One university's case for race

David Nolan, a historian in St. Augustine, Fla., can barely fathom how far the university has come since he was a student there in the fall of 1963. He recalls taping a Time magazine cover of Martin Luther King Jr. on his door. Before long, someone had sprayed the letters KKK on it with lighter fluid and set it on fire.

"I knew no one when I arrived in Charlottesville in September 1963," he writes in an e-mail. "I talked, listened, argued with other students about segregation. 'You don't want civil rights,' one of them told me. 'You want my rights.' 'What rights?' I asked. 'My right to discriminate,' the student said."

Three decades later, the university is a dramatically different place, say veteran professors who witnessed changes on campus. Paul Gaston, who taught history at the school for more than 40 years, says that before black undergraduates arrived on campus, white students used to feel "they had permission to say just about anything that came to mind about race."

The dynamic changed radically in the 1970s with the arrival of blacks. Professor Gaston broke his civil rights class into teams with white and black students working together on reports that chronicled the lynchings and beatings leading up to the civil rights era of the 1960s.

Some white students, he found, were shocked to find out such things had taken place, while some black students had exaggerated ideas about atrocities. Gaston told both his groups, "Go to the library so you know what you're talking about."

Overall, he says, "The mix of students made a big difference. It made people more honest, think harder, learn more, and be more sensitive to others."

John Blackburn, dean of admission at the University of Virginia, has run the shop since 1985. He says the school gives underrepresented minorities the same extra consideration in admissions accorded applicants who are athletes, or children of alumni, or wealthy donors. Such applications are tagged to denote a "plus factor."

That "plus" can help if a student is borderline, but the academics still have to be there, Mr. Blackburn insists.

So even though minorities' test scores have long been lower on average than those of whites, all have the academic qualifications to be at UVA.

Yet with college admissions more competitive than ever, the 1990s saw a raft of reverse-discrimination lawsuits. That's a shift from the 1970s, when affirmative action in admissions was seen as redressing wrongs of the pre-civil rights era.

But affirmative action is still an important tool for improving academic quality, many say. When UVA's gender and race barrier was broken in the 1970s, the result was an influx of strong female students. But a racially diverse campus was key to drawing the nation's best students.

Average SAT scores of incoming freshman last year were 1314, compared with 1206 three decades ago. More telling, says Blackburn, is that 83 percent of this year's freshman were in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class, compared with just 66 percent in the top one-fifth of their class in 1970.

Diversity is a magnet for top applicants, Blackburn and Gaston agree.

"Without a steady flow of black students in the '80s and '90s, we would never have achieved the national ranking we have now," Gaston says. "We rose in the ranks because students from all over the country wanted to come here precisely because we were sensitive to the problems of a heritage of racial exclusion."

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