Beyond Black and White
Affirmative action on the line at COM’s 2007 Great Debate
Click play to watch excerpts from Wednesday night’s Great Debate.
The question has been the subject of national debate — and divided some college campuses — in the last several years: does affirmative action in higher education really benefit minorities?
On Wednesday night, April 4, that question was fodder for a lively exchange at the Tsai Performance Center. The College of Communication’s Great Debate, sponsored by COM since spring 1996, features four professionals and two students discussing both sides of an important and timely issue. Once the arguments and supporting remarks have been made, the audience is asked to decide the winner by moving to the left or right side of the performance hall, designated as either affirmative or negative.
Arguing in support of affirmative action were James E. Coleman, Jr., a professor of law at Duke University; Kenneth Elmore, dean of students at Boston University; and Deon Provost (CAS’07), the first African-American to be elected president of BU’s Student Union.
Taking the opposing side, against affirmative action, were Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at UCLA; Stephan Thernstrom, Harvard University’s Winthrop Professor of History and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; and Joseph Mroszczyk (COM’07), president of BU's College Republicans.
The debate left more questions than answers. For example, what is the true intent of public education?
“By ignoring the democratic purpose of higher education, the current debate about race-conscious affirmative action wrongly assumes that the issue of who is entitled to higher education is about individual rights,” said Coleman. “It is not. A race-blind admission policy in public education would elevate the individual interest of applicants over the fundamentally more important public interest of society in the diffusion of knowledge.”
And what are the consequences of providing preferences to a group of people based solely on skin color?
“Schools don’t take into account socioeconomic disadvantage for the most part when they do admissions programs,” said Sander. “They take into account race. That has the effect of admitting blacks and Hispanics who are as elite with respect to other blacks and Hispanics as whites are with respect to other whites who get into these schools.”
At debate’s end, the audience agreed with those arguing against affirmative action.
Nicole Laskowski can be reached at nicolel@bu.edu.