During February on most college campuses across America, students and faculty will celebrate Black History Month with lectures, symposia and other special events.
Other public entities, in an attempt to be politically correct, will put on 21st century blackface—distinct advertising or pandering to this minority group usually ignored—to try to convince their customers that they really do care about the issues that face black Americans.
In true celebration or feigned interest, most of America will take time this month to recognize and commemorate the unique, black American experience.
Then there is Hillsdale. Last year, our college inadvertently celebrated Black History Month by inviting Professor of Economics Walter Williams to give the opening lecture for the CCA on entrepreneurship.
A critic might point out that Williams’ speech was a token of Hillsdale’s respect for minorities and that he noticed Williams outside SAGA, not by his features, which were plastered around school on CCA posters, but by the fact that he was nearly the only minority on campus—as obvious as a drop of ink on a blank sheet of paper.
These coincidences regarding Williams’ presence on campus should not become a fountainhead for endless nit-picking about Hillsdale’s lack of refinement or culture: It should begin a critical assessment of Hillsdale’s attitude towards minorities.
Should Hillsdale College care that its student body looks like a field of lilies on a snowy day? If so, should Hillsdale consider establishing some form of affirmative action?
Something that is lost on many liberals and is purged from public debates is that the true nature of racial preferences, affirmative action and quotas is discrimination.
Discrimination has become a dirty word; however, it is a perfectly normal process that can improve a person’s life or destroy his existence.
Racism is not necessarily the definition of discrimination—rather, discrimination is simply the preferring of one outcome, choice or subject over another. It is the decision where one rejects a host of options for a desired outcome.
Our college is built upon discrimination: In order to establish an intellectual environment, Hillsdale does not admit students with lackluster academic credentials nor hire professors who lack advanced degrees.
Discrimination continues as atheists are not considered for the position of school chaplain, wealthy students are denied financial aid and handicapped people are not employed as security guards.
Arguing for discrimination in the abstract is fine, but the application of discrimination will be controversial because it will reveal that some form of racial discrimination (affirmative action) should be used to improve life at our college.
Race or class-based discrimination can certainly lead to lower academic standards and an irrational pandering to a favored race. This may culminate in a disturbed view of the individual, who would not then exist as a person with his or her own unique skills or needs, but rather as a color splotch or a social category.
A limited, appropriate program of racial preference will limit these negatives while at the same time provide important benefits—namely, a more diverse campus, improved classroom discussion and the elimination of any residual racial tensions.
Such a program, beginning with an increase in financial aid for minorities and a limited advantage in application, will also help to further our college’s goal of educating for liberty, an objective that is in serious jeopardy without a plan of discrimination.
From its very inception, Hillsdale has promoted civil rights and encouraged persons of all races to experience the values at the core of American culture. This superb record is being marginalized by a campus whose few black students are usually recruits for the basketball or football programs.
Without any kind of racial discrimination, Hillsdale will become a WASP nest, a colony of rich, white students—white students who are more likely than many minorities to have undergone a sound training in or to have been exposed to the ideals held at Hillsdale: the free market, limited government, the Western Heritage and personal responsibility.
The ideas of liberty that Hillsdale preaches are needed most in the ghetto, where public schools condemn generations of ignorant students to poverty through a lack of proper education, where the war on drugs destroys communities through wrongheaded imprisonment and through the inadvertent creation of a violent black market, and where state laws regulate businesses out of existence.
It is ludicrous to believe that a poor black student from the inner city, burdened by these failed government policies, can contend with a rich, well-schooled white student.
Our blindness and hypocrisy are complete when we, after the requisite jab at the politically correct academia, argue against racial preferences, when these are the only policies that will provide minorities with a chance to see that our values are for all people—and not just for affluent, suburban Republicans.
What would an appropriate system of racial discrimination look like? It would begin by increasing the amount of scholarships available to minority students and by sending more college representatives to black high schools—especially to the inner city of Detroit, a mission field that urban America has abandoned to the state, the corrupt manager that has destroyed a once-vibrant city.
Hillsdale’s admissions board, in its deliberations over student applications, should also award some advantage to ethnicity, especially if individuals have overcome some hardships along the way.
Without a system of racial discrimination, Hillsdale will be further marginalized as a rich white college.
Without an active policy to recruit more minorities, our ideals will fall prey to a popular stereotype: Hillsdale as a racist relic of European imperialism.
We cannot allow this to happen. Our mission, our civil rights heritage and our ideals deserve better.
Poenicke is a Hillsdale College senior majoring in philosophy.