Reprint from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 12, 1998The UW System’s new 10-year diversity plan, approved Friday by the Board of Regents, ignores one issue central to diversity programs in higher education.
It says nothing about the role of race/ethnic preferences in furthering the plan’s seven goals.
This omission is curious. Board of Regent policies and state law (Wisconsin Statutes 36.12) explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity in UW campus admissions, programs, services, courses, and facilities.
Many people have suspected that UW affirmative action/diversity plans give preference to targeted minorities in freshman admissions. Recently assembled evidence for UW-Madison confirms this suspicion.
For students in the top fifth of their high school class, targeted minority applicants are admitted at about the same rate as nontargeted applicants. But, for applicants in the lower three-fifths of their class, the percent of targeted minority applicants admitted is more than four times greater than the percent of nontargeted applicants admitted.
These differences show the impact of race/ethnic-based preferences in the UW-Madison admissions procedures. The result is to be expected. Larger numbers of targeted minorities are enrolled, but greater proportions of them fail to graduate.
Let us hope the Board of Regents soon reaffirms its almost half-century-old commitment to human rights and nondiscrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, or creed.