CMC's Changing Policy Toward Affirmative Action/Reverse Discrimination

Compare Dean Vos's statement in 1999 with the College's in a Nov. 1993 letter to WASC. This month marks the fifteenth anniversary of the WASC letter and the ensuing brouhaha between then-President Stark and WASC.

"There is no clear linkage between educational quality and diversity," according to a Nov. 1993 letter to WASC's Dr. Steven Weiner from Assistant Government Professor, Judith A. Merkle. (See p. 115 of The Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences by M. Ali Raza, A. Janell Anderson, and Harry Glynn Custred. Note they spell Merkle's name "Merkel.")

Dean Richard Vos, quoted in "Fighting Back the Chill," by Angela Stephens in Black Issues in Higher Education on February 19, 1999.

"Why would we change our policies?" notes Richard Vos, dean of admissions and financial aid at Claremont McKenna College. "We've always had a commitment to affirmative action, and now because some students perceive that the University of California system is perhaps not as welcoming as it was a few years ago, more students are now thinking of going to the private [colleges]. The UC's loss is our gain."

Claremont McKenna -- located in Claremont, Calif., and part of the Claremont colleges complex -- is a small institution, with just 274 students in 1998's entering freshman class. Yet its enrollment of Black students is up 100 percent since 1996 -- from nine to 18 students. Black students comprised less than 4 percent of the entering class in 1996, when 9 percent of Black applicants were accepted. Thirteen percent of Black applicants were accepted last year, and they now comprise 6.5 percent of the freshman class.

I wonder what percentage of black students would make the college or the activists happy. Surely they have some number, right? Where there are too many blacks? You know, much as colleges had a number for too many Jews, too many Asians, and too many "greasy grinds."

But if there is "no clear link between diversity and educational quality," why are all the colleges doing it now? Was there some clear link discovered? I doubt it.