Two reasons are consistently put forth by defenders of UW’s and other universities’ policies with regards to racial preference in admissions. First, that institutions of higher learning are charged to “act affirmatively” as a mechanism to correct social injustice of the past and lift the underprivileged minorities, allowing them a seat at the table of an elite institution.

Secondly, that racial preferencing in admissions acts as a means toward greater minority enrollment at a university where the percentages of non-white students do not measure up to those of the greatest public universities in the world. If UW wishes to enter the league of Michigan and Berkeley (which it desperately does, and is near doing) in terms of prestige and ranking, then, it is claimed, Madison’s campus must look more like America.

The reality that Barron’s, U.S. News, government contractors with research grants, and corporations seeking employees examine minority enrollment when considering the viability of an institution is undeniable, and this university fails to clear the bar. As it stands now, preferential treatment toward minorities in enrollment is viewed by Bascom as one of the most efficient means to remedy this problem.

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Institutionalized racism is a pockmark on the history of this country — most would argue it our deepest, most pervasive social wound. It is a burden on the soul of this great nation, and its error stood manifest throughout public policy and public attitudes for the better part of the past three centuries. Yet racism is a sin of the heart, an ill which can be solved through public doctrine no more effectively than abortion can be legislated into non-occurrence or alcoholism can be eradicated through prohibition.

Many qualified individuals have been and remain today locked from doors to which they deserve admittance. This university, in 2003, is not one of those places. The door is open for those who would choose to access it.

The University of Wisconsin is hardly in a position to act as a state agent for resolving the wrongs of the past. It is boxed out of this role by its predisposition. UW is marketed as a world-class institution that happens to be next door and happens to be cheap. Hence, it has become a Mecca for the first-rate students from Wisconsin’s first-rate public school system.

The primary goal for the legislators that ultimately control UW is to make it accessible and highly serviceable for their constituents — taxpaying Wisconsinites and their children. They have been highly successful in this regard, especially over the past decade when higher-education costs have skyrocketed nationwide. UW is still world-class and still a deal for the high-achieving children of taxpaying Wisconsinites — who happen to be overwhelmingly white.

Should efforts to increase the number of minority applicants succeed, UW’s cloak of secrecy regarding its use of race in admissions is dangerous in its ambiguity — perhaps more dangerous than that of Michigan. An as-yet-unpublished (in fact, highly guarded) set of criteria for how race is used in the admissions process leaves the door open for such latitude in the acceptance of potentially unqualified minority students as to provoke caution. While Michigan’s form of racial discrimination in admissions is quantifiable, concrete and public, ours is none of the three. The potential for abuses of subjectivity resulting in flaccid standards of admission tainted by racial stigma is disconcerting.

The party line from Bascom has always been, in my experience, that race is used as a single factor among many other criteria. But the fact remains that it is the one determinant used in admissions least under an applicant’s control and least descriptive of his or her character. That which we can “affirmatively” derive from the color of one’s skin is based on little more than stereotype.

It’s easy to think of a black man from Wisconsin or Minnesota as someone who is in some way cast aside or downtrodden, an emergent from the depths of urban strife. And while such a deduction is often quite rightly assumed (stereotypes are, after all, born from kernels of truth), geographic, social and economic background — though equally out of the applicants’ control — carry us nearer the goal of a truly “diverse” campus.

It is hard to argue for the acceptance of the son of a doctor and a business executive from Brookfield who happen to be black versus the child of poor Eastern European refugees in New York who happen to be white. How this situation would be “factored” in the back rooms of the Red Gym, we cannot be sure.

We should know.

But perhaps more importantly, those applicants should know. Their life experiences, qualifications, academic record and value in the scheme of true “diversity” should be weighed for what they are, not how they are tinged.

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If the ultimate aim of diversity efforts is to raise the quality of education at UW and the bigwigs of Bascom want to look from their offices and see a broader slice of the spectrum, they must attack the problem at its root. The issue isn’t granting minority students a slide in coming to campus, but rather, creating incentives for them to make the trip in the first place and staying here once they arrive.

Efforts such as the POSSE and PEOPLE programs, aimed at recruiting both out-of-state and minority students to UW, appear valuable. Efforts to raise the bar at this university and expand its clientele need not be mutually exclusive.

Fortunately, as it stands now, the practice now known as “affirmative action” is not keeping white students out of this school. When 90 percent of a student body is white, few rejected high school seniors can justifiably claim that a minority student occupies a seat that was rightfully theirs. Such is not the case in Michigan; thus the lawsuit.

To be rejected from Madison, one must sit on the proverbial “bubble” to begin with. Some potentially unqualified students are accepted here; some potentially qualified students who could be successful here are turned away. Such is the nature of a highly selective Big Ten university. Paper only goes so far.

If you’re a white Wisconsinite who graduated high school with a 3.2 GPA and minimal extracurricular involvement and were spurned by this school, look no further than the mirror for your rationale. The pigment of your skin is not the reason you’re now in Whitewater. You just didn’t study your calculus. The sheer volume of minority applicants to this university has not yet reached the point where practices of racial preferencing can effectively supplant assuredly qualified students. Unless changes in policy and attitudes toward the meaning of diversity shift, the day they do will mark the achievement of one goal — racial diversity — at the expense of the quality and integrity of the institution.

Standards are high here, and they should be. Lowering them or altering them for the sake of social reconstruction is an insult to the institution, its students, its alumni, its faculty and any individual who works, sacrifices or donates to improve its quality.

Eric Cullen ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and history.