Ink Spo ts Matt Paxton
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan announced last week that he is resigning. It came as a shock to the university community – students, faculty and alumni. From what I know about Ryan, he had done an excellent job leading UVa since his arrival seven years ago. He will be missed in Charlottesville.
I’m a proud Wahoo myself. My class of 1976 was the first in which women were represented in close to a 50-50 ratio. The first woman was admitted to the undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences in 1969, just three years before I matriculated. The number of Black students, as late as 1969, “could be counted on one hand,” according to a recent article in Virginia, the UVa alumni magazine. When I was a student, UVa was regarded as a decent public university, but not in the top rank of colleges and universities nationally, though that was changing.
Much of the impetus for that change came from a succession of outstanding university presidents, beginning with Lexington’s own Edgar Shannon. They recognized that removing the barriers - bureaucratic, cultural and financial – that hindered attracting the best faculty and students regardless of their background would make UVa stronger, and it did. Today, U.S. News and World Report puts UVa among the top five public universities in the country.
The current administration in Washington, and to a degree in Richmond, seem to have some weird idea that promoting a diverse student body and faculty is a bad thing. From my understanding, the opposition to diversity and inclusion initiatives is that they are not merit-based – that they give unfair preferential treatment to people from certain groups. That’s always been the argument raised about affirmative action programs, which, evolved into the current DEI programs.
Affirmative action sought to open college admissions to women and people of color who had historically been overtly or by tradition excluded from admission to many colleges and universities. While quota systems were found to be unacceptable years ago, there remained a belief among some that deserving applicants were denied admission because their spot in a matriculating class was “given” to a less qualified applicant.
The problem with this whole argument is that colleges’ selection criteria have never been solely “merit-based.” Admissions offices use a whole range of attributes and criteria when selecting applicants – high school GPA or class rank is about the only one that could be quantified. Success in sports, school-based and non-school extracurricular activities, and whether an applicant had a relative or parent as an alumnus are or have been additional factors, many of which would have to be graded on some sort of subjective scale.
I was told years ago that college admission directors aim to accept students that will make for a wellrounded class, containing students from many backgrounds, with a variety of talents and skills. The thinking is that such a class, through the interaction of the students in it, provides a learning opportunity in and of itself. And if most of the members are only of one sex, race or socioeconomic background, there’s not much opportunity for that.
America’s universities have been the envy of the world, and the scientific discoveries that have come out of them have played a huge role in our technical dominance and economic success. If our colleges and universities become an ideological battleground, with research grants as the prize, we may kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
