the Sam Jackson College Experience

This is a ‘part 1′ because this is a very big very thorny issue which concerns affirmative action and much more. As such I will in the near future be writing a ‘part 2′ which directly addresses any AA-related concerns I’m having about this topic here… but for now, my understanding of the issue:

Pulitzer prize winner Daniel Golden wrote a piece about “whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake” in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It focused specifically on the case of one Jian Li, a Chinese permanent legal resident who went to a NJ public school having emigrated at age 4. Mr. Li recently filed a complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him through the Dept. Education’s Office for Civil Rights; he is currently a freshman at Yale. (n.b., this is not a tort case, it is a complaint about what Li feels was discrimination.)

This is an issue that throws a lot of people off sometimes, because some people confuse a) Affirmative action with b) race-based discrimination. Private universities in the United States are not required to have the same ‘objective’ qualifications that businesses or real estate have; race discrimination is only happening if there a pattern (in this case acceptance / rejection) unique to one race or ethnicity on the basis of unfair (nonstandard) comparisons–hence the problem with Berkeley’s law program back in the early 90s, which took Asians out of the general pool and compared them against each other.

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Sally Champagne of Harvard and Martin Walsh of Stanford were here this evening telling us about their respective institutions and then taking questions (and asking a few). I counted 45 people at the technical start of the session, but something like another ten had stealthily joined us by the end. As with the University of Chicago info session Tuesday night with Ted O’Neill, we were asked to tell them pertinent information which would help them to understand our particular group of Exonians and Exeter in general. Champagne has been reading Exeter applications for a long time, but Walsh was new to them, so this seemed extra true.

In addition, Angela Henson, an Exeter and Harvard alumna, was there to offer her thoughts “not from an admissions perspective.” She was not a particlarly recent alum of either but her insight was of course still valuable.

We were asked which of the two should begin first, and after much vacillation (for clearly the crowd did not want to express an outright favor for either one) someone said “Ladies first” which gave Champagne the clear to start her abbreviated stump. One word, first: I had Sally Champagne do my info session back in March when I went one fateful afternoon down into Cambridge. Truth be told, it was not my favorite info session of the last year. I was therefore pleased by the difference I heard this evening; it just goes to show how an impression can linger long after one individual’s ‘off day’ has passed.

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