Wednesday, January 21, 1998

Connerly on Preferential Education

Ward Connerly: Affirmative action in its original form was well-intentioned — actively opening the doors of education and employment to all people, regardless of race or gender. However, over time, the programs and policies mutated into quotas, set asides, and preferences. Race and gender-based preferences are not focused on the disadvantaged. They are government programs which discriminate against people on the basis of the color of their skin or their gender.

Coloring Admissions: 'A is for Admission'

A is for Admission is a recently published 'insider's guide' that purports to detail the inner workings of the admissions offices of highly selective colleges in general and Dartmouth in particular. The book was written by Michelle Hernandez '89, a Dartmouth admissions officer until her departure last spring to teach secondary school. Hernandez has the following to say about affirmative action as currently practiced by colleges and universities, especially Dartmouth.

Lyndon's Campus Legacy

Whatever the original concepts of civil rights entailed, Title VII has evolved, through an elaborate distortion of the law, into a tool for imposing equality of results rather than equal opportunity.

Affirmative Action's False Legacy

The first time I fully understood the effects of affirmative action was in the Spring of 1995, when I watched an episode of Dateline NBC. The episode was a debate between the proponents and opponents of affirmative action in California. It was also the first time I saw Ward Connerly and the beginnings of Proposition 209.

Racial Preference Demagogues

As the national debate on racial preferences heats up, I have begun keeping a notebook in which I record marvelous flowers of rhetoric, and that notebook is filling up rapidly. It is a settled rule of demagogy that when you cannot attack the issue head on, because you would lose, you misstate the issue and scream.

College Preference Fallout

Earlier this year the Supreme Court refused to hear a case claiming that Proposition 209, the proposition that made preferential treatment in California State Government illegal, was unconstitutional. Short of setting a reverse-discrimination precedent, this is the strongest sign that the affirmative action policies first created by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s could face serious opposition in the future.

Freedmanizing Boston University

Boston University also had a 90-year football tradition until last month when high officials at BU, led by University Chancellor John Silber, suggested to the Board of Trustees that the football program be struck from the budget. A vote was taken and the plug pulled.

Hockey Upsets #9 Yale

On paper it must have looked like a mismatch, the nationally ranked Bulldogs of Yale facing the Dartmouth Indians, perennial residents of the ECAC cellar. But instead of conceding a Yale victory, the men's ice hockey team exhibited Dartmouth's finest traditional virus 4-3.

If I were President of Dartmouth College ... Campus Celebrities Weigh In

Your campaign song? Freebird. The live version off Gold and Platinum, of course.
—Officer Rebel Roberts

Letters to the Editor

Dear President Freedman, While you are correct to place Dartmouth in the category of anti-Semitic colleges down into — but certainly not beyond — the early 1950s, I think you fail to give credit to those who affected the change.