Debaters wrangle over affirmative action
Participants in Monday’s affirmative action debate agreed that creating a dialogue about the issue was the most important result of holding the debate.
“I really believe that these are the kind of things we should do on campus on the issues every month,” one of the debate’s participants, Utah State University Professor Ross Peterson, said. “We’re educating people to go out into the world to be citizens, and I think the more they can be aware of some of the things they’re going to face, the better off we’ll be.”
USU professor Tony Peacock concurred.
“I thought it was an excellent debate,” he said. “I thought the presentations were very good and touched on a lot of the core issues that are at the center of the affirmative action debate.”
The debate, held in the Taggart Student Center Ballroom at 12:30 p.m., was sponsored by the Associate Students of USU Campus Diversity and the Office of the Vice President for Student Services.
The debate was organized as a reaction to an anti-affirmative action bake sale held by the Utah State College Republicans Dec. 2 offering cookies at discount prices for minorities.
“This is the kind of debate we need to have at Utah State, whether it’s on this issue or others,” Juan Franco, the moderator of the debate, said. “I am particularly pleased that the students were actually the impetus for this. I’m hoping they won’t stop at this and we can talk about other issues that are important to young people.”
Franco, the vice president for Student Services at USU, said the arguments made were typical of those made in the national discussion of affirmative action.
“I was delighted with the way it turned out, with the way both sides handled it,” Franco said. “It’s a difficult issue to try and focus on and keep the emotions out.”
While the participants agreed on the value of the forum, they agreed on little else.
Representatives of Aggies for the Education of Affirmative Action (AEAA) and the USU College Republicans were each given five minutes to speak on the issue, followed by a one-minute summary by a faculty representative from each side.
The AEAA won a coin toss and elected to let the College Republicans speak first, then the two sides alternated speakers.
Anti-Affirmative action positions
Tom Robins, state chairman of the Utah Federation of College Republicans, called affirmative action a treatment of symptoms of the problems in race relations, rather than focusing on the “root of the problem.”
This root, he said, are socioeconomic problems which are better dealt with through education reforms like school choice and vouchers.
“The problem with affirmative action is that it just looks at the color of your skin,” Robins said in English before continuing in Spanish, “I want to tell you that it is not just the color of a person’s skin, but we have to look to see what’s inside.”
Jared Westbroek, a member of the USU College Republicans, said affirmative action is not the policy it was intended to be.
“Over the past 30 to 40 years, affirmative action has changed course. It is no longer the race-neutral policy that it started out as. It is a race-preferential program,” he said.
Peacock, a political science professor, said civil rights reforms that led to the affirmative action policy were transformed into an “opposite principle” of the original intent.
“Rather than ignoring race, race became the precondition for compensatory justice. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, affirmative action ceased being an equal opportunity initiative and focused more on equal results.”
Peacock attacked the word “under-utilization,” used by proponents of affirmative action to describe low percentages of minorities in a field of work.
Even without a quota system, Peacock said, “to achieve proportional representation in any field typically requires the use of discriminatory preferences to achieve those outcomes.
“Affirmative action is a divisive policy that has done more to this country than any other federal initiative. It should be ended, not amended.”
Pro-affirmative action positions
Jaber, president of a multicultural fraternity, said he has experienced discrimination as a first-generation Arab-American.
In an impassioned speech, Jaber said affirmative action is the best solution that has been presented so far to fight prejudice that “is still very prevalent in our society,” he said.
“[This leads] to a strong validation of the existence of social institutions such as affirmative action to fight this institutionalized discrimination,” he said. “Affirmative action is our only tool that may be utilized to balance the scale of discrimination.”
Peterson said history shows affirmative action is necessary because of the effects of past racist policies like slavery and segregation.
“Affirmative action is not about competition,” he said. “It is about opportunity, it’s about openness and being fair. It does not endanger equality nor does it deprive others of an opportunity to excel.”
Melanie Domenech-Rodriguez, a USU professor of psychology, said racism continues today.
“The days of overt racism may be over, perhaps, one would hope, but we still have covert racism to contend with,” she said. “We continue to live in a society that judges people by the color of the skin and continues to provide opportunities differentially.”
Domenech-Rodriguez called affirmative action a ‘big picture thinking’ policy to increase diversity, and said opponents were in the quandary of saying to themselves, “I value diversity but not at my own expense. I want to see diverse university campuses, but not if that means I cannot gain admission to the exact university I want at the exact time.”
“Diversity is and continues to be a compelling state interest,” she said. “If we were to turn the clock back today, how many of us here wouldn’t proudly give our seat for Rosa Park on the bus?”
Audience reaction
“The biggest thing about the debate was the opportunity to educate the students, to give them two sides of the issue and let them make the decision for themselves,” Jaber said.
Mike Housden, a USU master’s student in instructional technology, said he didn’t have a strong opinion on the issue but tends to agree with the pro-affirmative action side.
“I really felt like [the pro-affirmative action] side of the aisle was willing to look at the complexity of the issue, but the [anti-affirmative action] side of the aisle was using rhetoric. I’m just disgusted by the rhetoric.”
Blair Smith, a sophomore majoring in German, said the debate didn’t change the opinion he began with.
“I think my feelings of needing to promote equality and not having preferential treatment were escalated,” he said. “I understood the serious need for that, but the way we go about promoting equality, fairness, and non-preferential treatment was even more firmly cemented in what I already felt.”
Keri Tolboe, a history major, said she favors affirmative action.
“We have taken, taken, and taken [from minorities] in history,” she said. “What’s wrong with giving now?”
Kristin Marshall, a recent USU grad in business administration, said neither side convinced her with their arguments.
“I’m still pretty neutral in what I think,” she said.
-royburton@cc.usu.edu