a proxy for anything, including opportunity. After all, 86 percent of African-American students at top U.S. colleges (the majority of which practice affirmative action) are from middle or upper middle-class families.
The level playing field argument goes against Berkeley students’ very nature — they are hard workers, they believe in competitive meritocracy and they are wary of giving anyone an unfair advantage.
How can affirmative action supporters modify their reasoning to have a better hope of convincing affirmative action skeptics? By using the only justification for affirmative action the Supreme Court has found constitutionally acceptable: that interacting with people of different races and ethnic backgrounds broadens everyone’s intellectual horizons. Prop. 209 opponents must make the case that their position is in the best interests of everyone on campus, not just in the interests of underrepresented minorities.
Berkeley students care about diversity. They recognize that the disproportionately low representation of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans on campus weakens our institution. Affirmative action proponents should leverage students’ commitment to diversity and de-emphasize their case for a level playing field, which was rejected by the Supreme Court 34 years ago and sounds, to many students, like reverse discrimination.
Everyone on campus wishes the student body were more racially diverse. The challenge for affirmative action proponents should be to convince people — including me — that our interest in having a diverse campus outweighs the ugliness of racial preferences.
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Affirmative action in general doesn’t make any sense to me. Look at my picture- I look white, right? My Dad is white, but my Mom is Filipino. My Mom is also Spanish and Chinese. My Dad is German, Irish and Norwegian. What box do I check? Modern society in the U.S. is already a very diverse place, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m not worried about not getting enough exposure to the wealth and richness that a diverse culture has to offer, because living here, we are surrounded by it. Race should not be a factor in deciding who gets accepted into a university. Yes, we want to see minorities and women rise above the odds, but that’s something that should happen by the individuals dedication to their own academic achievement, and their passion for the field they’re choosing to pursue. This isn’t like when you’re coaching tee-ball and you need to make sure you give each kid an equal amount of chances to hit the ball. At that level it serves its purpose, but once we look towards who we want playing for our team in the major leagues, it’s all about the individuals performance, capabilities, and talent. At UC Berkeley acceptance should be all about the individual student’s academic performance, academic excellence, and the student’s obvious passion for the field their pursuing. Leveling the playing field at a university should mean- making sure that the student’s who have truly put the hard work needed towards their academic careers are recognized and accepted. Not making sure there’s an even distribution of “black people”, “mexican people” and “whatever other race or color people”. No. Let’s quit playing these race games. Let’s stop worrying about racial demographics. Race shouldn’t even be reflected on the student applications. Affirmative action doesn’t make things fair, or level the playing field. All it does is further perpetuate our society’s obsession with having to have everyone categorized into what gender, what race, what ethnicity, or what sexual orientation is everyone classified under. Maybe if we’re doing this to study genetics, and things like that it’s a different story, but for everything else, let’s quit being obsessed with these things, and focus on the things that do matter- that the university is bringing in high-quality, hardworking individuals, who will be an asset to the university, and go on and graduate to be productive members of society.
You assert:
Berkeley students care about diversity. They recognize that the disproportionately low representation of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans on campus weakens our institution.
Exactly how would the proportionate representation strengthen UCB?
because then it becomes full of rich conservative white folks who only care about white issues and white problems. and as power holders, whites will make minorities at the campus (including asians and asian americans) feel alienated and marginalized. the curriculum will be less diverse and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, etc will be slashed. the administration will stop funding programs to help people of color through the college experience, because there will be no more people of color. and the few POC there will have little academic and social support, forced to live in a world where the norm is whatever the white man thinks is correct. and then all these white folks will go out into the world with their fancy degrees, and they will run our government and own our banks, and they will continue to hold the power while the rest of us figure out what to do.
Fantastic article. Really insightful :)
another topic well analysed and thoughtfully discussed. excellent stuff.
Yo, the problem needs to be addressed at the root level:
If you are born into lower socio-economic class in America, you are likely to stay there.
We politically demonize school teachers, and then we demand that rote, asinine bullshit be taught to students so we can assess them, their teachers, and their schools on the basis of scantron tests of dubious merit. When they don’t meet the bar (b/c they’ve been set up to fail, the tests are worthless) then we cut off the money to those schools, all the while claiming that cutting off the funding is somehow going to improve performance.
This is only about race in so far as racial minorities are disproportionately poor. If the psychotic Randian oligarchs and technocrats were swept aside and replaced with persons having a modicum on common sense and decency, then maybe we could effect meaningful change that benefits everyone from day one – and we wouldn’t even be talking about affirmative action at the university level.
Fuck Michelle Rhee (whom Obama, Rham, and Arne Duncan love b/c they’re all twits).
Listen to Dianne Ravich (Assistant Secretary of Education under GHW Bush, ironically)
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-may-14-2003/diane-ravitch
It’s pretty sad when the Democrats are way more incompetent and clueless than somebody from the Bush administration. Oh and please bother to listen to what Ravich has to say before reverting to retarded partisan name calling.
Very well written article. If you poll all Berkeley students, I say a majority are against affirmative action.
They could have a cupcake sale.
That’s what the genius conservatives did .
Liberalism marches on without the need for bake sales.
The conservatives made their point with that cupcake sale. The liberals took the bait and showed their hypocrisy.
how were they hypocritical?
[Nearly all justifications for granting racial preferences in college
admissions can be sorted into two broad categories. The first is a case
for leveling the playing field — the idea that because racism has done
profound harm to minority groups, the only way to ensure that they enjoy
equality of opportunity is to give them a boost in the admissions
process. The second argument is that a diverse student body enriches
everyone’s educational experience.]
True, but the only reason the second argument came about was because the first argument was a tough sell based on the fact that this country has already gone overboard on such treatment for people who weren’t even born when such racist practices were ended. I don’t necessary agree with his arguments for “diversity”, but I will give the author credit for writing a reasoned, coherent article instead of the usual blathering rants that pass for op-ed in the Daily Cal.
A thoughtful, well reasoned article. I’m surprised the DailyCal even published it.
Good points. I believe students care more about their future than the color of their classmates. Diversity should take work experience and military service into consideration. Cal maintains its excellence despite being underfunded because Prop 209 removes race and gender as measurable criteria in admissions, so employers already know Cal students can handle the technical challenges of the job.
i took a screencap of this comment so maybe you can look at it one day and be ashamed of yourself. we as human beings should not be solely focused on getting ahead at the expense of other lives. i believe that many people care about the color of their peers, especially when it doesn’t reflect reality. and why wouldn’t employers think that cal student can handle technical challenges of the job just because race is considered in admissions? are you asserting that blacks, latinos, and native americans would cause others to look down on cal as a less than world class institution because it is their belief that people of color are less able? is that what you believe? i think a university is great because of the faculty, curriculum, educational programs, and the opportunities it offers.
This is a very well balanced assessment of affirmative action. I personally believe that affirmative action should be economically, not racially based, which the author hints at but does not say explicitly.
“They recognize that the disproportionately low representation of
African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans on campus weakens our
institution.”
No, it doesn’t. Having academically unqualified students (which we do due to backdoor affirmative action meant to evade 209) weakens our institution. It’s time to start speaking the truth.
there is still a requirement students must pass in order to attend uc berkeley. there’s a certain gpa and a certain SAT score, and repealing 209 doesn’t mean that students of color get to bypass that.
You are thinking in terms of trained academic skill sets of students alone, the ability to ‘do school’, traits that correlate significantly with the economically privileged class, and in general white people. In addition, the impressive extracurriculars Cal students supplement their applications with are often opportunities exclusively available to the privileged in their well connected social circles, while the poor with their limited social capital have a harder time measuring up.
I believe, as has been suggested, that affirmative action should be based on economic status alone, because that is much less controversial to quantify than race. But the fact is that if this approach was to be implemented, the beneficiaries would be mostly minority groups.
What you fail to realize as well is how much more regular interaction with people of different races, cultures, and socio-economic backgrounds from you could teach you about the world. Berkeley does pretty well in terms of cultural diversity. We have student groups every day on Sproul, performance groups putting on shows, and prominent ethnic speakers coming to campus introducing us to a whole spectrum of cultural views if you will let them, and I would say this enriches our campus at large with the opportunity to appreciate things most of us would never be exposed to otherwise. This is a major cornerstone of the liberal arts education, a broad education academic, cultural, and social. Bringing more articulate and willing people of low income and minority background would strengthen their contribution to this melting pot, and further expand our knowledge and hopefully our minds.
That affirmative action recipients are not far behind their regular admission peers academically and express willingness to work hard and advance themselves is obviously a necessary prerequisite for this approach to be successful. Studies have shown that moderately underperforming students do improve when immersed in a rigorous academic environment with supplemental learning services (such as our campus tutoring services) provided.
Another point, which a poli sci major and friend of mine mentioned to me when discussing this issue, is that generally having a representative sample of the population in a governmental body confers legitimacy to the government in the eyes of foreign governments. In the same way, Berkeley stands only to gain in prestige if it takes the step to include a more representative sample of the California population in its students.
What are you talking about “backdoor”. Look at the campus demographics and compare them to Harvard’s. If anything, there’s a roadblock,
very well written and strong points. I agree