Adding yet another twist to the affirmative action bake sales and the Roger Williams University whites-only scholarship (discussed here), the Young Conservatives at Texas A&M and the Texas Review Society, which publishes several conservative Texas journals, will award scholarships of $5,000, $3,500, and $1,500 to students who write the best essays on overcoming affirmative action.
Applicants must submit an essay of 1,500 words or less describing “how you or a family member have overcome institutionalized discrimination and/or the stigma imposed by policies giving preference to particular racial or ethnic groups in college admissions, employment and other competitive arenas.”
The essays will be partially evaluated on “the applicant’s narrative of how he or she has worked to overcome the adversity created by such preferences.”
Unlike the scholarship at Roger Williams, these are not “white only” scholarships.
Matthew Maddox, an A&M senior from Tomball who is chairman of the campus YCT organization, said the Texas scholarships are open to all students.
“We certainly hope to get applicants who are not white,” Maddox said. “I know for a fact that not all minorities agree with affirmative action policies.”
I began by saying this was “just another twist” on bake sale and white scholarship parodies, but I’m not so sure it’s a parody at all. After all, a number of universities, from California eastward, are already inviting essays on overcoming adversity and discrimination as part of their application process. If those are legitimate (a big “if”), then presumably the Texas A&M variation is as well.
This one, John, is a much better thought out play. I support the Texas A&M one, since it is directly on point (race preferences) and open to all students, whereas I felt it necessary to condemn the Roger Williams program because it wasn’t as well thought out. It is a “twist” in that the Texas A-M idea probably couldn’t have evolved without the Roger Williams controversy, but it is substantially different.
There’s a very simple way to signal to the public that a whites only scholarship is satire, not racism — make the award a dollar. I think this s the biggest place the RW club messed up, they should never have accepted money to increase the dollar amount since this undermined the satiric message.