Quote:
Originally posted by bethany1982
I see no hatred directed towards any individuals by their actions.
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I think the university chose to act before the situation reached that point . . . which it very easily could have.
The message you may have gotten from this demonstration is "Oh, affirmative action is like this cookie sale, because certain people are favored over others." The message that other people may have gotten from this is instead "Wait . . . are they saying that a black man only needs to do 1/4 the work of a white male in order to get into the same school? Are they saying that a woman is only worth 3/4 of what a man is worth?" (Actually, 7/10th according to current wages.) There are multiple other ways it could be interpreted too. Their message isn't clear and that's what makes it dangerous -- because even though it isn't meant to be hate speech, it can be interpreted as such.
The thing is, if I want to a sell a cookie to one of my friends for five bucks and give the other one away for free, I can do that. And universities can do the same thing with their affirmative action policies if they want. There's no law anywhere that says a school must accept the most "qualified" (according to the traditional scale of grades, extracurriculars and test scores -- and oh, did you know that they did a study that found that the SAT correlates better with grandparents' income than with college academic performance?) applicants, and usually they don't. Nobody whines when a school accepts a girl that published a book at age 16 but only has a 3.4 GPA over a girl who has nothing to make her stand out but her 3.9 GPA. So why should we attack schools for using their own criteria to accept students in cases of affirmative action? Schools are looking for a qualified diverse student body in terms of race, socioeconomic status, background, accomplishments, talents, gender, whatever. They don't want "the most qualified" if the most qualified means all naive white upper-middleclass violin-playing track-running honors students from the suburbs, and I can't say I blame them. As long as I student is qualified, I'm not going to argue about who is "most qualified" based on the admittedly shaky standards of SATs and grades.