Column: Affirmative inaction

Recently, The Chronicle brought the Duke community some exciting news: the Class of 2004 will be one of the most racially diverse classes in our short history. After spending tens of thousands of dollars recruiting minority students, especially blacks and Latinos, the University has finally drawn closer to its goal of making the University's racial profile reflect the nation's racial profile. The attainment of this "correct" racial profile is the University's Holy Grail, even sparking a strong effort to increase the number of black faculty.

However, there is one organization at the University, in fact it is the University's most important group, that does not follow this prime directive. That organization is the men's basketball team. Led by an apparent racist, the team's racial profile does not even come close to matching that of either the University or the nation. To remedy this, I call upon Coach K to spend thousands of dollars on a recruiting trip across country. The team is in desperate need of Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, Pacific Islanders and whites in order to conform to the University-wide goal of creating the "perfect racial profile." Such a racially unbalanced organization should not exist at a highly enlightened institution such as Duke.

I am sure that just about all readers realize what a ludicrous idea the last paragraph offered. But how many realize how ludicrous the first paragraph is?

Coach K is not a racist. He recruits the best talent he can. I would bet that he does not think once about the race of the men he recruits. I would think he is too busy trying to determine whether they are talented basketball players and whether they can stand up to the pressure and challenges of playing at a top Division I school. You cannot argue with his results: he consistently fields solid teams. He slips once in a while, but we can forgive a Greg Newton for every Grant Hill.

So why does Christoph Guttentag, the Coach K of academics, think differently? Why does he hire a "diversified staff" and spend an obscene amount of money to recruit students based on race and not merit? The goal of the University admissions office should be to get the best young minds of the country and deliver them to East Campus. His job should not be to select a class that must fit some "ideal" racial profile.

Against stiff competition from other institutions, Guttentag has enough to worry about. Guttentag has stated in The Chronicle that the University loses students who have been accepted to the "SHYRMP" schools at a rate of about four to one. The SHYRMP schools (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe, MIT, and Princeton) are the prestigious names in undergraduate education that the University has tried, since its inception, to emulate.

If I were Guttentag, that is the statistic that would keep me up at night. That ratio means that, as much as we would like to think otherwise, Duke just does not have what many of the most talented students in the country want in an undergraduate program. If the University were serious about creating a better undergraduate class each year, then this is the area where it should use its money rather than spending it on recruiting weekends where only people of a certain skin color are welcome.

Some may say that our reverse discrimination makes up for past wrongdoing. Two wrongs do not make a right. Rather than constantly examining and defining racial boundaries, the University should commit itself to making the institution what it was designed to be: a meritocracy. Academics should try to be the last "pure" place in the world, an Ivory Tower isolated from the social problems of the outside.