COLUMN: Of quotas and chances

From Dave Crystal's, "Crystal Clear," Fall '96 From Dave Crystal's, "Crystal Clear," Fall '96Race-based affirmative action policies areFrom Dave Crystal's, "Crystal Clear," Fall '96Race-based affirmative action policies areunfair to all of us. They should be eliminated. From Dave Crystal's, "Crystal Clear," Fall '96Race-based affirmative action policies areunfair to all of us. They should be eliminated.I was originally contemplating devoting my last column of this semester to Jack Kevorkian's Right-to-Die campaign. But I decided that wouldn't be fair to my letter-happy public. After all, the only person on campus who can personally benefit from Kevorkian's practice is Lance Rogers, and I have to give the people one last excuse to air their spit-filled emotionally charged remarks. So, I've decided to devote this last edition of Crystal Clear (worry not, I'll probably be back next spring) to an issue on which every student has an opinion: race-based affirmative action, and its role in undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The bill will be voted on in November. With polls indicating that 70 percent of California's voters support it, it's only a matter of time before race-based affirmative action is a bygone for California institutions like the universities of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley. In Texas, four white Caucasians sued the University of Texas Law School for rejecting them on the basis of race; they had higher rankings on the school's "Texas Index" than many others who were accepted. A federal appeals court ruled in the rejected students' favor, decreeing that race should not be used as a factor in admissions, and that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional. In Colorado, the governing board of the state university system curtailed certain affirmative action programs after the state's attorney general declared them unlawful. For proponents of race-based affirmative action wondering why so many people -- whether Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid -- view it as immoral, I'll start with a simple answer: In theory, race-based affirmative action is originally a Nazi concept. However, I realize that the debate on this issue is not so simplistic. I will give the other side a fair say before I proceed to demolish any point they think they have. There are many arguments in favor of race-based affirmative action. Not surprisingly, most people who agree to support this institution don't agree on the reasons for it. One argument for the role of race-based affirmative action in the university admission process is the achievement of diversity. University administrators must ask themselves what is the purpose of achieving diversity on campus. If their cause is to be able to boast in their brochures that "minorities make up 25 percent of our student body," then diversity for them is just a cynical attempt to appear politically correct. If the purpose of achieving diversity is to foster community awareness of and understanding between different races and cultures, then I totally support it. However, that in no way means I support racial quotas. The next question university administrators must ask themselves is what engenders communal understanding of different races? Is it the quantity of "minority" students on campus, or the quality of these students? I contend it is the quality. For example, let's say in an effort to increase diversity on campus the Penn administration decides to up the quota for "black" students to 10 percent. If all 2,000 of these students segregate themselves in DuBois-like housing complexes, refrain from getting involved in extracurricular activities and do not interact with people of Caucasian and Mongoloid races, then what marginal social good does each of these students add to campus life? By enrolling most of these students, all the administration would be accomplishing is keeping more qualified students from matriculating at Penn under the guise of achieving diversity. Then there are those who argue that affirmative action must be employed to counter the racist tendencies of "white" administrators, to protect minority students from the injustices and inequities of racism. This logic is totally muddled. In today's political climate, the biggest fear of every institution, academic or otherwise, is of earning a "racist" reputation. But even if university administrators were racist, it wouldn't alter the number of minority students accepted into their schools, since they have a vested interest in not appearing racist, and hence would put their own racism in check. Finally, if the role of affirmative action is to eliminate injustice, then it certainly must be more than race-based. As Cheryl Hopwood, one of the plaintiffs in the University of Texas case, most eloquently articulated in an August 1995 Rolling Stone article: "Affirmative action should be used to help disadvantaged people of whatever background. You can find injustice anywhere. The fact that I have one severely handicapped child and another one died is an injustice. But nobody's helping me."