I'VE GOT A secret. It's something the American media doesn't want you to know, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Here it is: The real dividing line in our country is not race, but class. Of course, the fact that there is no giant racist machine dividing America into color-coded castes is not a very spicy story. Racial conflict sells.
The issue of race at the University tends to focus on one particular controversy: affirmative action. For a great variety of reasons, this issue inspires debate like few others can. There is no single explanation why this is the case. Most likely, it makes many University students so emotional because it gets right to the heart of that painful question: Who deserves to be here?
The truth is, whether you like it or not, affirmative action is going down. You can hold all the rallies you want. You can criticize affirmative action's opponents until you're blue in the face. But the fact is, in state after state, voters have chosen to outlaw the use of race as a factor in higher education admissions. If affirmative action proponents really want to promote the best possible outcome for their cause, they should re-focus their energy on addressing the real dividing line in America: class.
I am not about to insult anyone's intelligence by claiming that racism does not exist in our country. Quite the contrary, it is alive and well in the hearts of a million John Rockers -- closet or otherwise -- from sea to shining sea. But much to the chagrin of demagogues like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, racism is not the cause of the fundamental divisions within U.S. society.
Class has superceded race as the single most divisive factor within the U.S. If universities really want to help promote a more equitable society, they must begin to address this factor. They do not help the situation by using the politically loaded race factor in collegiate admissions. In fact, by clinging to the use of race as a means to bring about greater equality in higher education, racial preference proponents ultimately will cause the downfall of all efforts at achieving equality at our nation's universities.
That may seem unlikely, but look at the facts. In every state that has held a referendum on the use of race as a factor in admissions, the anti-affirmative action forces have won out every time. Whether it was California's Proposition 209 (1996) or Washington's State Initiative I-200 (1998), voters repeatedly have opted to eliminate the race factor in admissions.
Last Thursday, the Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition (FAST) reported that 77.3 percent of American college students opposed the use of preferences for minorities in the admissions process ("Study suggests students oppose affirmative action," April 20). Yet at the same time, FAST found that an even greater percentage, 84.3, believed that ethnic diversity on campus was important. Clearly, while an overwhelming majority of students oppose the arbitrary preference of minorities in admissions, they also strongly are in favor of a diverse student body.
It is clear that in the American electorate, racial preferences as we know them are living on borrowed time. It should come as no surprise that a state like Texas has banned racial preferences in university admissions. But the fact that California, traditionally a fairly liberal state, has voted down race as a factor in admissions shows that affirmative action proponents need to develop a new strategy. There is no doubt that in a very conservative state like Virginia-where it's easier to buy a gun than to buy a drink -- the result would be very much the same.
The best way to reach this goal of a more equal University is to provide admissions advantages to those that really need them. These are the people who could not afford to take the Princeton Review before taking the SATs. These are the people whose parents -- if they had two -- did not have the time to work with them on their homework because they were too busy at work, trying to make ends meet. And these are the people from economically depressed regions of our country where school systems do not have the same resources as, say, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia.
What do they all have in common? They all are economically disadvantaged. The color of their skin has nothing to do with it. Being a member of a certain race is not a disadvantage unless you allow it to be. Once the University changes its admissions criteria towards helping those prospective students that were less fortunate early in life, it will move closer towards the goal of increased opportunity here at this school, and in the nation as a whole.
By aiming its priorities at the economically disadvantaged, the University still can assist many of the same minority students it originally set out to help. Only now it is doing so for the right reason, not the politically correct one.
(Timothy DuBoff's column appears Fridays inThe Cavalier Daily.)
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