Affirmative action foe Ward Connerly said race-based preferences in college admissions and hiring practices are "unconstitutional" before a packed 105 Dartmouth Hall last night in a speech titled "Racial Preferences are Dead."
"Race is used in unconstitutional ways on college campuses," Connerly said.
Two years after he was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents in 1993, Connerly led his fellow regents in abolishing the University system's use of race as a factor in admissions.
Connerly described the University of California's admissions policies as a matrix that automatically added 300 points on a 8,000 point scale to those applicants who checked a box that indicated a certain minority status.
"This was lawsuit just waiting to happen," Connerly said. "We needed to find a better way to broaden access."
Connerly supports a recent University of California proposal that automatically admits the top four percent of every high school in California.
Other Regent initiatives include outreach programs aimed at the 200 lowest-performing schools in the state and offer more financial aid to students from low-income households.
In a question and answer session that lasted nearly as long as the one hour long speech that preceded it, students and community members challenged Connerly.
Several students asked how Connerly reconciled the long history and current reality of racial inequalities with eliminating race-based affirmative action.
Connerly replied quoting a recent poll by the Seattle Times that found 84 percent of Americans were against settling past inequalities by race-based affirmative action.
"However, 64 percent were in favor of other forms of affirmative action," Connerly said.
Ozzie Harris, of the College's Affirmative Action Office at the College reminded the audience that Connerly had been forced to collapse several legal concepts into a short address.
Davis also said that most of Connerly's statements were based on observation of the Californian system and may not apply elsewhere, especially at Dartmouth.
