Posted on 09/24/2003 9:45:14 PM PDT by Prof Engineer
SMU halts race-based bake sale
Anti-affirmative action group used ethnicity, gender to set prices
08:51 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2003
By LINDA K. WERTHEIMER / The Dallas Morning News
The sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. White women: 75 cents. Hispanics: 50 cents. Blacks: a quarter.
The event Tuesday at Southern Methodist University was no PTA bake sale.
It was a conservative student group's attempt at making a political statement, and it caused such a stir that SMU shut it down after 45 minutes.
The Young Conservatives of Texas chapter ran its so-called affirmative action bake sale to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions. Conservative groups have held similar sales at colleges around the country since February.
Group leaders say they were only making a point while exercising their freedom of speech, but a black student who filed a discrimination complaint with SMU said the bake sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event because it created a potentially unsafe situation for students.
"This was not an issue about free speech," said Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile."
During the bake sale, students were crowding around the table outside the student center, and several began to get into a shouting match, Mr. Moore said.
David C. Rushing, a second-year SMU law student and leader of the conservatives' group, said the event didn't get out of hand and that at the most, a dozen students gathered around the table of sugar and chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispie treats.
"We copied what's been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it's unfair," said Mr. Rushing, chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state.
Chapters of the group held similar bake sales at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University this month. Both schools allowed the events, citing free speech policies.
Mr. Rushing, 23, said the events strive to give students a sense of the inequality he says is created by unequal college admissions policies for whites and minority groups.
Matt Houston, a sophomore, said the group's sign, which listed prices for the treats by the race and sex of buyers, was not a learning tool. It was offensive, he said.
"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Mr. Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."
He and Kambira Jones, a 20-year-old junior, both expressed their concerns to SMU officials. "When I saw this, I was like, 'I can't believe they let you guys post this,' " she said. "I felt they were attempting to make Hispanics and blacks feel inferior. We jumped over the same hoops to get there."
SMU's freshman class this year is one of its most diverse ever – 20 percent are minorities. Overall, minority enrollment among the school's 10,000-member student body is 19 percent.
Before the bake sale brouhaha, SMU already was planning a forum so students and others could debate the aftermath of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. The court ruled in June that universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. The ruling changes the landscape in Texas, where universities have been banned from using race as a factor since 1996.
"We value free speech, and I think our record here shows freedom of expression is important to the academic community and especially this one," said James Caswell, SMU's vice president of student affairs.
The students organizing the SMU event said they meant no offense. To get permission for setting up, students said only that they were holding a bake sale.
For the record, the SMU sale was a flop, at least financially. The group ended up selling just three cookies, raising $1.50.
E-mail lwertheimer@dallasnews.com
I wonder if these students had applied for grants from (or conversely, ever complained about) the United Negro College Fund.
They still are...as long as you protest the "right" things.
Funny how when a lefty spouts anything, it's protected free speech. But when a conservative voices his views, it creates a "hostile environment" and must be shut down.
That statment jumped out at me too. I hope that kid's major isn't heavily dependent upon logic.
BUMP!
It was a cookie sale, not a donut sale......
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