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Affirmative Action: Personal Stories

Readers discuss an article tracing the lives of some black students who were admitted to Columbia in 1969.

Gregory Peterson, a lawyer, shared his experience as one of a record number of black students admitted to Columbia University in 1969.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

To the Editor:

ReAffirmative Action at 50: Successes and Regrets” (front page, March 31):

I appreciate Anemona Hartocollis’s report on affirmative action at Columbia University, specifically the divergent outcomes of black students who were enrolled in 1969. Unfortunately, the reasons provided for the divergent outcomes could be seen as another way to blame some black students for their own lack of success, despite affirmative action.

Fifty years on, retention rates of black college students continue to be significantly lower than their white counterparts, especially in academically selective predominantly white institutions of higher learning. Even for those who successfully graduate from college, their unemployment rates are worse than those of their peers.

To conclude that this is a personal issue or bad luck or, worse, a bad choice misses the pernicious influences of systemic racism. Under these circumstances, we need the political will and leadership to do more to address structural inequities and implicit biases, especially for black and brown college students and graduates.

Philip A. Rozario
Garden City, N.Y.
The writer is a professor at the Adelphi University School of Social Work.

To the Editor:

I read the story on the early days of affirmative action at Columbia mindful of the recent cheating scandal that laid bare the myth of merit as the primary factor in admission to elite higher education.

I’m left thinking that the street musician and Columbia dropout Les Goodson does not deserve to be held up as the exemplar of what went wrong with affirmative action, while his classmates the corporate lawyer, neurologist and financial officer are understood to be the successes. We should not use earning power and professional badges to judge a life.

Mr. Goodson’s neat apartment is adorned with his own artwork. He gets to play music weekly with his own band and daily on his own terms. I know a fair number of “successful” professionals who dream of that sort of freedom.

While we’re smashing the sacred cow of elite higher education, let’s also revisit our cruelly limiting ideas about who gets to be called a success.

Sheela Clary
Housatonic, Mass.

To the Editor:

I was among those black and Latino students who gained admission to Columbia’s class of 1973, majoring in engineering. I was the oldest son of a Latina single mother on welfare with three other children.

I was probably admitted because of affirmative action, though at the time I really did not understand how these social and political pressures had given me a leg up. I did not have the highest grades at Brooklyn Technical High School, and my guidance counselor refused to sign my application to Columbia. He claimed I would never get admitted. I proved him wrong.

I survived and prospered at Columbia for one reason only. I loved Columbia. I tried as hard as I could to persuade Columbia that the record number of Latino admissions in our class of 1973 should not be the last. Columbia provided resources that permitted me and other Latino students to travel to places in the country with large Latino populations to inform students of the opportunities at Columbia and to help them with the application process.

I wish that Columbia had provided more support for Latinos once admitted, and I worry that it is not as committed to opening doors for upward mobility for black and Latino students today as it was 50 years ago.

Jose R. Sanchez
Brooklyn
The writer is a professor of political science at Long Island University.

To the Editor:

While purporting to sum up the history of affirmative action, this piece is merely a snapshot of a handful of African-American Columbia students admitted in 1969 and tells us nothing about the actual legacy of inclusive admissions, which is the striking and vital gains in the numbers of women, Asian-Americans, Latinxs, Native Americans and African-Americans attending college.

The juxtaposition of one classmate busking outside the University Club while the other enters is a reporter’s dream anecdote, but neither attributes his situation to his race or to affirmative action.

Affirmative action is not a perfect process, but to paint it with broad and stereotypical strokes is to distort and diminish an important driver of diversity, equity and civil rights.

Jeannie Park
New York
The writer is president of the Harvard Asian-American Alumni Alliance and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

To the Editor:

I was a 7-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria in 1938 and felt like an outsider in the New York City public schools in Harlem and as a freshman at Columbia in 1948.

It is wrong to include the term “regrets” in the headline of a discussion of affirmative action, journalistic balance notwithstanding. Yes, some students fail after they have been favored by affirmative action, but it has been a resounding success! Who could have imagined in the 1960s that we would have a black president and a black attorney general? Could I have predicted that a Latino student (first in his family to attend college) would become a professor in the University of California in my specialty when I took him under my wing?

I have no regrets about affirmative action. Progress requires risk-taking, and the risks involved in affirmative action have been worthwhile.

John R. Benfield
Los Angeles
The writer is emeritus professor of surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

While this article provides interesting and important history, like so many discussions of affirmative action, particularly in postsecondary education, it falls short by focusing solely on race. The largest group to benefit from affirmative action in the United States has been white women.

Even as gendered disparities in pay, glass ceilings, gender discrimination and sexual harassment remain ubiquitous, white women have achieved high levels of access to and success in undergraduate and graduate/professional education in many fields that 50, or even 20 or 30, years ago were largely unwelcoming — including enrollment at Columbia College.

It’s critical for white women to recognize the ways affirmative action has benefited us, and to probe what factors have allowed us to fare over all far differently than African-American and Latinx women and men when it comes to affirmative action, so that together we can hone and support programs that will ensure the success of even more Americans.

Lois Leveen
Portland, Ore.

To the Editor:

I was a graduate student at Harvard during the period Anemona Hartocollis describes. The African-American undergraduate students I encountered were, on average, extraordinarily intelligent.

Many colleges and universities that increased the number of African-Americans in their student bodies around 1969 changed course only a few years later. The percentages of African-American students dropped considerably (by higher percentages at less prestigious colleges), and their composition also changed.

A much higher percentage of the new admits were either from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds or had been filtered through middle-class and upper-middle-class institutions. While many of the ablest of the students who were admitted around 1969 were from working-class backgrounds, colleges and universities were unwilling to transform themselves to adapt to these students; instead, they chose to admit students who were more like their traditional students.

Had they been willing to adapt, just as they demanded that African-American, working-class students adapt, they would not only have better served African-American students, but they would also have enhanced the quality of education received by their white students.

Mark Gould
Haverford, Pa.
The writer is a professor of sociology at Haverford College.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Affirmative Action: Personal Tales. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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