The Shared Benefits of Affirmative Action
The Shared Benefits of Affirmative Action
As an Asian-American alumnus of Harvard, I know it’s incorrect to think of race-conscious admissions policies as helping just the lucky few.
In a federal court in Boston on Monday, a trial that could have major consequences for diversity on university campuses began. A group of Asian-American students have accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by rejecting them despite their higher numerical scores in favor of African-American and Latino students.
Harvard’s “race-conscious” admissions policy, which is at the center of the case, is caricatured by opponents as being “infected with racial bias.” If the plaintiffs, a group called Students for Fair Admissions, win, the decision could threaten the ability of all colleges to consider an applicant’s race in admissions.
Like many Asian-Americans and many Harvard graduates, I vigorously oppose the lawsuit. I reject the false equivalence of the argument that taking into consideration the race of applicants from underrepresented groups is the same as discriminating against everyone else.
The plaintiffs are asking why colleges like Harvard should increase racial and ethnic diversity at the expense of “more qualified” applicants, in particular Asian-Americans? The assumption here is that factors like an applicant’s SATs, grade point average and number of extracurricular activities can provide a precise ranking of student quality. But that’s not true. While scores and grades may provide a general measure of cognitive ability and motivation, no universal metric can exactly gauge applicants’ intellect or their value to an institution.
I would flip the question: Does the racial and ethnic diversity at Harvard enhance the quality of the education there? My answer is a resounding yes. The best college education includes intellectual and social interactions among thoughtful people from a broad range of cultural and racial backgrounds, both inside and outside the classroom. Restricting diversity efforts will ultimately reduce the quality of education.
I am now a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, a public university that is sometimes used as a counterpoint to Harvard’s holistic undergraduate admissions policy. Berkeley eliminated affirmative action in graduate and professional schools in 1996 and in its undergraduate school in 1998. The passage of State Proposition 209 in 1996 prevented a reconsideration of this position, eliminating race as a factor for admissions.
After this policy change, the percentages of underrepresented minorities — defined as African-American, Chicano/Latino and Native American students — already low, dropped even further and haven’t fully recovered since. For example, African-Americans now account for only 3 percent of the student body at Berkeley. At Harvard, according to The Boston Globe, recent data shows they make up about 8 percent of the student body, and represent about 15 percent of admitted students.
Berkeley is working hard to promote racial diversity among its undergraduate body, but it has a long way to go. The elimination of affirmative action hinders this progress. Still, the university is able to get students representing a wide range of interests, backgrounds and identities because it’s so big (with over 30,000 undergraduates, it is almost five times the size of Harvard). Forbidding race as a factor in admissions would be a bigger blow to diversity at smaller universities, whose smaller student bodies limit the cross-section of the world that can be accommodated.
Though I’m a professor, I readily acknowledge that much of the learning occurs outside the lecture hall, in the spaces where students live and socialize. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1990s, I spent countless late nights debating religion, science, culture and politics with classmates of a wide variety of belief systems, backgrounds, interests, political viewpoints, ethnicities and race. These interactions made my mental constructs of society more flexible, allowing me to incorporate new information and to learn from the experiences of others.
Some ask why can’t Harvard be more like Berkeley, eliminating an individual’s race as a factor in admissions? As someone who knows both schools quite well, I take the opposite position, and wish Berkeley could be more like Harvard. If students are an integral part of the educational experience, then having a diverse class is essential. Only an admissions process that takes into consideration the whole person — including race — can produce the extraordinary diversity of each incoming class at Harvard.
I once believed that affirmative action was primarily important as a vehicle to address the decades of racial inequality that have harmed minorities in the past, including Asian-Americans. I now recognize that the benefits of the racial and ethnic diversity that affirmative action produces are shared by everyone. When this diversity exists, stereotypes are shattered, arguments are informed by experience, and alternate perspectives lead to revelations. Race cannot and should not be excised from a person’s identity, but communities can be built around shared undergraduate experiences and friendships among students with different backgrounds.
The experiential learning environment provided by a diverse community is vital. Our students are the future professionals who will enter a diverse work force, the business leaders who will work in a global economy and the visionaries who will solve local and global problems. Perhaps most important, diversity is vital to educating citizens who can identify the artificial constructs that divide us and develop new relationships to move our society forward. A race-conscious admissions policy is not about benefiting the lucky few — it is about improving the educational experience for all.
Robert Rhew is an associate professor in the departments of geography and of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley.
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