Smith President Urges Colleges to Fight Back on Affirmative Action

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 9, 1999

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Smith College's president, Dr. Ruth Simmons, last month called for college leaders to unite in making clear that they are not about to abandon young people of any race who want and need an education.

"Lots of people have spoken against affirmative action, but we've not responded as coherently or well as we should have," says the sharecropper's daughter, who became the first Black to head one of the elite Seven Sister schools.

She says many of the proposed alternatives--such as a move in Florida to admit the top 20 percent of the graduates of every high school in the state to its public colleges--run into the same problems as affirmative action.

"They box us in. You have to fit a certain mold. We are still trying to identify the right kind of people and that's what got us in trouble before," she says, calling for college faculty to become more involved in admissions.

"We know the faculty in an institution can judge whether a student can do the work and they should decide," she says. "We should not cave in to the national movement to let outsiders make those decisions for us."

Colleges have themselves to blame in part, she says. At one point, colleges routinely used a host of other factors as well as SAT scores and class rank.

"Then it became easier to admit students in large part on how they performed and so we boxed ourselves into a corner," she says. "But educational leaders do not exist to stamp the credentials of the privileged--the ones who can already pass all the tests. To truly educate is to provide a service to people in need of that service."

Then, adding that race shouldn't be the most important criteria either, she says: "My children have all the same advantages of any other children of the middle class"--including the advantages that translate into higher scores on standardized tests. It is those who could fall by the wayside because of their economic conditions about whom she says she worries.

Simmons heads an elite women's liberal arts college that costs more than $31,000 a year to attend and where Black students make up 4 percent of the students. This year, she says, she has launched a small program allowing the faculty to consider some admissions.

"The 4 percent hasn't changed in the five years I've been here," she says. "And we will be sitting here forever trying to diversify if we just keep looking for the mythical test scores in the range we need."