SOME DAYS, I start to think people of color are too defensive about racism. Then there are days when I realize they're not overreacting at all. The Center for Equal Opportunity has cited the University as an institution whose affirmative action program discriminates against white and Asian American students in favor of "less qualified" black and Hispanic applicants.
But this is an inaccurate conclusion based on incomplete data and a desire to advance ideology regardless of the truth. The Center examines a very small part of our admissions process and questions the qualifications of minority students.
The CEO likes to make extremely inflammatory statements with questionable support. Its Web site features a "predictive admissions" section that purports to tell the user her chance of being admitted to the University based on race, high school class rank, SATs, legacy status and residency status. With my statistics, I was quoted a 42 percent chance since I was white, but a 98 percent chance had I been black. If I believed this actually was correct, I'd be angry.
But I don't believe it, because the factors above aren't the whole picture. According to Dean of Admissions John Blackburn, U.Va. receives such a high volume of applications from qualified students that the problem each year is not building a quality incoming class. Rather, the problem is picking from this pool in a way that best accomplishes the University's mission. Building a student body of many different racial, national and social backgrounds is part of this mission.
Blackburn admits that the attributes listed by the CEO matter, but so do others, such as the courses taken, strength of the essays and recommendations. This isn't to say that U.Va. takes students with very low SATs or grades, but there's a threshold past which it doesn't really matter, so these other factors are considered.
This is why the CEO's inflammatory rhetoric is pointless. The assertion that the University is lowering its qualifications comes from finding that a black student with an SAT score 90 points below a white student has an equal chance of admission. When I read that, I thought, so what? Between two white students, says Blackburn, the student scoring 90 points lower also has an equal chance, since the SAT scores here are very high overall.
The CEO's data doesn't reflect the University's standards. Blackburn argues that how many people from an incoming class actually graduate is a much better standard than simply looking at its high school statistics. The graduation statistics show that the Admissions Office has met this standard.
Jordan Bradley from the office of University Relations said that in 1998, the University had a black student graduation rate - 87 percent - in the top 10 nationally and 20 points higher than any other public university. The average white student graduation rate at the University is 93 percent, and the overall rate is 91 percent. Such figures show that the University has not picked a group of unprepared individuals; instead, it has picked qualified individuals of all backgrounds who work hard and succeed.
What's truly shameful about the CEO's campaign is its cynical attempt to pit minorities against one another. By arguing that the University discriminates against "Asians," the CEO tries to make Asian-Americans resent other underrepresented minorities and thereby weaken support for policies that often benefit them as well.
Such an approach presents what Asian Student Union President Janis Millete calls the "model minority myth," a stereotype of universal Asian-American success. Yet as she pointed out in an interview, the terms "Asian" and "Asian-American" encompass many individuals of different nationalities and socioeconomic backgrounds. For this reason, many of these students benefit directly from policies like affirmative action that look at more than just SAT scores and class rank.
She notes there's no one "Asian" perspective on affirmative action, but the ASU supports it because Asians and Asian Americans are still underrepresented in many professions and majors, especially at U.Va. To the ASU, this suggests that discrimination still occurs against them, and that affirmative action produces a climate friendlier to all minorities.
The CEO condemns policies very different from those actually used in admissions and implies that minority students haven't earned their places here. This is repugnant because these students have demonstrated time and time again that they are here to learn and contribute, not just to fill a color quota. They deserve the respect and the place that they have earned.
(Elizabeth Managan's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at emanagan @cavalierdaily.com.)
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