Affirmative Action Debates on Campus

This contextual article shows that in the early 1990s, the African American population on State's campus experienced exponential growth.

This column by Bret Poteat is the first in a series of columns by NCSU students trying to define affirmative action in a political moment when President Bush and other conservatives were leading the charge against affirmative action.

This first column by Steven Crisp uses the context of David Duke's possible election as governor of Louisiana to argue against affirmative action as privileging minorities over the majority.

Emily Laura Pitt's article also uses the context of David Duke's possible election to address affirmative action, but her article explains why she believes affirmative action is necessary.

In the early 1990s, the affirmative action debate on NCSU’s campus took on special significance because of the large number of African American students applying to and enrolling in the university.  According to the Technician, African American high school students chose to send their SAT scores to NCSU at the nation’s seventh highest rate and the highest rate for any non-historically black college or university.  The reasons for African American students’ high preference for NCSU were not clear, but university officials believed that the affordability of NCSU and the high number of career-oriented degrees swayed African American students to apply in high numbers.  In addition, NCSU had good scholarships and outreach for disadvantaged students.[1]

At the same time, NCSU was expanding its scholarship programs and reach into African American communities, the school was experiencing debates about the representation of African Americans among faculty members and in the student body.[2]  While these debates were directly relevant to the experience of faculty and students at NCSU, they were framed in larger, national debates about racial equality and color-blindness.

In particular, students were concerned that affirmative action would lead to a “quota” system where a certain number of jobs/places would be reserved exclusively for minorities, passing over more qualified white applicants.  These allegations had become political fodder in the 1992 national elections, with Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Louisiana’s GOP gubernatorial candidate David Duke riding high on a tide of white backlash at the idea of affirmative action “quotas.”  In a column ostensibly denouncing Duke, inflammatory conservative columnist Steven Crisp lashed out at affirmative action and characterizes many African Americans as waiting for handouts.  He also argues that affirmative action and like programs may have gone beyond correcting historical wrongs, and actually benefit minorities over the majority as well.  Crisp’s opinion plays on white fears about losing the privileges that they traditionally enjoyed in academia and hiring processes.[3]  A more supportive article by Emily Laura Pitt also responds to the David Duke election campaign, but Pitt uses the election as context to explain the importance of affirmative action.  Like Crisp, Pitt backs away from the idea of “quotas,” but her article is nevertheless a passionate defense of affirmative action as helping to create equal opportunity by correcting current structural inequalities in terms of access to education and employment.[4]  Bret Poteat presented a more middle-of-the-line view. Poteat writes in support of affirmative action, but he draws the line at what he considers to be “preferential treatment,” which supposedly “seeks to instill sex and race in the selection process.”[5]