Last month, Campus Republicans sold Rice Krispie bars at different prices to people of different races as a way to “incite debate” about what they feel are unjust affirmative action policies at the University and other colleges around the country. It was a ridiculous stunt that was embarrassing for people who consider themselves Republicans and insulting to anyone who has ever considered the affirmative action debate with any intelligence or reason.
With the U.S. Supreme Court considering a landmark affirmative action case, the debate around the issue hardly needs mindless gimmicks to get it started. So acts that fail to consider any of the relative issues regarding affirmative action are not helping, they’re simply increasing the divide between the two sides and limiting the debate to oversimplifications and stereotypes.
If the Campus Republicans were really interested in reflecting what universities around the country are doing through their little bake sale, they should consider the “affirmative action” wealthy students and children of alumni receive around the world. It seems recently that anytime a white student gets denied admission to the school of their choice, their parents hire a lawyer and go running into court complaining about affirmative action. Maybe their parents feel guilty. After all, if my parents had gone to Harvard University, all I would have had to do was graduate from high school with a pulse and I could have been admitted to the most prestigious academic institution in the land.
Next time you look at the entrance requirements for one of the top institutions and wonder why you were not admitted despite being right at all the averages, remember once you account for all the legacies admitted, a student has to be almost perfect to even be considered. That means if great-great-great Grandpa Telleen had tried to get in to Yale University, for instance, (and this was back when one of the only considerations was whether your family could afford tuition, long before scholarships of any kind) we all could have ridden the gravy train of privilege right into cushy jobs and top grad schools.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Harvard was founded in the 1600s. How many black students do you think went there for the first, oh, say 300 years? Probably not too many, what with slavery and segregation and whatnot. So that’s almost 300 years of white families securing for their children the right to a first-class education before blacks were even allowed to attend.
Some schools don’t even care if your parents went there, as long as they’ve made a lot of money. Two articles in the Wall Street Journal in the last month talked about affirmative action for the wealthy. The first was a straight news story about the efforts of Duke University to recruit a girl who was not up to their academic criteria because her family had made millions from the sale of coffeemakers. Duke wanted her parents as donors, so they admitted their daughter.
The second article took the form of more of a “how-to” article, explaining exactly how much money wealthy parents should give in order to assure their child admission into the top schools in the country. Admission can be bought was the lesson we learned. Maybe the parents of the affirmative action plaintiffs should have saved their legal fees and simply bought their way into college in the first place.
Most of the schools in this article are private institutions that are allowed to do whatever they want when admitting students. Many would argue that we wouldn’t accept the same behavior from state-run schools, which are primarily the schools being sued over affirmative action. This is a valid point, if we are going to accept affirmative action from all private universities. But the admission of legacies and the recruitment of the unqualified wealthy are just examples of the way the system is set up to benefit primarily white, wealthy families.
Affirmative action might not be a perfect answer. But you cannot evaluate the legitimacy of the programs in a vacuum that fails to consider the historical inequities and the current advantages given primarily to whites over other races. There are intelligent arguments against affirmative action. Unfortunately, the Campus Republicans didn’t make any of them with their little gimmick.
For the next bake sale, be sure to bring enough treats to give one away for free to anyone whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents attended the University. And then bake even more and drive out to the wealthiest neighborhoods and offer them for free to the families in the hopes of soliciting donations later. You’re going to need a lot of marshmallows.
Matt Telleen’s biweekly column usually appears alternate Mondays. Send letters to the editor to
