This week the Supreme Court voted to hear a challenge to the ability of colleges and universities to shape the racial and ethnic demographics of their student bodies. Currently, schools are allowed to use race as a factor among many others in achieving diversity for educational reasons. When the Court hears Fisher vs. the University of Texas, we may find that the justices set strict limits on how universities can consider race in their efforts to create an educational environment in which all students learn -- and learn from one another.
Residential colleges and universities have for many years emphasized creating a diverse student body because we believe this results in a deeper educational experience. In the late 1960s many schools steered away from cultivated homogeneity and toward creating a campus community in which people can learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. This had nothing to do with what would later be called political correctness or even identity politics. It had to do with preparing students to become lifelong learners who could navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation.
In our classrooms, students and teachers see the value of diversity throughout the semester. As David Kelley of IDEO and the Stanford Design School has noted time and time again, homogeneity kills creativity. The key to successful brainstorming and innovative teamwork is to have a multiplicity of perspectives. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow. Groups are beneficial for problem solving as long as they don't degrade into following-the-leader; learning takes place when people bring a variety of perspectives to the issue at hand. If almost everyone is from the same background, you run the risk of substituting mere repetition for iterative cross-pollination.
At residential universities, homogeneity in the student body undermines our mission of helping students develop personal autonomy within a dynamic community. That's why we are eager to welcome students from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world to our campuses. That's why we ask our donors to support robust financial aid programs so as to ensure that our students come from a variety of economic backgrounds. A "dynamic community" is one in which members have to navigate difference -- and racial and ethnic differences are certainly parts of the mix. All the students we admit have intellectual capacity, but we also want them to have different sorts of capacities. Their interests, modes of learning, and perspectives on the world should be sufficiently different from one another so as to promote active learning in and outside the classroom.
At Wesleyan University our mission statement reminds us that we aim to prepare students "to explore the world with a variety of tools." Diversity is an aspect of the world we expect our students to explore, turning it into an asset they can use. We expect graduates to have completed a course of study in the liberal arts that will enable them to see differences among people as a powerful tool for solving problems and seeking opportunities. We expect graduates to embrace diversity as a source of lifelong learning, personal fulfillment, and creative possibility. Selective universities want to shape a student body that maximizes each undergraduate's ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to draw on resources from the most familiar and the most unexpected places.
As the Supreme Court considers Fisher vs. the University of Texas, it is crucial that the justices continue to allow universities to consider race and ethnicity within a holistic admissions process that aims to create a student body that maximizes learning. University admissions programs are not the place to promote partisan visions of social justice, but they are the place to produce the most dynamic and profound learning environments. It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.
Some have mentioned you shouldn't consider the high school but think about this... I graduated from a well respected prep school in St. Louis (which my blue-collar dad broke his back to send me to) with a 2.95 GPA and was in the 50 percentile of my class. Years later, I was teaching at a local inner-city school where the valedictorian had a 2.8 GPA and an 18 on her ACT.
Your accomplishments in HS need to be put in context not your race. If a college has 1000 spots for freshmen and the top 1000 applicants are asian or indian so be it. The whites, blacks and mexicans will just have to study harder for next year or apply somewhere else.
At my graduate and professional schools, the bottom quarter of the class was filled with African Americans. How were these individuals selected for admission? Affirmative action in pursuit of "diversity"? Hmmm....
At the center of Fisher vs. the University of Texas, diversity--which may be of less concern to students--has spawned entire departments devoted to its perpetuation. However, Sugarland, Texas, Abigail Fisher and other black and white students, past and present, are aware that certain universities lead to career opportunities. They want what I wanted upon enrolling in Texas A&M University 38 years ago—access to one of the most powerful professional networks on the face of the earth.
To understand the history of educational diversity, look back at white Vermont U.S Congressman, Justin Morrill’s Land Grant College Act of 1862, which funded public colleges through sales of public lands. The political fight began when Morrill wanted to expand the law in 1890 to include black colleges, declaring that if former Confederates refused to use a portion of their public land funds for black colleges, federal law required white public colleges to admit black students.
Justin Morrill’s political gamble won the passage of his Land Grant College Act of 1890. But after 122 years of subsequent federal legislation and court cases, Fisher will become a footnote in history, like Plessy, Brown, Sweat, Bakke and others, while the nation continues its struggle over issues of race in higher education. http://sunnynash.blogspot.com/2011/02/justin-morrill-land-grant-college-acts.html
Then they are also denied scholarships, again because of race.
Then they denied again because they are not poor enough to qualify for financial aid either.
3 strikes your out. If you are a white, middle class male with decent grades,
In Texas how do you justify the majority of government jobs, educational opportunities, and assistance programs to the Spanish ethnic group?
Mr. Roth I would like your answer.
Note Spaniards had black slaves to work the land and dealt in the Slave Trade.
If you simply based admissions on a test, such as the SAT, the most pretigious schools would be slightly more white and Asian, but certainly not all white or all Asian as you imply. In fact, you only need to look at the states that have already banned race based affirmative action. It's been 13 or 14 years in California, for example, and the public universities are still very diverse. In fact, graduation rates for groups that were "benefiting" from affirmative action before have actually improved after ending affirmative action. Why? Because if I was somebody who was placed in a school like UCLA under affirmative action, with the majority of my fellow students having higher test scores and academic backgrounds, versus if I was placed in a UC of slightly lessor pretige, such as UC Riverside, with students whose academics more equally match my own, it's no wonder that I'm able to excel and one school and fall behind at another.
In other words, we already have the perfect test cases for ending affirmative action. It's not the end of the world, the schools are overall still diverse, and nobody is discriminated against based on race in admissions. It's seems strange to me that people are against having this as a policy nation wide.