The value of economic affirmative action

We need to have a frank discussion about diversity at Princeton. But before we can do that, we need to learn how to talk about diversity. To do either — though we must aspire to do both — requires unbelievable courage, to use the words of Professor Cornel West. In March, Professor West told an audience at Rutgers, "When you're talking about diversity, you're talking about sisters of all colors; you're talking about peoples of color; you're talking about the deepest forms of paideia — education in its profound sense."

By now, most of us have come to realize that much of our education occurs outside the classroom and that we learn most and learn best when our assumptions are challenged, sometimes in such profound and fundamental ways that we cannot help but be changed by the experience. We learn best when we live with, converse with and share our love with people who are most likely to challenge us in those ways. Professor West's "colors" aren't just skin-deep — they speak to the ways in which a person with a very different worldview can strike deep chords inside of us and inspire unprecedented self-reflection.

If we are to take Professor West's ideas about diversity to heart, then the biggest problem with diversity at Princeton is the utter lack of it. For all the fancy rhetoric we employ, we're much more similar than we think. Just how similar are we? I leave the explanation to scholar Jerome Karabel, who, lucky for us, will be speaking at the U-Store tonight at 7 p.m.

In the concluding chapter of "The Chosen," Karabel's colossal study of admissions at Princeton, Harvard and Yale in the 20th century, Karabel lauds the historic and dramatic progress made by the Big Three in attaining a "striking degree of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity" in their current classes. But, Karabel continues, "Beneath this dramatic and highly visible change in the physiognomy of the student body [is] a surprising degree of stability in one crucial regard — the privileged class origins of students ... ."

Though the Class of 2009 boasts record numbers of freshmen on financial aid — 675 students on aid and 196 from "low-income" households with incomes below $50,900 per year — the statistics also show that 45 percent of the class is paying full tuition.For all the strides we've made in constructing a merit-based admission policy, it is no secret that most of us come from very comfortable and, consequently, similar cultural backgrounds. The University's efforts at achieving diversity are predicated on the idea that social and intellectual discourse is enhanced because of difference, but this policy's ignorance of class renders it incomplete and ineffectual. What sort of paideia will we be able to cultivate if we all think and act alike?

As Dean Rapelye told me in a conversation in September, the administration has begun to focus more of its attention on reaching out to low-income students. The ambitious expansion of Princeton's financial aid policy in the past four years is an example of this policy shift. But until class diversity becomes an institutional priority in the way that racial or ethnic diversity is at Princeton, the student body may continue to become more and more colorful on the outside while growing increasingly affluent, complacent and vanilla on the inside.

Karabel notes that our own former president, William Bowen, wrote in 1998 in "The Shape of the River" that a class-based affirmative action policy would be "harmful to academic standards" and "prohibitively expensive." As Professor West imitated, playfully yet insightfully, in his Rutgers lecture: "Well, we'd like to wrestle with diversity, but we have a budget crisis."

Since the publication of "The Shape of the River," Bowen has reversed his position, calling for affirmative action admission policies to incorporate class alongside, but not in place of, other existing factors. Yet many people within the University community continue to hold the view that class-based affirmative action has already been addressed or is simply impossible to implement. It seems so far-fetched, in fact, that we are not even willing to think about how it could be done.

This is a grave mistake. We mustn't think that everything is fine or shy away from a noble fight because it is difficult. Undergraduates in particular have a great opportunity to be a part of shaping Princeton's future. Yet too often we, the youngest and expectedly most rebellious members of the vast Princeton family, become the staunchest defenders of traditions we don't even understand.

Reform is not beyond our reach. Reform begins with having the courage to accept Professor West's invitation to think — and to think hard — about diversity. We should not think of ourselves as helpless prisoners to an eternal system.As Allan Johnson tells us in "Power, Privilege and Difference": "We are prisoners to something, but it's closer to our own making than we realize. And we, therefore, are far from helpless to change it and ourselves." Freddie LaFemina is a history major from North Massapequa, N.Y. He can be reached at lafemina@princeton.edu.