The Board of Rectors of Virginia Tech has reversed its March 10 decision to ban racial preferences, bowing to pressure from students, faculty, and Governor Mark Warner (Link requires subscription).
“The voice of the people was so loud and so constant that it had to be heard,” said Edd Sewell, an associate professor of communication studies and president of the University Council, Virginia Tech’s faculty senate. “The coalition of students, faculty, and alumni came together and let their opinion be known to the board, and it made a difference.”
After the Board’s initial decision (which also suspended a gay rights policy and barred outsiders who had engaged in violence from speaking on campus), I quoted Sewell’s somewhat less measured remarks about Virginia Tech being turned in a proto-Nazi police state:
“I’m sorry,” he said, “they are systematically deconstructing the freedoms, the civil rights of the people at this university….” “It certainly puts Virginia Tech in the light that we are no longer a viable academic community,” he said. Sewell likened the BOV’s actions to pre-World War II Germany. At the beginning of the Nazi rise to power, civil liberties were quietly rolled back, people were discriminated against and people merely stood by and watched it happen. That’s exactly what is happening now at Tech, Sewell said. “I think we need to start reading the history of the 1930s,” he said.
What I find most interesting about the Board’s reinstating affirmative action is the stated reason for it. Ben Davenport, a Board member, said that he had come to realize
that what the board had done was “extremely disruptive” to admissions, faculty recruitment, and fund raising, and had damaged the reputation of Virginia Tech among other universities.
We certainly wouldn’t want those other universities to think ill of us, would we?
UPDATE – Reader Fred Ray calls my attention to an article in the Washington Post this morning that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. The article, “Race-Neutral Policies Planned at Va. Tech,” seems to contradict what reported above.
The chairman of Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors vowed yesterday that the school will follow race-neutral admissions and scholarship policies despite Sunday’s decision to abandon a controversial resolution ending affirmative action at the Virginia university.
[….]
[Chairman of the Va. Tech Board of Visitors, Rector John Rocovich said he hopes Sunday’s decision will end the immediate controversy. But he said the school is still bound by legal agreements and repeated warnings from Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore (R), who has said that board members and college officials could be held personally liable if the federal government or a private individual sued the school for discrimination.
“When the attorney general tells me to do something, I believe I ought to do it,” Rocovich said. “The board decided to rescind because the specific language seemed to upset so many people.”
So, what is the current status of racial preferences at Virginia Tech? No one seems to know. The Board has, you guessed it, created a committee to study the problem. According to Attorney General Kilgore, who opposes preferences,
They are going to review each and every program. They are going to make sure that if race and gender are used, they are used in a narrowly tailored fashion.
The Xerox Memo — Try to defend affirmative action after you read this:
This is an actual 1968 memo from Xerox Ceo Joseph C. Wilson. This is the smoking gun that proves that affirmative action lowers the standards wherever it touches. Corporate America and academia don’t want you to see this — thousands of similar memos have been written over the years.
Black Caucus Groups at Xerox Corporation (A) 49~-O47
Exhibit 4 Wilson and McColough
Actually, I don’t think this is too bad. Points made in this letter:
Black people aren’t applying to work at Xerox because they assume they will not be hired. We’ll have to make a special effort to recruit blacks so they will see this is not the case.
Some of them don’t qualify, and that’s a problem we need to address with training.
We’ve hired only the best, but with training we think we can reach out to this other group without hurting productivity.
Fostering economic improvement among black people will work toward increasing our customer base.
This beats the heck out of arbitrarily adding 20 points to the score if the prospective student is black. Xerox’s answer to wretched public schools was to fix the problem with training; U of M’s answer is to ignore them. And remember, in 1968 black people had a whole lot more to overcome than they do now. Some don’t think so but I certainly do.