The sound of a gateway closing - how anti-affirmative action was organized for national debate - Special Report Top 100 Degree Producers

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 30, 1996 by B. Denise Hawkins

Wood is not conciliatory to his NAS colleagues who seek compromise on the issue of civil rights and affirmative action. Says Wood: "There is no middle ground on the issue of civil rights."

Although the NAS has never officially endorsed the California Initiative, Wood's motivation, says NAS President Stephen Balch, strikes at one of the association's founding principles: That individual merit in the academy and not quotas should be the basis of college or school admissions and even faculty hiring practices.

In published interviews, Wood once stated that fie blamed affirmative action programs for being passed over for a teaching post in favor of a less qualified "diversity hire." Wood later recanted, saying that he did not actually apply for the job, and what lie was told about qualifications may not have been accurate.

Sowing Seeds of Meritocracy

Many inside and outside the academy say the seeds of the anti-affirmative action initiative can be traced to 1990, when Wood and other academics in the association converted their frustrations with affirmative action policies on California campuses into political action.

"That's what's at the root of the (California) initiative and part of the principle of liberal education...by judging people according to who they are as individuals you will in fact have a more diverse society," says Balch, a former professor at John Jay College in New York and a founder of the NAS in 1987.

Black conservative Michael Meyers agrees that people should be regarded on an individual basis and not merely defined by their ethnic or racial identification. "Students are no longer students," says Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a member of the board of directors of the New York branch of the NAS. "They are Black, they are Hispanic, they are Asian...."

Groups vs. Individuals

Balch says he is deeply troubled by what he sees as a gradual erosion of individual rights over the last three decades. "What we [the NAS] have been working toward for a long time, is a different organization of society and the academy, based on individuality and individual rights" not on race or ethnicity.

Building on his understanding of the "original notion of affirmative action -- outreach and assuring people that they would not be discriminated against" -- Balch says there is a way to take "racial preferences" out of the college admissions equation, while still extending educational access to "all the people who are eligible to apply."

A Dangerous Precedent

Prescriptions that undermine group preferences are dangerous, says scholar and author Roger Wilkins, and a recent legal ruling bolstering affirmative action opponents is meritless.

"I think there is no merit whatsoever in the 5th Circuit's reasoning [Hopwood vs. Texas] when it concludes that using race to promote diversity leads institutions to ignore the individuality of Black students and that true diversity is only to he found in the experiences of individuals," says Wilkins, who was an assistant attorney general during the Johnson administration.