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Minority students are not coming up to the standards set by
one of the nation’s most competitive institutions
Glynn Custred
April 30, 2005
“Is Anyone Responsible?” is the title of a front page article that appeared
on the front page of the Friday April 15, 2005 edition of the San Francisco Bay
Area newspaper the Contra Costa Time. The writer Steven Thomma observed that the
practice of “accepting responsibility without passing the buck or blaming others
when things went wrong” was once a part of the moral character of the nation.
This ethic, however, has given way to a very different manner of doing things.
“Almost none of the leaders of the country’s great institutions”, says Thomma,
“step forward and take responsibility for failure or even an honest mistake.”
On the same page the Times fortuitously provided an illustration. The story was
about Robert Birgeneau who the following day was to be inaugurated as the ninth
chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley is the
flagship institution of the University of California and according to the Times
“one of the country’s most competitive colleges.” Birgeneau has let it be known
that he is disturbed by the drop in minority enrollments that has taken place at
Berkeley since 1998. The figure for black students, for example, 28% fewer this
year than in 2003.
According to Birgeneau the reason for this drop is not just the underachievement
of minority students, but the voters of California who in 1996 passed
Proposition 209, a popular initiative that ended racial and ethnic preferences
in the state’s system of higher education. Before voters banned preferences,
university bureaucrats were able to juggle admissions anyway they pleased to
come up with whatever racial and ethnic mix they deemed appropriate. After Prop
209, however, the university had to apply a single standard that applied equally
to everyone rather than the race and ethnic based double standard they had used
before, thus the drop in minority enrollments.
What does this tell us? It tells us that there is a very serious problem in
California’s education system in which minority students are not coming up to
the standards set by one of the nation’s most competitive institutions. Tinker
with admissions in the form of “affirmation action” preference only masks the
problem rather than solving it. Worse still racial and ethnic preferences
discriminate against those white and Asian students who have worked hard to
reach a high level of academic achievement only to be told that they are
excluded not because of their ability but because of the color of their skin or
their last name. Some of those who are excluded come from disadvantaged
backgrounds, while some of those who are preferred merely because of race and
perceived ethnicity may be far more advantaged by virtue of their middle class
status and access to better schools in better neighborhoods. Such set asides for
middle class students actually forms a new kind of legacy alongside those based
on preference due to alumni family connections and donations to the university.
It is the prohibition of such legacies that Birgeneau publicly regrets.
Not only have the victims of this kind of discrimination suffered, but also in
many cases those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of racial and ethnic
preferences. Less prepared students selected merely on the basis of race and
ethnicity, when thrown into classes with those carefully selected for their
advanced preparation and ability, often feel less competent than then really
are. In some cases they even drop out because of the competition, whereas if
they were matched with other kinds of institutions geared to developing the
natural abilities of the students they serve, those drop outs would go on to
academic and professional success. This systematic mismatch between students
with institutions, because of the administration’s obsession on the numbers
game, both engenders frustration in individuals and results in some cases in a
loss of human resources. Administrators like Robert Birgeneau apparently never
stop to think about that.
Racial and ethnic representation on the elitist Berkeley campus, and the
legerdemain its managers come up with to create what is for them is a good
image, is only the tip of a very troubling iceberg; a problem for which
university managers and education bureaucrats from K through 12 refuse to take
responsibility. For example, the California State University system expends
millions of scarce dollars each year not on higher education but on remediation;
in other words on trying to bring underprepared high school graduates up to
college level work By far the largest percentage of those in remediation are
minority students. Even more disturbing is the high rate of minority high school
drop-outs who simply disappear before they even have a chance at post-graduation
remediation at CSU.
When seen in the perspective of K through BA the educational establishment of
California is undeniably failing its minority students; and no one within those
institutions is standing up to admit responsibility. Instead Robert Birgeneau
wags his finger at the people of California for requiring fairness in
California’s public institutions rather than permitting its bureaucrats to cook
the books to mask their failures.
In his article on accepting responsibility Thomma quotes a historian commenting
on the child abuse scandals of the Catholic Church: “When you’re paying more
attention to the definition of doctrinal correctness”, says the historian, “you
find people looking past the question of whether people are doing a good job in
power.” From what Robert Birgeneau has said so far that is precisely what he is
doing, and given his prior record in other institutions that is what he intends
to do as chancellor of the University of California Berkeley.
Glynn Custred
is co-author of Proposition 209 and is a professor at California State
University Hayward. |
Glynn Custred is co-author
of Proposition 209 and is a professor at California State University Hayward.
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