While many students were enjoying Friday’s pleasant weather, a group of about 25 undergraduates, Law students and faculty gathered in the Quadrangle’s McClelland Hall for an afternoon symposium on the future of affirmative action in America.
The program, entitled “Rethinking the Remedy: The Future of Affirmative Action in Higher Education and in the Workplace,” was divided into three panel discussions. Each panel addressed topics ranging from proposals to enact class-based methods of minority recruitment to current cases challenging race-based preferences at colleges and universities around the country.
The first panel featured a keynote address by Richard Kahlenberg, author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action. In the book, Kahlenberg argues for affirmative action policies based on economic status rather than race or gender.
“The argument for class-based preferences is that you can produce a rich economic and racial diversity [on college campuses] with means that can be fully justified as fair,” he said.
Rather than consider an applicant’s race in deciding whether to grant admission, Kahlenberg argued, educational institutions could create an “obstacles test” to gauge the barriers a candidate had confronted due to socioeconomic status. Based on the results of this test, which would include information about the parents’ income, family structure, high school quality and the neighborhood in which the applicant had been raised, the university could give preference to those students who had to overcome more obstacles.
“If you do well despite all these obstacles, then there’s something very special that we’d want to tap into,” Kahlenberg said.
History Professor Thomas Sugrue, an opponent of class-based preferences, was one of two respondents to Kahlenberg’s address. Sugrue argued that considering race is the best way to address the gaps in opportunities.
“Class-based affirmative action cannot respond adequately? to the persistent racial divisions in virtually every aspect of American life,” Sugrue said.
The second group of panelists came from a range of professions, and each speaker provided a different perspective on the debate. The subjects discussed during this segment included the legal implications of current affirmative action policies, public opinion about the implementation of such policies and the position of Asian Americans in the controversy over race-based initiatives.
Two members of a national pro-affirmative action organization, By Any Means Necessary, sat on the third panel.
Erika Dowdell, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, discussed her role as one of 42 students intervening on behalf of the university in a federal lawsuit filed against the school for using racial quotas in its admissions decisions.
Although the event attracted only a small number of students, those who did attend said they found the discussion engaging and provocative.
College sophomore Lindsey Mathews said she saw today’s program as “a possible departure point, a way of taking a hard-core look at how segregated Penn is even though we’re diverse on paper.”
“It was not possible to walk away from Friday’s symposium unchanged, unchallenged or complacent,” added College sophomore Ari Alexander, one of the organizers of the event.
