A massive leather armchair at the far end of the living room is the official seat of honor in my parents’ house.
And the guest speaker always gets it when Mom holds class at home, which she does most Thursday nights during the school year.
The course is Perspectives on Careers in Medicine for undergraduates in the Comprehensive Studies Program at the University of Michigan. The program offers academic support to primarily black and Hispanic students, many of whom were admitted through affirmative action.
“I always try to invite former students who have gone on to careers in the health professions,” Mom said when we spoke Monday. “When minority undergraduates see minority professionals who look like them, they realize they, too, have a chance to come back someday and sit in that chair.”
Many do. Dozens of the minority students Mom has taught in 15 years at CSP (out of her 30 years as a lecturer at Michigan) have gone on to work in a variety of health-related fields, achievements they might never have attained if the university did not seek to have a diverse student body.
In this and other classes Mom teaches, these “lucky” students tell her about the often overcrowded, dangerous, dilapidated high schools they attended and an educational system that has low expectations for them.
The successful among them not only go on to become role models, Mom pointed out, but they also make it easier for “black people to seek help from black doctors and attorneys and CPAs and counselors; people who come from their culture and probably understand them better.”
I wanted Mom’s input because for so long she’s been on the front lines of this issue–prior to her current assignment she spent eight years teaching tutorials in a composition program. And especially since the University of Michigan has become Omaha Beach in the assault on affirmative action now that its admissions policy has come under attack by the Bush administration as it faces a Supreme Court challenge, I thought a firsthand report would be valuable.
And also, frankly, I wasn’t getting very far in my abstract, on-one-hand on-the-other hand arguments with myself. You’ve heard the rhetoric: On one hand, our white-dominated culture has offended its own stated ideals by keeping people down in various ways simply because of their skin color for hundreds of years. On the other hand, trying to undo that damage by lifting people up simply because of their skin color offends those very ideals.
Affirmative action is focused on the wrong end of the age spectrum. We ought to be giving underrepresented minority kids a special hand in pre-school, grade school and high school to correct the malignant educational inequality of opportunity between black and white, rich and poor. It’s a Band-Aid, not a cure, to give that job to our elite universities (Go Blue!).
“Well, come on, ” said Mom when I muttered something like this to her. “How many years have we had affirmative action? Do you think we can really change that much history that quickly? I mean, my students are often the first people in their family ever to go to college.”
But what about the victims? The qualified students who would have been admitted if only they weren’t white? “I can see why they’re mad,” Mom said. “But I don’t hear anybody asking how many Caucasians with lower test scores also got in ahead of them because they were a legacy or lived in the Upper Peninsula or could play in the marching band.”
She’s going to retire soon and doesn’t have to cozy up to the administration. So I trust her up-close observation that, the balance of moral equities and serene abstractions notwithstanding, affirmative action works.
My mother has seen students from deprived backgrounds blossom when given a chance. She’s seen greater minority enrollments prompt growth in the understanding and affection between blacks and whites over her 30 years at Michigan. And she’s heard what may be the most important words in any discussion on education: “`You believed in me when nobody else did,'” she said, paraphrasing a letter from a former student who went on to become a doctor and earn a standing invitation to occupy the coveted leather chair. “`It gave me the courage to go on.'”
