Affirmative action debate growing

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BY MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star

His was the kind of high school resume that stands out.

A 3.58 grade-point average. 1480 on the SAT. National Honor Society member. Longtime baritone player in the band.

The potential to be the first in his family to finish college.

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Josh Lopez, a UNL freshman from El Paso, Texas, is studying secondary math education. He says had he known there was going to be an effort to end affirmative action in Nebraska, he likely would have gone elsewhere. (William Lauer)

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A ban on affirmative action would mean UNL would have to re-evaluate certain recruiting events. (Hilary Kindschuh / Lincoln Journal Star)...

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It’s hardly surprising that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — along with a host of other colleges — quickly added El Paso, Texas, native Josh Lopez’s name to their recruiting lists.

Lopez, eager to explore his out-of-state options, returned UNL’s interest. Lincoln, he remembers, had the city feel and downtown campus he was looking for. And he was impressed by the rising average ACT score of UNL’s entering students, a sign, he believed, the university’s academic profile was on its way up.

UNL offered Lopez a National Hispanic Scholarship, an award that would help pay his tuition and fees.

Lopez accepted. He’s now on the verge of completing his first year at UNL as a secondary math education major.

Now, rewind a year.

Say Nebraska had had a ban on race- and gender-based affirmative action, a measure that could be on the November ballot. Would Lopez still have chosen UNL?

Let’s just say Nebraska’s loss would have been another state’s gain.

“I was getting better offers from other universities — Ball State, Arizona, Oklahoma State. But I chose this university. I chose to come here.

“Having this going on, it definitely would have swayed my vote.”

Local, national debate growing

Many university leaders fear they’ll lose promising students like Lopez if Nebraska voters approve a ban on racial and gender preferences in admissions and hiring this fall.

The ban, sponsored by the controversially named Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, will appear on the Nov. 4 ballot if affirmative action opponents gather enough petition signatures — about 115,000 — by July 4.

They are confident they will, though they won’t say exactly how many signatures they have thus far.

Further, they’re confident that if the issue gets on the ballot, Nebraska voters will swing their way.

“Affirmative action had a good purpose … but affirmative action changed,” says Ward Connerly, a California businessman and chairman of the American Civil Rights Initiative, the national effort to end race and gender preferences.

The effort has been successful in three states and has targeted five more this year.

“Over the years, it became a cure as bad as the disease (of racism). It became OK to discriminate against whites and males,” Connerly says.

Americans, he says, are ready to move past issues of race and gender — and they’re proving it by narrowing their choices for the Democratic presidential nominee to a black man and a woman.

“It is foolish to keep applying race to public policy,” says Connerly, who is black.

Some people disagree — passionately.

As petitioners continue to collect signatures outside grocery stores, post offices and on the streets, students and other activists have joined forces in support of affirmative action, a practice they believe is still necessary four decades after the Civil Rights and women’s movements.

Ending affirmative action now, some say, would endanger university recruiting programs aimed at minorities, put diversity-based scholarships like Lopez’s at risk and send a message to out-of-staters that Nebraska isn’t a friendly place for minorities.

Well aware that when Connerly’s supporters succeed in getting the affirmative-action ban on states’ ballots, they enjoy a 100 percent success rate on Election Day, some people at the university want to send a message — loudly and clearly — to Nebraskans approached by petitioners: Decline to sign.

“The idea that we would limit the opportunity for people to go to school is disheartening,” says Eva Sohl, a UNL senior from Lincoln whose grandfather came to the United States from Mexico.

Sohl is the recipient of several UNL awards for which diversity is a factor, including the Nebraska Achievement and Larson scholarships.

Without them, she says she’d still be in school but much deeper into debt, and she’d be forced to give up community service so she could work.

Sohl believes a myth exists that UNL hands out scholarships to undeserving minorities, a myth she says is fueled by Nebraskans’ sensitivity to immigration issues.

That idea, she says, is hurtful and inaccurate. Sohl says scholarships like hers benefit the entire university community by introducing students to people from different backgrounds, in turn preparing them to enter a global work force.

“You need to be able to interact with others,” she says. “If you don’t know how to communicate with people, if you just try to eliminate the idea that we’re all individuals, we’re just going to hinder the idea of success.”

Too much affirmative action?

Some people believe UNL’s use of affirmative action has gone too far.

They note that the school has a number of recruiting events and scholarship programs that target certain racial or ethnic groups, including:

* Native American College Day, held just this Wednesday on campus

* Leadership conferences for promising black and Hispanic high schoolers

* An outreach effort to Hispanic families called “Nuestra Familia, Nuestra Universidad,” or “Our Family, Our University”

* Rising Stars Banquet, which honors top high school students of color from the Nebraska Panhandle

* Multicultural Red Letter Days, a branch of UNL’s traditional Red Letter Days, that include the same campus tours and informational sessions but also seeks to address unique concerns of minorities

* Davis-Chambers Scholarship, which covers the full cost of attendance for top minority students

* Native American Heritage and Tribal College scholarships, which help cover tuition costs of qualifying Native students

* Health Sciences Scholarship, which offers freshman tuition support for underrepresented students 

* Summer Institute for Promising Scholars, a six-week, pre-college program for minority and first-generation students that covers their summer tuition plus $1,000 for their freshman year.

University leaders say all of those programs and more would be in danger if affirmative action were outlawed.

But affirmative action opponents say the efforts amount to little more than race-based preferential treatment.

Further, they accuse UNL of engaging in scare tactics. If affirmative action were banned, they say, UNL would still be free to recruit minorities. It simply would have to open all recruiting events and scholarships to all students.

“We can do outreach,” says chemistry professor Gerard Harbison. “We just can’t do outreach based on race.”

Harbison and Connerly say diversity has become a buzzword that implies a certain racial mix.

If UNL truly cared about all kinds of diversity, Harbison says, the university would try harder to recruit all underrepresented groups — Republican faculty, for example.

He’s unconvinced racial diversity is a plus in an academic setting.

“There’s no black perspective on chemical thermodynamics,” he says. “Thermodynamics don’t care what color you are.”

Supporters of affirmative action maintain the university must make an effort to recruit historically underrepresented groups to ensure those students find a path to college.

If it does not, UNL leaders fear the progress they’ve made in diversifying their student body — 9.42 percent of students this year are students of color, a new high but still far behind peer institutions — will stall or even reverse as fewer minorities gain access to UNL and out-of-state minorities choose other states they perceive to be more supportive of diversity.

That perception — accurate or not — is among UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman’s chief worries.

“That’s the problem — the message,” he says.

He and others point out that UNL has no enrollment cap and a standard set of admission requirements, meaning no student who is academically qualified is turned away.

And although the university does give out some scholarships that take diversity into consideration, there aren’t many, notes Craig Munier, director of scholarships and financial aid.

Of about $36.5 million in scholarship dollars handed out this academic year, $2.3 million, or 6.3 percent, are partially based on diversity, according to Munier’s office.

Moreover, all scholarships are based on academic merit, he says. And many of the most prestigious awards, like the full-tuition Regents Scholarship, go almost exclusively to whites and Asians.

“(Affirmative action) opponents think there’s all kinds of money they’re not getting to compete for,” Munier says.

Numerically, that isn’t the case.

But opponents maintain that any racial preference, no matter how rare, is wrong.

Diversity-based scholarships could and should be reformulated into income-based scholarships, says UNL management professor Marc Schniederjans, who is treasurer of the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative.

Many low-income students come from underrepresented racial groups, so the university still would reach minorities without specifically targeting them, Schniederjans says.

“This is a way of directly giving back without discriminating on race and gender.”

As it stands now, if an affirmative-action ban passes, UNL officials aren’t sure how they would re-evaluate or reconfigure diversity-based scholarships.

Perlman and Munier doubt scholarships already awarded could be taken away from students like Lopez and Sohl.

Future students may not be as lucky.

“There are a lot of unknowns,” Munier says.

‘This is not Nebraskans’

Meanwhile, Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative allies now have less than three months to gather the petition signatures they need.

An unusually long and harsh winter slowed the process slightly, Schniederjans says, but now that temperatures are rising, he foresees no obstacles to reaching the goal of 115,000.

Nebraskans, he says, largely are reacting favorably when approached by petitioners.

Some petitioners are volunteers. Others get paid about $2.50 a signature.

They typically begin by asking passers-by whether they want to end discrimination.

Some go on to cite the recent promotion of Lincoln firefighter Jeanne Pashalek to deputy fire chief as an example of race and gender preference. The story is featured prominently on the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative Web site.

Five male Lincoln firefighters have sued the city over Pashalek’s promotion, saying they ranked higher than she did on the department’s promotional list and that she was chosen because she’s a woman.

The Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, petitioners tell passers-by, will help ensure gender and racial equality. They then ask for a signature.

Critics say the process is misleading to voters who may actually think they’re signing in support of affirmative action.

Voters are further led astray, critics say, by the initiative’s name, which seems to align itself with the civil rights movement, and by the fact the initiative’s ballot language asks voters to end racial and gender preferences without explicitly mentioning affirmative action.

Shirley Wilcher, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Association for Affirmative Action, believes fewer voters would sign if they knew they were signing to end affirmative action.

“We’ve got to correct the record,” she says. “The language is so confusing to voters. They never use the words ‘affirmative action.’”

Schniederjans says the initiative’s ballot language is anything but misleading.

Ending discrimination is exactly what the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative aims to do, and voters deserve to know as much, he says.

“Look at the objective,” he says. “What are we talking about? A third-grade education? If people get confused on that, it’s pretty bad.”

He does acknowledge the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative is largely funded by non-Nebraskans.

According to the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, of the nearly $57,000 the initiative has raised so far, $50,000 came from Paul Singer, a New York businessman who was a major donor to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani.

Schniederjans has kicked in another $100, according to reports filed with the commission.

Many Nebraskans have made smaller donations, Schniederjans says.

Critics don’t think Connerly or Singer should try to shape Nebraska public policy.

“This thing is outsourced. This really is an out-of-state effort,” says Nic Swiercek, a UNL senior and vice president of Students United for Nebraska, which is fighting the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative.

“This is not Nebraskans.”

Connerly’s response: Ending affirmative action is simply something he’s passionate about.

“Let the people decide. They don’t have to approve this,” he says. “I would never presume to come in here and say what your tax policy should be.

“My name won’t be anywhere on that ballot.”

What’s happened elsewhere

Thus far, American voters largely are responding favorably to Connerly’s efforts.

In California, where Connerly was a University of California regent for 12 years, voters ended affirmative action by a 54 percent majority in 1996.

Two years later, Connerly allies got an affirmative action ban on the ballot in Washington, and voters passed it by a 58 percent majority.

And in 2006, voters in Michigan passed the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative by a 58 percent majority.

Immediately after the California initiative passed, the University of California reported significant drops in black and Hispanic enrollment at its two most prestigious campuses, Los Angeles and Berkeley.

Asian enrollment, meanwhile, rose sharply.

To Connerly, that’s evidence of a severe performance gap between Asian and white students and black and Hispanic students.

“We’re never going to solve that gap as long as there’s a mandate over it,” he says.

Instead of affirmative action at the college level, Connerly says academic performance gaps must be addressed early and often: Parents should read more to their children, for example, and elementary, middle and high schools must do a better job of preparing students for college.

And in lieu of race-based scholarships, universities should pour more money into aid for low-income students, he says.

“I am guided by the moral principle that every American deserves equal treatment,” he says. “Affirmative action is about applying different standards to people.”

Along with Nebraska, the American Civil Rights Initiative hoped to end affirmative action in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma this year.

But earlier this month, allies of the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative were forced to withdraw their petition after the secretary of state discovered inconsistencies in the signature-gathering process, including numerous duplicate signatures.

Schniederjans says he’s disappointed in the Oklahoma result but hopes petitioners there will come to Nebraska to ensure success here.

His opponents, on the other hand, have renewed hope an affirmative action ban won’t make it onto Nebraska ballots.

“It’s very hopeful that groups are able to defeat this thing,” says Swiercek of Students United for Nebraska.

The future: Men at risk, too?

Affirmative action supporters want to make clear they’re focused on more than creating opportunities for racial minorities.

Gender equality is critical, too, they say, whether it’s recruiting more women to engineering programs or more men to nursing.

And in the future, it’s men — not women — who may need extra help.

TIME magazine reported this month that women continue to outpace men in entering and finishing college, leaving some American universities scrambling for a gender balance. Clark University in Massachusetts, for example, offers a “men helping men” support program, and Kenyon College in Ohio has lower admissions standards for men.

UNL’s gender split is even, but that’s likely to change in coming years, says admissions dean Alan Cerveny.

Admissions staff members have met to consider what they can do to recruit men, he says.

“Ironically,” he says, “if this (affirmative action ban) goes through, that would be illegal.”

Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative allies continue to believe all race- and gender-based programs are discriminatory.

Others believe affirmative action means equality, not preferential treatment.

Wilcher, of the American Association for Affirmative Action, thinks it’s far too early to end a practice she believes ensures quality minority candidates are considered for jobs and admissions.

It will take generations, she says, for institutional racism and sexism to fade completely.

In the meantime, Wilcher fears if the American Civil Rights Initiative is successful, the nation’s future leaders won’t reflect a diverse population.

For instance: A black colleague recently took her son to a doctor for a checkup.

The doctor noticed the boy’s arms appeared ashy and suspected he had a skin condition, Wilcher says.

But dryness simply shows up more easily on dark skin. All the boy needed was some lotion.

Wilcher was shocked the doctor didn’t know as much.

That, she says, is why affirmative action still is necessary.

“We’re not talking about students who can’t get the job done,” Wilcher says. “We’re not talking about lawyers who can’t pass the bar. We’re not talking about physicians who can’t get certified.

“Affirmative action means people who are qualified are considered. You can’t close the door at this point. You can’t just pull the rug out from under us after only 40 years.”

Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.