Taking Away the Salad Bowl

The voters of Michigan made a poor decision last night when they approved the referendum known as “Proposal Two.”

The proposal will amend the Michigan constitution to “ban public institutions from using affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.” And the question’s definition of public institutions is all-encompassing, including “state government, local governments, public colleges and universities, community colleges and school districts.” The results of this amendment could be disastrous to the missions of Michigan’s state institutions.

In higher education, the benefits of affirmative action programs are twofold: They act as a corrective to socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to opportunity, and also create more diverse (and thus constructive) educational environments. Neither of these is a benefit that colleges, universities, and school districts in Michigan and throughout the nation can afford to lose.

We believe that a diverse student body is important to any institution of higher education because it allows students to interact with and learn from fellow students from other cultures and with different life experiences. A number of studies have found that diversity can produce these tangible results. According to Mitchell J. Chang, an associate dean at Loyola Marymount University, and Alexander W. Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, a diverse campus environment “contributes to the student’s academic development, satisfaction with college, level of cultural awareness, and commitment to promoting racial understanding,” and is also associated with higher student GPAs and better overall student satisfaction.

We believe, however, that diversity should not simply be limited to race, which is why we also endorse the inclusion of socioeconomic factors in higher education affirmative action programs. Socioeconomically disadvantaged students often receive inadequate secondary schooling and therefore have less of a chance to advance their station in life through higher education.

We have already seen what can happen to educational systems when blanket measures such as Proposal Two are adopted. Since California voters banned the use of affirmative action in admissions to its public universities, there has been a sharp decline in student body diversity, especially at UCLA. The adoption of Proposal Two in Michigan will simply spread this unfortunate situation to another state and keep even more students from gaining equal opportunity in education.

We also encourage the use of affirmative action programs beyond the classroom, as they have clear value in the workplace. Most importantly, we still believe that there are clear biases in many areas of employee hiring, even if the biases are unintentional. There is research to suggest that black job applicants often receive worse job offers than white applicants, despite being equal in every possible regard—education, skill set, and experience. And empirical evidence shows that the notorious “glass ceiling” continues to hamper women’s opportunities for advancement in the corporate world. Measures to level the playing field of employment are still needed.

Increasing workplace diversity will, as in higher education, also have the positive effect of allowing others to interact with colleagues they otherwise would not. There is a definite social good in having individuals from different backgrounds interact with each other, and oftentimes the workplace is one of the few spots where this can occur.

Finally, it can often be helpful to take an individual’s race or gender into account in deciding who to hire for a job. It would be foolhardy for the Detroit Police Department to ignore its city’s racial tensions when hiring new officers or for the state to ignore gender when hiring rape counselors to aid victimized citizens.

Proposal Two will take away the ability of state and educational institutions to use the valuable tool that is affirmative action—a tool which, in reality, allows these institutions to make wiser and more informed decisions and, thus, to do their jobs better. We are disappointed Michigan voters rejected this logic, choosing instead to sacrifice diversity on the altar of false equality.