Race should not be a plus factor in university admissions, the 200-person audience of the Great Debate decided after listening to arguments from both sides last night at the Tsai Performance Center.
School of Management freshman Matt Brown was the student representative for the winning side, and focused his argument on the financial politics within universities. Students “earn plus points for things out of their control” when filling out college applications, Brown said, indicating the major misconception of diversity is that a different race or skin color automatically assumes different cultural background.
“Race of itself is independent of true diversity,” he said.
Joining Brown in arguing the negative was Roger Clegg, vice president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, and Abigail Thernstrom, author and scholar for the Manhattan Institute.
Clegg made it clear he was not against all affirmative action. However, in several of his points he explained the costs of this discrimination outweigh the benefits. “It’s also a very dangerous precedent for us as a society to say that it’s OK to discriminate if you have a good reason for it,” Clegg said.
Thernstrom argued an issue that appeared to be widely embraced by debaters and audience members: the racial gap in kindergarten through 12th grade “results in a small pool of black and Hispanic students … getting into elite schools.”
“Let’s really go for racial equality in this society,” Thernstrom said, “not fake solutions.”
Although debate rules prohibited audience applause, calls of “here, here,” clapping followed each speaker.
Student debater Heather Williams, a University Professors Program sophomore, led the team in favor of using race as a plus factor. She was joined in her contention by Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard University, and Georgetown University Law School associate professor Neal Katyal.
Glazer started the affirmative argument by citing three major ideas, including the gap in achievement between blacks and other groups in the United States, colleges’ desires to represent the true U.S. population on campus, and the role of tests in university admissions.
“If, in time, colleges and universities come to decide that these preferences were a bad idea … they should be free to do that, obviously,” Glazer said.
Glazer also argued against government involvement in the need to obtain representative numbers of race variations in the larger population, but said institutions should make those decisions.
Williams presented the value of diversity on college campuses and in the classroom by quoting Kelly Walter, director of the Office of Admissions at Boston University, saying college admissions offices are looking for those students “with a diversity of talents, skills, interests and backgrounds.”
Williams also said white students at a diverse school are better prepared for jobs in the real world if their college experience has been more a representation of the real world.
After arguments were made by both sides, the panels heard audiences arguments and comments for 20 minutes before delivering closing comments. Moderator Robert Zelnick, a professor in the College of Communication, then physically split the audience to determine which side had won the greater support. The majority of people sided with the negative team, headed by Clegg.
The Great Debate has become a semi-annual tradition at BU, and this semester’s event, sponsored by COM, was broadcast live on C-SPAN and on the World Wide Web.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
