Face the State

Face The State Staff Report

Appearing on 850 KOA's Mike Rosen Show Tuesday, Melissa Hart, co-chair of the "No on 46" campaign, said that without race and gender preferences, schools would admit classes of "overprivileged" students who "all look the same."

HartFTS File Photo

Hart made the comments during a debate on Amendment 46, a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit the government from using race and gender as factors in hiring, contracting, and admissions decisions.

When Rosen asked Hart, who is also a University of Colorado law professor, about the role racial and gender preference programs play in higher education admissions (MP3), she said schools should be able to take into account many factors, not just grades or test scores.

Hart said, “If we admitted classes to the law school with just the highest LSATs and the highest GPAs we would have a not in anyway interesting class of people, who all look the same. And I don’t mean they’d all be white, I mean they’d all be from the same overprivileged background.”

Shawn Coleman, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and public supporter of 46, said Hart’s conclusions insulted him. Coleman, who is black, said he knows he got into Juilliard, which has one of the lowest acceptance rates of any university in the nation, without the aid of a racial preference because the school makes selections based on merit and without consideration of race or gender.

“The idea that women and minorities won’t get into higher education institutes without preference programs is personally offensive to me,” Coleman said.

Coleman, a spokesman of Amendment 46, said he was motivated to get involved in the campaign because of personal experiences. “I volunteered because as a person of color, there had to be balance in this debate,” Coleman said.

In response, Hart said there is plenty of research that backs up her claim.

“There has been a wealth of research that should be easily available to [Coleman] on the Internet or in any local library,” said Hart. “He need only to Google ‘standardized testing’ and ‘privilege or discrimination or distortion’ and he will instantly have at his fingertips studies from across the country that show standardized testing again and again generally favors the privileged upper class for a variety of reasons. To argue otherwise is baseless.”

Coleman agreed that people who come from wealthier backgrounds definitely have more advantages than those who do not, but Coleman contends that race and gender preference programs don’t address the root of economic inequality.

“If her point is that those who come from a strong economic background will have more opportunities in life, then I’m in agreement with her,” Coleman said. “But this is just a scare tactic.”

Hart also drew fire from the Center of Equal Opportunity, a conservative civil rights think tank “devoted to the issues of race and ethnicity” based in Washington, D.C. CEO President Roger Clegg said connecting race or gender with academic performance is misleading.

“If schools want to give special consideration to underprivileged applicants, than they still can do so,” Clegg said. “Diamonds in the rough come in all colors. The equation that privilege comes with skin color is wrong.”