Affirmative action and UCLA's Academic Advancement Program
Wyatt
Affirmative action and UCLA's Academic Advancement Program
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By George Will
(Published March 1, 1998)
OS ANGELES--Guatemala's civil war was one motivation to move. Another
was the 1976 earthquake that killed 23,000 and would have killed
Alvaro Cardona if his head had still been on the pillow where the
large adobe brick fell. So when he was 9, his father brought the
family north. To Los Angeles, on the San Andreas fault. To South
Central, a war zone of gangs.
However, Cardona thrived. He left high school, married and started a
family at 16, became manager of some Subway restaurants, passed the
exam for a high school equivalency degree, enrolled at a community
college, then at UCLA, studying history. He is now so thoroughly
Americanized he is suing someone.
His UCLA financial aid package required that he work. While in
community college he had tutored students in English, and he sought
employment tutoring in UCLA's Academic Advancement Program, an
affirmative action program. It has approximately 7,500 students.
Students are automatically eligible if they are from "historically
underrepresented" peoples, including those of African American,
Chicano/Latino, Filipino and Pacific Islander descent. White and Asian
students are eligible only if they are low-income.
In November 1995, when Cardona was interviewed for an AAP tutorial
position, he says the interviewer repeatedly spoke to him about UCLA's
"institutionalized racism" and interrogated him about his views on
affirmative action. Cardona told her he had mixed feelings. Last year
he told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he had said to the AAP
interviewer that many black and Latino students "seem to carry this
complex around that higher education is a God-given right, not
something you earn."
Today he worries that because of affirmative action programs, "You
start doubting yourself." He says he experienced some racism at UCLA
but was "so elated to be there" that he did not dwell on it.
During his interview for the AAP position he says he was never asked
about his qualifications or experience as a tutor. He says the
interviewer worried that he would stress academics "too much" because
half of a tutor's job is to "validate" students' feelings about
institutionalized racism and discrimination. Indeed, a recruitment
flier for AAP tutors lists one hiring criterion as "sensitivity and
commitment to underrepresented and low-income students and the goals
of affirmative action." That is, only persons of certain political
beliefs are eligible.
Cardona says he told the AAP interviewer he would try to allay
students' fears and help them find assistance if they experienced
discrimination, but that he thought his primary job as a tutor would
be to help students become coherent writers so they could express
whatever they felt about anything. In December 1995 he says he was
told that he would not be hired as a tutor because he did not
understand discrimination and did not wholeheartedly support
affirmative action, but that he should apply again after he had
discovered what UCLA is "really like."
Only in America: Aided by libertarian litigators at Washington's
Institute for Justice, Cardona is suing UCLA, charging that he was
denied a job for the reason that he did not think sufficiently poorly
of UCLA. And apparently he was denied the job because he agreed with
the University of California's Board of Regents, which in July 1995
had voted to eliminate race and gender preferences in university
programs.
His contention is that employment was unconstitutionally made
conditional on his surrender of his First Amendment right to free
speech. He is not challenging the legality of racial preferences,
which California voters in 1996 proscribed in government programs. He
is asserting a right to speak freely about them in settings that do
not involve students or interfere with student-teacher relations.
The AAP argues that deference should be shown to academic freedom,
which involves making judgments about teaching methods, and that
someone unsympathetic to AAP's premises might not be an effective
tutor. However, the Supreme Court has held that such speculative
worries cannot justify the specific action of denying employment.
Institutional prerogatives in higher education should not be
disdained. But neither should American premises, which seem to have
been discarded in Cardona's case, by the following reasoning:
The premise of racial preference programs is that rights inhere in
groups rather than individuals. Hence the importance of isolating
those retrograde individuals who subscribe to the traditional American
premise about the primacy of individuals. Hence the importance of
enforcing political orthodoxy. Hence an easy conscience about
sacrificing the rights of individuals like Cardona.
How odd--or is it?--that an immigrant has risen to stir uneasiness
about this.
_ _
-ooo-0^0-ooo-
=
Wyatt Wright
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The heights by great men reached and kept,
were not attained by sudden flight.
They, while their companions slept,
were toiling upward through the night.
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