Raleigh, N. C.—It turns out that the main forces blocking real affirmative action may be the very establishments that claim to want it the most—institutions of higher learning. “Americans want color blindness,” longtime civil rights activist Ward Connerly says. “They yearn for it.”
“The biggest obstacle is our colleges.” Connerly served for an eventful decade on the University of California Board of Regents. “From the day that I arrived, I was hearing all this blather about diversity,” Connerly remembers. “I didn’t know any more about diversity on the day I left than I did on the day I arrived and it wasn’t because I didn’t try to find out.”
“I asked.” Connerly left the Board of Regents in 2005. He became a center of an affirmative action controversy when he campaigned for an ultimately successful ballot proposition that effectively ended racial preferences in admissions to state universities.
“After Proposition 209 passed, the minority enrollment at U. C. Berkeley dropped but not in the U. C. system as a whole,” Connerly says. “The cap in graduation rates is largely gone.”
“The cap in retention rates is largely gone.” An often-overlooked aspect of the issue of racial preferences in college admissions is the high turnover rate that results when collegiates do not actually graduate: this trend can be seen among all students but graduation rates among blacks and Hispanics tend to be lower than for the student body as a whole, nationally.
Connerly spoke to the lunchtime audience at a conference sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
“At U. C. Berkeley, you have 42,000 students competing for 4,200 seats,” Connerly explained to the luncheon crowd at the Brownstone-Holiday Inn:
• “You have 18,000 black kids graduating from California high schools of whom 9,000 are U.C.-eligible.
• “You have 18,000 Asian kids graduating from California high schools of whom 9,000 are U. C.-eligible.
“Let’s take that thousand [U.C.-eligible black kids],” Connerly suggested:
• “About 300 go to Harvard and the Ivies.
• “Another 300 go to the historically black colleges and/or universities which have an appealing message that ‘you won’t be a minority here.’
• “There’s not much left so you start dipping down and getting a student who would normally be going to Sacramento State—my alma mater—and sending him to U. C. Davis and some others.”
He urged members of the audience not to lose sight of the true goal of civil rights laws. “Civil rights aren’t just for black people,” he noted. “They are for everyone.”
“Our mission is to get more people to be productive citizens,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of Americans will not set foot on a college campus, yet they are leading productive lives.”
Now old enough to collect social security, Connerly has watched with wry amusement some of the more politically correct aspects of the Civil Rights struggle as it morphed from a movement seeking basic legal protections to one that sought to police language usage, among other things. “First, we were colored, then negro, then African-American and now people of color,” Connerly said. “From colored people to people of color, that’s progress,” he laughed.
Predictably, despite his urbane demeanor and approach, Connerly’s message unnerves college audiences. After he spoke at an Accuracy in Academia conference at Columbia in the 1990s, university administrators pointed to the protests that greeted him when they shut the conference down.
I asked him if the recent experience that the Minutemen had when trying to present their case for secure American borders to a hostile Columbia crowd brought back memories of that AIA event. “Oh yes,” he said. “It was déjà vu.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
