California campuses get an affirmative reaction

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 21, 1995 | by Gayle M.B. Hanson

When he persuaded a majority of the University of California Board of Regents to eliminate racial preference as a factor in university admissions, regent Ward Connerly opened the Pandora's box of affirmative action, placing abolition at the forefront of national political debate. Connerly now knows what it is like to be vilified.

"I had hoped that we would be able to talk this out," he told Insight in an interview several days after a tumultuous 12-hour meeting that led to a 14-10 vote by the university regents to abolish affirmative action. "But a lot of black people believe that as a black I should subscribe to some kind of black agenda; that I am someone who by definition has to agree with affirmative action. They want to play a racial solidarity game. The next thing you know I have Jesse Jackson telling me I am throwing rocks at the tombstone of Dr. [Martin Luther] King."

But Connerly, a former deputy director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development who now heads his own consulting firm, says he's firmly committed to the notion of a color-blind society, despite critics who've labeled him a "house negro" and "Uncle Tom."

"I have received support on my stand from some black Americans, but the so-called leadership are so intolerant and are not maturing. They don't seem to understand that the only way black people are going to go the rest of the way in America is to invest in America as citizens separately and apart from our color."

At a time when college campuses have become shrines to the notion of multiculturalism, resulting in increasing racial separatism on the nation's campuses, Connerly says, he took a hard look around University of California campuses and saw something he believed was seriously wrong.

"I've only been on the Board of Regents for two-and-one-half years and I've been visiting the campuses because I think it is important that I know what is going on; that I be in touch with students and professors. And as I visited these campuses I saw that black and Hispanic students were isolated, and that we were developing these separate-theme dorms. And to me that said separatism. As I talked to students about this and my beliefs in a color-blind society they actually ridiculed me. A lot of black students would say things to me like, 'The white man has had his foot on my neck for generations,' or 'We have been victims of oppression for 200 years,' and all these things began to create a fear in me that the university is practicing a form of race separatism and consciousness that is not good for society."

Connerly lays blame for this new racial separatism squarely at the feet of academics, whom he says have undermined the very idea of equality before the law. "Academia has embraced a whole new vision of what race should be," he reflects. "It is the language of the underrepresented minority. It means that there are groups that are supposed to be entitled to a certain share. Suddenly the individual becomes secondary to the group. Parity is the language they use and that is antithetical to my views."

But what finally pushed Connerly to confront the issue head-on was his belief that affirmative action was actually discrimination, and that it needed to be set aside to create a level playing field.

"I had a couple come to me whose son was a 4.0 student at San Diego State University. He was a longtime California resident and his father was a professor at the university," recalls Connerly. "He'd been turned down when he applied to medical school here. At first I thought these people had an ax to grind. But then I looked at the figures and they were compelling. Something was very wrong. The competition for even academically average black and Hispanic students is so fierce that many of them opt to go to Harvard or Princeton where they get full financial-aid packages. So in order to meet the university goals of diversity we start admitting minority students with a 2.8 average, while white and Asian students with 4.0 averages are being turned down. So, do you challenge the institution or do you close your eyes to it? I chose to keep my eyes open. And yes, it has cost me."

The final bill, however, has yet to be tallied. Already San Francisco is considering filing a lawsuit against the university system about its decision. The matter of affirmative action in statewide policies will be placed before California voters in November 1996, and without question it will be a key issue in the 1996 presidential election.

This round began when a black university regent looked closely at the University of California system, decided affirmative action was racism and fought it where he found it.