Dear UNC-Wilmington Students:
For years, my well-known opposition to “affirmative action” has been a source of great controversy across our campus, particularly among UNCW faculty. Many have assumed that my position on this topic has been a function of personal prejudice or “insensitivity” to the needs of various “disenfranchised” groups on campus and in society in general. In reality, my opposition to affirmative action has been based on personal experience.
When I first applied for a job as a university professor, a well-meaning department chair at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) told me that I had no chance of getting a job in his department because the only other finalist for the position was a black male. When I took a job at UNCW a month later, I hoped that I had found an environment devoid of such blatant racial discrimination. Unfortunately, my experiences here have proved otherwise. It is my constitutionally protected opinion that I have experienced direct pressure from the administration to engage in both racial and gender discrimination as a member of various university search committees.
Furthermore, I have seen examples of salary discrimination based on affirmative action. For example, one department at UNCW hired a black female as an assistant professor in 1999 before she had finalized her dissertation. Despite her inexperience, she was paid more than two tenured white male associate professors in her department who had, of course, finished their dissertations. One had been teaching at UNCW for five years, the other for seven years.
Despite all of this, I have decided to abandon my longstanding opposition to affirmative action after listening to the oral arguments in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case challenging admissions policies at the University of Michigan. While listening to these recorded arguments, I learned that public universities have a “compelling interest in diversity” which supersedes simplistic notions of reverse discrimination. Now, because my views have changed, I am forced to alter my classroom grading policies.