Some UW faculty and students have responded with fervor to Emeritus Professor W. Lee Hansen’s assertion that UW-Madison admissions give preferential treatment to minority applicants.
More minority students fail to meet the three faculty-established admissions requirements, Hansen contends. He said the result is a higher dropout rate, and it is detrimental to the entire university.
“Minority students who weren’t prepared are going to have trouble here,” Hansen said. “We hurt them. We also hurt the white students; when we see minority students, they think they came in under special admissions. It creates a situation that is not conducive to anyone.”
Hansen has been working on the issue since the late ’60s, and said he has recently been aggravated by Plan 2008, a UW goal to increase minority recruitment and retainment of minority students. He says the plan “makes no sense” because there are not enough minorities coming through primary education.
Hansen placed an ad in The Badger Herald Tuesday detailing his qualms with the UW application, saying UW deliberately hides facts from applicants.
“Let’s tell the truth,” Hansen said. “Let’s not hide. Let’s be open and honest.”
In an April 2001 letter to the Board of Regents, Chancellor John Wiley stated Hansen’s reasoning is faulty. Wiley said two-thirds of students who fail to graduate are in good academic standing when they drop out. This means, Wiley said, that they have dropped out for nonacademic reasons, such as health problems and discouragement because of campus climate, which are experienced more by minority students.
“All the students we admit are, to the very best of our ability to judge, capable of succeeding academically, and most of them do,” Wiley wrote. “We have the highest graduate rate in the [UW] System, and are far above the national average for both majority and minority students.”
English professor Deborah Brant said Hansen is manipulating statistics to show an excessive amount of unqualified students are admitted to UW.
“What he’s doing is talking about percentages and making it look like there are great numbers of unqualified students on campus,” Brant said. “In reality, these numbers are very small.”
She supports Plan 2008 and said the university has an obligation to Wisconsin’s minority residents.
“We have a responsibility to communities in our state,” Brant said. “People of color in the state pay taxes and help support the university. The issue is to find talent, promise and potential everywhere. We must seek that out and be committed to all of our students.”
Brant also said Hansen’s idea of a racially blind admissions process is unrealistic.
“I don’t think that is wise, I don’t think that is fair, and I don’t think that is a solution to our racial predicament,” she said.
Conversely, Hansen said he has been receiving a lot of positive feedback.
“I have been getting lots of calls and e-mails from students,” he said. “Everyone has been saying, ‘Right on, you’re raising issues that need to be raised.'”
Brant disagrees.
“I would like to see the day when there is no racial gap in academic achievement,” she said. “I see no other way to reach that than to aggressively equalize higher education in communities.”
