It would be hard to think of a more controversial and debated issue nowadays than affirmative action. Indeed, it may be the defining racial issue of our day.
But there’ll be no debate before the president’s advisory panel on race. That by decree of the chairman, historian John Hope Franklin, who said in so many words Wednesday that those who oppose affirmative action have nothing to say that his panel needs to hear.
What a travesty! What a tragedy! What an inglorious way for Franklin to cap a distinguished scholarly career–covering his ears, in effect, to avoid hearing opinions he disagrees with.
That ill becomes a man who has always enjoyed the academic freedom of the university. It ill serves a nation that is groping for answers on race and affirmative action, a nation that was promised a candid dialogue on those issues by the president who appointed the Franklin panel.
The president’s race panel held a hearing on campus diversity Wednesday at the University of Maryland and pointedly excluded such opponents of affirmative action as Ward Connerly, the black University of California regent who led the campaign last year to pass that state’s Proposition 209.
“The people whom we did invite had something special to say about how to make universities more diverse than they are,” Franklin was quoted in The New York Times. “The people in California that advocate Proposition 209, for example, are not addressing . . . how to make the university more diverse. Consequently I’m not certain what Mr. Connerly, for example, could contribute to this discussion.”
But isn’t that what “hearings” are for? It is, anyway, unless the hearer’s mind is already made up. And that seems to be the case with Dr. Franklin.
