Shortsighted policies hurt state

  Paule Takash Takash is a visiting
assistant professor at UCLA in the Cesar E. Chavez Center For
Chicana and Chicano Studies. She will offer a course in Fall 2001
titled “The History and Politics of Affirmative
Action,” among other courses about race and politics.

Everyone Throw Up Your Fist! Tell the Regents We Will
Resist!” “Why Do We Fight? ‘Cause Education Is A
Right!” Upon our early arrival at the UC San Francisco Laurel
Heights auditorium and despite little or no sleep, the students
immediately mustered impassioned chants calling for the repeal of
UC Regents’ resolutions SP-1 and SP-2.

We had driven all night from Los Angeles to San Francisco and
forfeited breakfast to ensure we would be admitted to the May 16 UC
Board of Regents meeting. The caravan of approximately 100
affirmative action activists and supporters was one more successful
action organized this year by the UCLA Affirmative Action
Coalition.

Students from other colleges, UC campuses and Bay Area high
schools as well as faculty, staff, community members and state
legislators also turned out. By noon, the Board unanimously voted
to rescind SP-1 and SP-2.

The repeal of SP-1 and SP-2 is a landmark event in the history
of the University of California and for the future of affirmative
action in general. It represents an important recognition that a
radical attempt to eliminate traditional practices of affirmative
action that resulted in a devastating decline in minority student
enrollments, particularly at UC flagship campuses UCLA and UC
Berkeley.

Adopted in July 1995, SP-1 mandated that race, religion, sex,
color, ethnicity, and national origin could no longer be used as
criteria for determining UC eligibility and admission. Fashioned to
comply with former Governor Pete Wilson’s June 1995 Executive
Order W-124-95 to “End Preferential Treatment and to Promote
Individual Opportunity Based on Merit,” SP-2 extended the
mandate to UC hiring practices.

It is commonly acknowledged these measures were politically
orchestrated to secure Pete Wilson a second term as Governor. They
also launched SP-1 champion UC Regent Ward Connerly into national
prominence as an African American spokesman against affirmative
action. Moreover, the regents’ actions ignited and
legitimated further attack on long standing affirmative action
practices in California and across the country.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, a
citizen’s initiative prohibiting state agencies from
“discriminating against or giving preferential treatment
to” public employees. Washington state voters passed a
similar initiative in 1998 (Initiative 200) and the University of
Michigan’s admissions lawsuit is expected to be come before
the U.S. Supreme Court.

While the architects of SP-1 and SP-2 continue to defend these
policies, comprehensive studies by prominent scholars decisively
refute anti-affirmative action claims. Best known is the research
conducted by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, former presidents of
Princeton and Harvard Universities (The Shape of The River:
Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and
University Admissions, Princeton University Press).

The college and postgraduate life experiences of over 35,000
students enrolled at 28 selective universities in fall 1976 and
fall 1989 were studied. About 3,000 of these students were African
Americans. Furthermore, the authors linked SAT scores and college
majors to after-college experiences such as graduate and
professional degree achievement, income and civic
participation.

Their findings debunk myths that affirmative action policies
result in admitting unqualified students, set students up for
failure and significantly affect white applicants’ admission.
Moreover, minority students admitted with lower test scores still
had high rates of completion, enjoyed high salaries, earned
postgraduate degrees in greater numbers, reported greater civic and
political participation and held more leadership positions than
their white counterparts.

Bowen and Bok contend that eliminating race-sensitive admissions
at these elite universities and colleges would decimate minority
enrollment, an outcome our experience under SP-1 confirms. The
authors also recognize that without affirmative action admissions,
these campus environments, minority communities and the society at
large would be greatly impoverished.

The latter conclusions are especially salient in a state like
California where racialized minorities have become the
population’s majority. Minorities and women already comprise
the majority workforce and represent almost all future growth of
the California workforce.

At a time when the state requires well-educated workers to
guarantee fiscal support for aging baby-boomers and a robust and
competitive economy, it is against everyone’s interests not
to invest in the education of minority youth.

Continuing down the path of racial and ethnic divisiveness in
the form of shortsighted post-SP-1 university admission policies
(that 50 to 75 percent of admissions be exclusively on academic
achievement), or thinly-veiled racist state wide initiatives (Ward
Connerly’s latest “Racial Privacy” initiative
effort), will work against our forging the new ethnic and
generational compact we desperately require today and for our
shared long-term futures.