Race-Exclusive Programs Slowly Dwindle

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long article on the increasing (albeit reluctant) abandonment of race-exclusive programs by colleges across the country. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute deserve much of the credit.

If you have access to this article (“Not Just For Minority Students Anymore,” by Peter Schmidt, from the issue dated March 19, 2004) — reading it online may require a subscription — by all means read the whole thing, since I’m not going to summarize it. Instead, I will mention a few items that stood out for me.

First, although by now it should come as no surprise, it’s always depressing to see just how addictive racialism has become on campuses today, and how hard it is to kick the habit. After getting over their initial Grutter-induced euphoria that “diversity” had survived legal challenges, colleges began to notice, with help from CEO and ACRI, that the Court had also held

that colleges must treat students as individuals, and not accept or reject them from programs based solely on their skin color. That finding troubled college lawyers as they considered what the court’s decisions meant in areas beyond admissions.

Poor colleges! Being forced by right-wing meanies and bullying, interfering courts to treat all students as individuals and not reject anyone solely based on skin color! How could civil rights have come to this?

And then there’s the question of whether “opening up” these formerly race-exclusive programs will produce any change at all. Here’s an example of one typical change:

Last month Carnegie Mellon officials decided to open the university’s summer camp to white and Asian students who demonstrate that they can contribute to the campus’s diversity. (The total number of high-school students at the camp will remain unchanged, at 100.) The university also opened a full-tuition, minority-scholarship program to white and Asian students who show they can contribute to campus diversity, and ended its policy of giving black, Hispanic, and American Indian students an edge when awarding need-based student aid.

Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, was right on target when he said it’s too early to tell if these changes will have any impact. (Shaw was incorrectly identified in the article as the associate director. He recently became president when the former president, Elaine Jones, resigned under the cloud produced by the letter she wrote to Sen. Kennedy urging the Senate to hold up appointing a new judge to the Sixth Circuit until after the Michigan cases had been decided.)

“We have to wait and see the numbers where they have made the change,” he says. “The jury is going to be out until we find out if there is any significant change in the number of minority students who are being reached.”

Indeed, I am reminded of the long period of time during which Yale wrestled with the question of whether or not to admit women. The alumni, it was said, were all in favor of going co-ed … IF it could be done without increasing the size of the student body or admitting any fewer males.

Also troubling here is the stubborn, racialist refusal to abandon double standards. At Carnegie Mellon, for example, whites and Asians (and presumably only whites and Asians) must “demonstrate that they can contribute to the campus’s diversity.” Blacks presumably must demonstrate only that their skin is black. Nor is Carnegie Mellon alone in its adherence to double standards:

other colleges are keeping their programs focused on helping the disadvantaged, and are altering them to advance that goal. Most are requiring that nonminority applicants fit one of two profiles: Either they come from low-income households or families with little college experience, or they demonstrate a commitment to promoting racial diversity by, for example, tutoring minority children or working to improve race relations in their communities

How tutoring minority children or working to improve race relations in communities contributes to campus “diversity” is left unexplained. Rather than having anything to do with diversity, or even “diversity,” those activities seem to be more like merit badges in political correctness that must be earned in order to be considered for these programs.

You think I exaggerate?

Thomas R. Tritton, president of Haverford College, says administrators there will consider letting white students participate in his institution’s summer pre-orientation program for minority students but would probably reject any applicant who seemed to oppose affirmative action and to be applying “to make the ideological point that this is a bad program.”

Presumably Tritton believes that black students, by virtue of being black, can safely be assumed to be politically correct.

AFTERTHOUGHT (Added at 1:05PM)

Note how President Tritton, like other diversiphiles, incoherently seems to assume that having students who all think alike on racial matters somehow contributes to “diversity,” but allowing in someone who challenges prevalent assumptions would be disruptive.