COLUMN: Reward merit, not skin color

From Mark Fiore's, "The Right Stuff," Fall '99 · American Indian/Alaskan Native · Asian/Pacific Islander · Black/African American · Chicano/Mexican American · Puerto Rican · Hispanic · White · Other Like a game of Russian Roulette, the correct answer to such a question could result in a big payoff -- acceptance at a top college or graduate school, a scholarship offering big bucks or a job at a high-profile company. The wrong answer could destroy those same hopes. And more and more these days, saying that you are white is the wrong answer. Indeed, affirmative action -- the widespread effort to put all races on an equal footing -- has had just the opposite effect, elevating certain races to privileged status at the expense of others. Regrettably, as they stand now, affirmative action policies are morally questionable -- and perhaps illegal. The St. Paul Pioneer Press, the newspaper serving St. Paul, Minn., offers a summer internship, for example, that is available only to minorities. No matter how qualified an applicant is, if he's white, he's out. Budding Bob Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins need not apply. Nor could they apply to the many other newspapers or companies in other fields that restrict their applicant pools to minorities only. Where exactly is the equal opportunity in that? Indeed, affirmative action sharply rejects the widely held American belief promulgated in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Instead, racial preferences put some Americans on a higher, more distinguished level. For that reason, the Center for Individual Rights -- a public policy and legal center based in Washington, D.C. -- has rightly challenged institutions like Penn to eliminate racial preferences in admissions decisions. Late last month, the center took out a full-page ad in 15 college newspapers, including The Daily Pennsylvanian, to condemn affirmative action. The controversial ad, with Guilty by Admission running along the top in large bold letters, proclaimed: "Using racial preferences to achieve a particular racial mix of students has been illegal for twenty years. Yet many schools persist in treating applicants differently by race in order to promote racial diversity." CIR's argument about the legality of affirmative action is debatable -- the Supreme Court has said only that explicit racial quotas are illegal, and Penn's stated policy is not to use such quotas. Nonetheless, the University's use of race in admissions decisions is troubling. Why does being in a minority make you better than someone who isn't in a minority? Admissions decisions should be based on merit, not on skin color. And merit should be based on things that you have accomplished and achieved, not something that you're born with. As such, the University should eliminate the offensive racial classification question from all of its applications. Such a move would equalize race in the admissions process, ensuring that applicants are neither admitted nor rejected based on the color of their skin. At the same time, it would protect Penn from accusations of racial discrimination. With a blind eye, the University could turn its back on criticism from members of all races, who would be unable to prove that they were rejected because of their ethnicity. Most importantly, the University could focus more of its attention on the intellectual qualities of its applicants, guaranteeing an academically rich and varied student body. Already, public institutions are justly feeling the constitutional pressure put on affirmative action. In Hopwood v. State of Texas, successfully tried by the CIR, a federal appeals court ruled in 1996 that Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi are barred from considering race in college admissions. Proposition 209 gave the same mandate in California in 1996. It seems only a matter of time until affirmative action will justifiably be wiped out at public institutions across the country. But only societal outrage seems likely to lead private institutions to abandon similar policies. With the aid of Penn students racial preferences can at the very least be done away with on this campus.