Uncovering the Right on Campus

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Apr 2 07:57:24 PDT 2001


Chuck0 asks:


>Is there still a right wing presence on campus?

The OSU got members of the National Association of Scholars, and recently one of them published a column against affirmative action & the "diversity plan" of the OSU administration:

***** OSU racial policy should be rescinded By: Boris Mityagin

the Lantern, 02/26/01, page 4

-------------------------- A new OSU policy, recommended by the Diversity Plan Committee and adopted by the Kirwan-Ray administration as part of its Plan of Action, sets the following university goals:

"The short-term goal of this plan is to create a faculty, student and staff profile that reflects the demographic profile of the state. Long term, however, the university population must reflect national demographics."

Stated more simply and succinctly: on a prorated basis, only people like us is the new OSU racial policy. But, is this approach new when viewed from a historical perspective? Of course this is a complex issue, but I'll try to illustrate it with a few examples from my life experience.

In the 1960s some Columbus suburbs were 100 percent "pure". This was similar to the policy of only people like us, which led to the practice of: No blacks, no Jews, no Asians. Individuals of these racial and ethnic groups could not buy or rent a house in a "pure" Columbus suburb. The demographic profile of these suburbs would have supported this housing practice. After all, statistically there were no blacks, no Jews, and no Asians living in the area to start with.

In the late 1960s and in the 1970s Soviet Communists used the same policy of "proportional representation" to justify a primitive anti-Semitism. Jews were about 2 percent of total population in the Soviet Union in 1970, but sometimes in academic and research institutions they held 10 to 12 percent of the positions. The policy 'on a prorated basis, only people like us led to the firing or moving to lower positions of thousands Jews in Soviet academia.

What does this policy mean to OSU in the year 2001 and the next decade? The example of Asian-Americans in the Mathematics Department is instructive. Today, more than 20 percent of the OSU math faculty are Asian Americans or Asians. On the other hand, according to the Ohio Board of Regents December 2000 report, in 1998 just 1.1 percent of the entire state population was Asian-American.

Would the implementation of the new OSU racial policy require the Mathematics Department to bring the number 15 to one in five to seven years? This is hardly possible to achieve without the forced retirement of senior professors and the arbitrary firing of younger Asian-American faculty members, not to mention a hiring freeze for members of this racial group.

True, the OSU administration has not specified whether the 1.1 percent quota would be imposed on each department, or if the total quota of 35 Asian-American faculty members, (among 3000 OSU faculty members), would be subdivided into subquotas among the 100 departments and units at OSU. Presumably, departments will compete for distribution of these subquotas. The situation could well become like a budgetary process. Would the Mathematics Department have to write a proposal to get more than 40 percent of the total university quota, just to keep its 15 Asian-American faculty members?

Today OSU has approximately 210 Asian-American faculty members. Deans and chairpersons would be responsible, and properly awarded, for bringing this number to 35. This reduction of Asian-American faculty is an element of the plan "to increase diversity" at OSU. Will the Ohio taxpayer's money be used for rewarding the implementation of these quotas, or will it be through private donations? There are many other questions; see for example "A Response to OSU's Diversity Action Plan" by the Ohio Association of Scholars <http://www.nas.org/affiliates/ohio/osu_divplan.htm>.

My hope is that there will be no need to answer such questions if the University Senate, the OSU Board of Trustees and the Ohio Board of Regents successfully press the Kirwan-Ray administration to rescind their new racial policy and to bring all of us closer to the ideal expressed by Martin Luther King: Americans should judge others as individuals, by their achievements and the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.

Boris Mityagin is a professor of mathematics at OSU. He can be reached at <mityagin.1 at osu.edu>.

-------------------------- Story Source: The Lantern *****

Yoshie



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