Several recent columns on this page have supported or condemned affirmative action without considering the wide variety of forms it can take. Fortunately, or perhaps not, Dartmouth has consummate examples of the best, and worst, that affirmative action can produce.
In the basement of McNutt is the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, while just two floors up resides Admissions, a.k.a. the Office of Equal Results. The two offices represent the polar opposites of affirmative action and provide an ideal opportunity to examine the issue.
The Office of EO/AA compares the ethnic and gender composition of Dartmouth faculty and staff to the pool of qualified potential applicants for evidence of potential discrimination.
For instance, 142 of the 144 secretarial/clerical staff employees are white women. But this is not a concern because 93 percent of the potential employees are white women.
When departments' "utilization" falls short of the available numbers, they are not given quotas to fill, but instead their search procedures are reviewed to ensure fairness. Equal Opportunity is the key concept being enforced here.
A far different process is taking place upstairs where the applications for the Class of 2000 are reviewed. The goal in Admissions is not to make the student body mirror the pool of qualified applicants, but to make it reflect the national population, a policy with potentially tragic effects.
Consider what would happen if Admissions used the policies of the Office of EO/AA. Newsweek recently called 1200 on the old SAT scoring system "the minimum that top colleges normally require," so we will use it as the cutoff for pool of qualified applicants, although it may be racist against whites as the SATs tend to under predict their performance.
When determining percent availability for faculty, EO/AA looks at Ph.D. recipients. Just as there are a few excellent professors at Dartmouth with no Ph.D.'s, students without 1200s may thrive at Dartmouth. But it is certainly a reasonable cutoff for our purposes, and it includes well more than three quarters of the student body.
Sadly for the Admissions Office, fewer than 1,700 out of 400,000 blacks exceeded this score in 1993, putting the "percent availability" for black candidates far below actual demographics.
Admirably, Admissions aggressively recruits these students, as do all the top schools in the country. Despite this, blacks make up less than four percent of Dartmouth's applicants.
So Admissions is left with no choice but to apply different admission standards. Dartmouth admitted 22 percent of its more than 10,000 applicants for the Class of 1999. A white applicant had a 19 percent chance of acceptance. The admissions rate climbs to about a third for Asians while a whopping 47 percent of black applicants were admitted.
When I asked Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg to explain this discrepancy, he said "Most of what we do is to give students a break if they come from a disadvantaged background," so Admissions has "different expectations in terms of what they might have done in high school, what the sophistication of writing might be, what the scores might be."
This policy, if applied as Furstenberg describes, is very reasonable. Furstenberg denies that race alone is a factor in admissions, and attributes the statistics above to the large overlap between minority applicants and socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants.
But there are reasons to suspect this is not completely the truth; even well-to-do blacks may be receiving preferential admission.
The first is the words of our own President James Freedman in his new book "Idealism and Liberal Education" where he endorses racial preferences. Freedman writes, "It is therefore inappropriate in my view, to describe as racist those very admissions practices that would take account of race for the precise purpose of redressing the historic consequences of racial discrimination."
So, in Freedman's view, even a wealthy black applicant may deserve preferential treatment over a poor white because of historical discrimination.
The second is, of course, that applicants are still asked their race on the application. Although Dartmouth is required to report these racial statistics to the Federal Government, it is not required to have them on the application itself. Interestingly, the application makes very clear that the financial status of the applicant will not affect the admissions decision. No such disclaimer is given about race.
So what do I suggest? Freedman and Furstenberg should immediately sit down and agree that race will have no role in admission decisions. Applicants should no longer be asked their race on the application. A separate form can be used to tabulate statistics, as many scholarship agencies now do.
Dartmouth should openly state on the application that parent's income, school quality and other socioeconomic factors will play a role in admission decisions. An essay question should specifically ask applicants to explain any hardships they may have suffered that hurt their high school performance, including if applicable, racial discrimination.
The current practice is harmful to all involved. Despite Furstenberg's denials, the evidence, and the overwhelming student belief is that minorities receive preferential treatment. This is manifested in whispered conversations, in eyes rolling across classrooms, in private gatherings. Rare is the student who will speak publicly about a preferential admissions policy, but rare also is the student who doubts it exists.
When a Dartmouth student walks into the classroom, he knows his professor earned the job fully on his own qualifications and merit. Shouldn't he be able to say the same of his peers?
