One university's case for race

Indeed, the University of Virginia - like many others - still struggles with its legacy. Last fall two fraternities were censured for permitting members to perform skits in blackface.

The campus was shocked again in February when a minority woman running for student council president was assaulted by an unknown white assailant and harassed with racial epithets. She recovered, and was elected.

Still, parents like Joann McCullough, who drove to campus to visit her daughter, are concerned about their children. "I'm just here visiting, making sure she's OK," Ms. McCullough says.

Such incidents also trouble M. Rick Turner, director of African American Affairs at the university.

"I have never seen [black] parents as fearful and concerned for the safety of their children as right now," Mr. Turner says. "I still think UVA has done a remarkable job. It's still the best place for African-American students. We shower them with love and attention. But this university has got to respond with much more than a Band-Aid to this problem."

Corey Walker, an Afro-American studies professor, says the growing acceptance of the idea that affirmative action is reverse discrimination ignores reality.

"Look at the huge athletic facilities we have being built here," he says. "You have the football team, mostly black, cheered on by an audience almost entirely white. Now what's wrong with this picture?"

What's wrong, he says, is that blacks are still pigeonholed within society and academia as athletes and entertainers, and are only slowly breaking out of that box to be taken seriously. Even at UVA, he says, faculty diversity lags far behind that of the student body.

But no one questions university president John Casteen's commitment to racial diversity. As director of admissions in the early 1970s, he was instrumental in opening the university to blacks. Still, he has been under pressure in recent years from the state and the university's governing Board of Visitors to moderate the school's "race-sensitive" admissions policy.

In 1999, in the face of legal threats, the university did drop a numerical scoring system that gave points for race. Today, some see a slowing of the number of black students admitted, and a weakening of the university's commitment.

"Will America's great cheerleader for racial diversity in higher education lose its leadership position?" asked the Journal for Blacks in Higher Education in 1999.

Black freshmen as a percentage of total first-year enrollments slipped from about 12 percent in 1993 to about 9 percent today. And UVA has also fallen from first to fourth among the nation's most racially diverse universities in that category.

Dr. Casteen is quick to defend the university's admissions policy. "What we have done historically is not affirmative action," he says. "There never were quotas."

But he insists that the university is sticking by its policy of "race sensitive" admissions. It is not, he says, backing off its commitment to minority students - a commitment he believes makes UVA academically stronger, not weaker.

Casteen loves to share the story of Robert "Bobby" Bland, who in 1959 became the first African-American to graduate from the university, even though the state had adopted a policy of "massive resistance" to desegregating state colleges and universities.

"[Bobby] made a conscious decision to remain here even after his roommate decided to pull out," Casteen says.

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