UVA Officials Oppose Extending Equal Treatment To All, Support Racially Discriminatory Recruiting

A front page article in today’s University of Virginia Cavalier Dally discusses, on the surface, and, between the lines, laments the success of Roger Clegg and the Center for Equal Opportunity in persuading colleges to abandon or revise their racially exclusive programs.

There is nothing surprising in this lament, or in the University’s handwringing reluctance to let go of its racially discriminatory programs, but even so I was struck by the unselfconscious clarity of University officials in revealing their continuing opposition to treating all their students and prospective students equally.

Here is William Harvey, the University’s new “chief officier for diversity and equity”:

… when schools abandon or modify such minority-exclusive programs, they do so in an effort to avoid being sued.

“I’m disappointed by [the extension of the programs to all students],” Harvey said. “I think it is a reaction that’s in part taking place because there is a threat of possible lawsuit, and people are being extraordinarily cautious.”

It’s unfortunate that it takes the threat of a federal lawsuit to force a state institution to treat all of its students in a non-discriminatory manner, but we’ve been there before and done that before and it’s worked out fine.

Harvey then, legalistically, points out a possible shortcoming in current law that one hopes Roger Clegg and friends can fix, if it in fact needs fixing:

Harvey said that applying the 2003 Supreme Court rulings to these programs is an inaccurate application of the law.

“The rulings don’t speak to these programs at all, they speak to admissions,” Harvey said. “They said diversity is an added aspect to an environment. It’s a contradiction to what they’re doing.”

In short, Harvey is saying, all the Court told us is that we couldn’t discriminate here; it didn’t say we couldn’t discriminate there.

And he’s not the only one; University Dean of Admissions John Blackburn made the same point:

“There’s nothing that says that race-exclusive programs for recruiting are illegal,” Blackburn said. “In terms of what we’re doing, we’ve never had any kind of admission program here that was race specific, that, in fact, would suggest that simply by being Hispanic or African-American, [a student] got in.”

This latter assertion qualifies as the straw man, or person, of the year, and beyond, since I know of no critic of racial preferences who believes that they involve the admission of anyone simply for “being Hispanic or African-American.” But leave that aside.

As I’ve mentioned here several times before (here, here, here, and here), the University of Virginia has contracted out its racially exclusive scholarships, but it still advertises them and obviously co-operates closely with the donors. I believe the question to be asked of this effort is not only whether it is legal — it may be — but whether it passes the smell test, and a good place to start sniffing is to ask whether the defenders of such “private” discriminatory scholarships would feel the same about a scholarship limited to whites offered by, say, the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Actually, that may not be such a good comparison, since I suspect the UDC no longer would engage in such racial exclusion.

UPDATE [9 Feb.]

In a recent speech reported in the Feb. 7-13 issue of C-Ville, Diversity Chief Harvey said (why am I not surprised?) that colleges, including the University of Virginia, need more black faculty.

In his talk entitled “Issues of Race in Predominantly White Institutions,” William Harvey mostly read excerpts from his past writings, as well as those of other race scholars. He said that American colleges do not have enough black faculty, a problem he said is caused by racism and can be remedied by more aggressive affirmative action….

Digging as far back as 1981 into his file of past writings, Harvey emphasized how little the problem of black faculty has changed over the years. Even though many colleges have the official will to recruit more African-American faculty, Harvey said those goals have been thwarted by subtle and overt racism….

Someone in the audience asked a good if obvious question: how many more black professors does the University of Virginia need?

But when asked, Harvey did not know how many black professors are currently on UVA’s faculty. “I’ve only been here for 90 days,” he said.

If people continue to ask this pesky question, I commend to Diversity Chief Harvey Samuel Gompers’ answer when he was asked what Labor wants: “More!”

UPDATE II: “Loose Interpretation” [9 Feb.]

Yesterday the Cavalier Daily reported that the Student Council has approved a resolution urging the University to offer domestic partner benefits. There is, however, a problem:

Currently, such benefits are not permitted under HB 751, a 2004 state bill which says that state agencies, including the University, cannot provide benefits for unmarried couples. However, through a loose interpretation of the law, many private companies and schools in the Commonwealth are able to offer domestic partner benefits, Queer and Allied Activism Treasurer Wyatt Fore said.

Seth Croft, QuAA co-president and a resolution author, noted that the University could take steps to establish private funds in order to provide benefits to employees, even though it is prohibited by law from funding domestic benefits through its public funds.

I will leave it to the lawyers to determine where “loose interpretation” stops and flouting the law begins. The University may well have no interest in following this suggestion, but, having already demonstrated its willingness to practice “loose interpretation” where encouraging the private funding of racially exclusive scholarships is concerned, it can hardly point to the law as the reason.