ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 13, 1996 TAG: 9605130015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GORDON K. DAVIES
AFFIRMATIVE action is under attack in the courts, the newspapers and legislatures across the United States. It has been judged unconstitutional, unproductive, degrading and unfair. Almost everyone is said to be victimized by it, regardless of race, ethnicity or gender.
Some influential commentators who have used it as a ladder to climb the slippery slope now want to kick it away and claim that it was irrelevant to their success. Many who have not been able to climb the slope want to believe that they lost out because others received preferential treatment.
Affirmative action as currently practiced in higher education has its faults. But it plays an important role for our nation's colleges and universities, both to ensure that members of racial and ethnic minority groups have equal educational opportunities and to ensure that the populations of our campuses are not stratified and segregated.
And its dangers have been exaggerated: As a skeptical student (white, male) observed recently, "A white male is more apt to get mad cow disease than to suffer reverse discrimination."
Affirmative action also plays an important role in the economy of this nation. As our population ages, there are fewer young people who might join the workforce and contribute both their abilities and their tax dollars to sustain our way of life.
Henry Ford realized at the beginning of this century that eventually it would be pointless to mass-produce automobiles unless his workers and the workers in other factories were able to afford them. We need every young person in our population as a potential worker and, quite frankly, as a potential consumer.
But affirmative action as now practiced was shaped by experiences 30 years ago or more and needs to be changed to reflect today's social and economic conditions. While the minority enrollments of our nation's colleges and universities have more than doubled over this period of time, today affirmative action has become a divisive issue among us. Its mind-numbing regulations and reports have created a make-work industry: One Western university is considering a special student fee to pay the costs of affirmative-action litigation.
Instead of continuing affirmative action as it now is practiced, we need creative strategies that actually address the inequities of opportunity in America today. Perhaps one strategy is to shift the main focus of affirmative action to economic status. The poor, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are most often the educationally disadvantaged.
The playing field is not level for all Americans. Millions of young people come from impoverished homes, poor schools and violent communities. Many will not live productive lives and raise healthy families unless education helps them become skilled and dependable workers. They must learn how to think clearly, communicate effectively and solve problems.
Changing affirmative action will not be easy, but we have to do it if we are going to better integrate our schools, colleges, and workplaces. It is better to rescue affirmative action than to scrap it, not only because it's the self-interested thing to do, but also because it's the right thing to do.
A fatal flaw of Athenian democracy was the assumption that some people could be given the privileges of citizenship while others were enslaved and denied them. Two thousand years later, at the beginning of the modern era we now call the Enlightenment, the preacher and poet John Donne offered a different vision of the common lot of all human beings.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
We cannot and should not survive by becoming a society divided into a wealthy elite and an impoverished underclass. Consider how level the playing field really is the next time you drive by a crowd of young people hanging out on a corner or at a convenience store. Consider also that the bell tolls for us.
Gordon K. Davies is director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
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