Accentuate the Affirmative

The letter that Gilbert Casellas L’77 read aloud was friendly and full of good intentions. A former Yale classmate, nicknamed Dink, had written him to catch up 30 years after graduation.

Dink’s news soon turned to his son’s rejection from the university of his choice, and it became clear that he blamed Affirmative Action: “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but whatever happened to merit? For some of us, [Martin Luther King’s] dream has become a nightmare, and we have become victims of reverse discrimination.”

As it turned out, the letter was fictitious—an epistolary device used by Casellas, former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to illustrate some of the typical arguments used today against Affirmative Action.

Casellas responded with his own missive. “The fact that blacks [and other minorities] are systematically marginalized in U.S. society makes it a moral imperative that Affirmative Action continue,” he argued. Did Dink know, for example, that Hispanic women with college degrees earn less than white men with high-school diplomas? Did he know that at the EEOC, Casellas reviewed all manner of discriminatory cases—including one in which the number 8, referring to the black ball in billiards, was “blatantly marked on the [job] applications of African Americans”?

“I’ll admit Affirmative Action hasn’t solved all racial, economic, and gender problems,” he said, “but it didn’t cause them either.

“I know and acknowledge proudly that I got into Yale because of Affirmative Action,” Casellas added. “I also know I didn’t get out of Yale because of Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action doesn’t report to class, do homework, or take tests. Every one of my achievements was my own.”

If education is, as Casellas described it, “the great equalizer,” then he should have been somewhat heartened by the data that Dr. Raymond Fonseca, dean of the School of Dental Medicine, went on to share about his own institution.

Of the dental school’s 400 students, Fonseca said, the number of underrepresented minority students has grown from four African Americans, seven Latinos and no Native Americans in 1989 to 27 African Americans, 21 Latinos, and one Native American in 2002. Penn now has the third-largest number of African-American dental students in the country, behind only two historically black universities. “I’m not saying that for applause,” Fonseca was quick to add. “That’s sad” that the numbers are so low nationwide.

Contributing to the change at Penn’s dental school was the creation eight years ago of “half-scholarships” for underrepresented minorities. “I learned it was fruitless to try to bring people to campus, try to recruit them, and when it came down to the bottom line, money was an issue,” Fonseca said. When that program is fully funded, there will be 40 scholarships worth $900,000 given out each year. The school has also created bio-dental programs with a couple of traditionally black institutions.

Fonseca added that Penn has a long way to go in increasing minority representation within its full-time faculty and general student population. Just six percent of undergraduate students are Latino and six percent are African-American, Fonseca said. “It’s not enough, and it’s got to get better.”

Minority hiring, however, is on the upswing, he observed. Of 92 full-time faculty hires at Penn in 2000, 38 were African-American, Latino, or Asian-American. “If we can continue that, I think we will one day look very good—but we have a long way to go.”

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SYMPOSIUM

Inclusive Excellence

“Inclusion is an indispensable component of excellence,” declared Christopher Edley, professor of law at Harvard University and co-director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project. On September 12, he pointed out, CIA officials woke up and “realized that we didn’t have the right staff” to do the job. And, he added, it’s not likely that anyone will be demanding the agency follow “blind personnel practices” to carry out its mission.

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Edley was the keynote speaker at a symposium on “Achieving Equal Opportunity and Diversity in Higher Education” sponsored by the James Brister Society, an alumni group dedicated to promoting diversity at the University, and Penn’s Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs. Held in April at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the daylong gathering included panels on providing access and equal opportunity, successful policies to achieve inclusion and diversity, the benefits of diversity in education, and future prospects for diversity efforts in higher education (see accompanying articles).

Laying out the context for a defense of Affirmative Action, Edley recalled working in the Clinton White House and briefing the president for an expected press-conference question. Rather than getting bogged down in the policy details of what exactly constitutes discrimination, Edley recommended framing the issue simply: People have a tendency to like people similar to themselves. “Race gets in the way of connections,” he said, and when that tendency gets aggregated across multiple interactions, the result is exclusion. Affirmative Action, he added, is “a tool that helps us lean against the tendency to prefer people like ourselves.”

Clinton took his advice in crafting his answer, and “was great” in delivering it to his assembled advisers, said Edley. Ironically, though, in the actual press conference, the subject of Affirmative Action never came up.

In describing the role of universities, Edley emphasized that it is not enough to just let people in “at the sufferance of master.” Instead, institutions must be “transformed by inclusion,” with Affirmative Action recognized as crucial to admissions, faculty and staff hiring, and relations with the community. “Excellence demands inclusion,” he said, and an appreciation of the challenges of race and ethnicity must be seen as a critical part of “being educated.” Universities should “treat diversity as an intellectual challenge,” a goal “precious few have embraced.”

Edley singled out the military as an institution that made inclusion central to its culture—spurred by the fact that, during the Vietnam War, they found that “race broke down unit cohesion” and “people were dying.” So the armed forces committed themselves to Affirmative Action and equal opportunity, and now have an organization to study and improve such efforts. “What other institution in society could make that claim?” he asked.

Finally, he argued, universities must lead not just their campuses but the nation in affirming equal opportunity and diversity—concepts that he warned are “under assault.”

Although opponents of Affirmative Action claim it is a failure because there are “still all these poor people—and so many of them are colored”—Edley said that what Affirmative Action has done is to “crack the door open a little bit and [let us] see that people just outside and prepared” can be brought in. It is not and never has been the solution to poverty.

Because “discrimination and the risk of it remain all too real,” remedial tools are needed. “The natural mechanisms of opportunity remain terribly, terribly broken,” Edley added.

Edley also cited the “domino principle” as another reason to fight for Affirmative Action. “We must fight this battle because the lines of argument in Affirmative Action parallel those in every area of civil rights.” Arguments over quotas and over innocent bystanders supposedly harmed by policies “cannot be conceded,” he said. “The battle is here and must be joined.”

Drawing a parallel with welfare reform, in which liberal “policy plumbing” lost out to conservative “values” arguments about the deserving and undeserving poor, he pointed to a danger of losing again in the battle for Affirmative Action. “We must engage on both policy and values,” he said.

Universities are peculiarly equipped to do battle on this front, Edley added, in the people they train and admit, the research they conduct, the example they set. “We must become skilled at communicating with those who have different values,” he said. “This is hard. Race is hard. It’s not rocket science—it’s harder.”

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A Rising Multicultural Tide Lifts All Boats

Contrary to conventional wisdom, diversity initiatives benefit far more people than just those they target, said Dr. Jeffrey Milem during the Brister Symposium’s panel discussion on “The Benefits of Diversity in Education: What Does Research Reveal?” Milem, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, said that his research showed that diversity programs bring benefits to individuals (such as “enhanced critical-thinking ability”) and to society (a more educated citizenry), as well as to private enterprise (a workforce with “greater levels of cross-cultural competence” and “higher levels of creativity and innovation”). Not to mention to higher education itself, which benefits from “more diverse curricular offerings” and “more student-centered approaches to teaching and learning.”

Dr. Alma Clayton-Pedersen, vice president for education and institutional renewal at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, acknowledged that she was “preaching to the choir” in her pro-diversity presentation, but she hoped that her message might help the members of the audience to “sing better, sing louder, and sing in more places.” The goal was a “climate” of racial and cultural diversity, which can only be achieved if it’s an “institutional priority,” she stressed. And the ways to achieve that goal range from a “detailed, ongoing evaluation” of diversity programs to increasing student interaction with faculty outside of class to increasing the sensitivity and training of staff who work with students of color.

As diversity increases, conflict often increases, too, acknowledged Milem. “The key is how you deal with it. Without conflict, there can be no community.”

Thinking Outside the
Affirmative Action Box

“I think it’s time to start an argument,” said Dr. Phoebe Leboy. The professor of biochemistry in the School of Dental Medicine had been listening to a law professor at the University of Texas talk about that school’s success in boosting minority enrollment, not by Affirmative Action—which is now illegal in the state—but by offering admission
to the top 10 percent of graduates from each high school across Texas, which happens to be the nation’s third-most segregated state.