AAP unfairly favors minorities
By Daily Bruin Staff
March 3, 2008 9:01 p.m.
Last week marked the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Academic Advancement Program, a program aimed at increasing the enrollment and retention of underrepresented minorities on our campus.
This program, which offers free tutoring and access to priority enrollment to enrolled students, determines which students get access to these benefits on the basis of race. This bigoted allocation of our tax dollars and student fees violates Proposition 209 ““ the California law banning affirmative action and preferential treatment on the basis of race.
Though the AAP administrators might claim they don’t explicitly take race into account in their programs ““ that would be illegal ““ their Web site features a letter by AAP Director Charles J. Alexander who claims the programs exists to serve “students from underrepresented populations,” among other groups.
Yet such a program is venerated as a sacred icon on our campus; our Chancellor recently sent out an e-mail celebrating the program’s contribution to our campus. One can’t help but question a public that sorts students on the basis of race, rather than on the basis of things that matter. And AAP’s Web site says that eligibility is determined by “social and environmental barriers that may impact academic experience and performance” ““ what some may call a code phrase for race.
This program is merely symptomatic of an ideology that represents people not as individuals capable of determining their own identities, but just as members of a racial community. The administrators who pay lip service to the notion of diversity define it in terms of race. But racial diversity, because it is entirely superficial, is not the kind of diversity that matters.
More examples of this sort of hypocrisy abound. The Office of Residential Life has started racially themed housing programs that allow students to choose to live in floors segregated on the basis of majors such as African diaspora studies or Chican@/Latin@ studies. According to ORL’s Web site, these exist to “provides ways to connect with other students and spaces to work to change and facilitate involvement in the community.” Imagine the outrage if there was an option for living on an all-white, “WASP” or European-American studies-themed floor. Both are equally racist.
Ironically, the same liberal administrators who praise the benefit of racial diversity actively seek to avoid diverse environments by allowing students to self-segregate on the basis of culture-based majors.
Meanwhile, campus academic departments such as the Chicana and Chicano studies department offer classes such as one actually called “Understanding Whiteness in America,” which, according to the course syllabus, argues that white privilege (translation: racism) continues to permeate all aspects of society. Only at our universities do we pay people to tell us how racist we all are.
Correctness Week this week is gearing toward exploring the tangible damage caused by these “politically correct” ideologies.
Lazar is a second-year economics graduate student and the chairman of Bruin Republicans. He is also a former Daily Bruin columnist.
