Whether you’re for it or against it, affirmative action is a very hot topic in today’s world. This past Friday, the Colorado Asian Pacific Student Alliance (CAPSA) hosted a symposium on this very topic at the University of Denver. There, they took a comprehensive look into the highly controversial law in term of its past, present, and future.

Professor Alan Chen

The panelists included DU law professors, Wendy Duong and Alan Chen as well as Susan Lee, the Director of Diversity and Equal Opportunity at DU.

The first speaker was Professor Chen. He went into detail about the history of the law itself as well as various collegiate cases. He noted that laws like title 6, once used to combat racial discrimination is now being used by proponents to go against affirmative action. He remarked that many who are against the law say that it gives a person who is a minority a positive factor in college admissions, just based on their background.

Susan Lee

For the future of affirmative action, Chen felt that there’s still a larger issue on the socioeconomic class that our society needs to grapple. He also mentioned that there’s an “Asian-dilemma.” The Asian community is more divided on their stance with affirmative action than any other minority group. Asians tend to exceed their population percentages in college. Proponents have used Asians as an example of how a minority group is able to succeed on their own. This, as Chen said, “Creates a dangerous divide within the minority community.”

Professor Duong states, “Racial differences and diversity promotes learning” and that in its truest form, the diversity project is good. She would go on to list various statistics of minorities in the job field. Of the attorneys employed by firms, only 3.17% are minorities, of law professors, only 6.2%. One report alleged that female minority attorneys are “too timid to take on the men.”

CAPSA Co-President Vy Nguyen

The final speaker was Susan Lee who felt that affirmative action is an imperfect tool that offered a modest compensation and some benefit to those it serves. During her speech, she brings up some relevant points including various myths about the law. She concluded by saying that effective affirmative action is a management tool to the end.

The symposium continued with a Q&A session, a working lunch and finally, a report from each table back to the group. The audience was smaller than what was anticipated, but those who attended were shown a nice discussion on a very sensitive subject. CAPSA-DU co-president Vy Nguyen best summed it up by saying that this symposium was meant to “stimulate thought on this subject.”

Personal thought
One thing that bothered this reporter was the term ‘reverse discrimination.’ As I learned from Prof. Chen, it was a buzzword created in the 80s used by white-Americans who felt that the laws hurt them more than it helped minorities. First off, discrimination is discrimination. With that said, wouldn’t ‘reverse discrimination,’ be equality? Just a thought.