How My Admission to U.C. Berkeley Led Me to Vote Against Prop. 16
Me and Prop. 16
In the 1980s I was a high school student applying to college. I was a good student at a Jesuit high school in the midwest, and only applied to good colleges. I was fortunate to get accepted by many of them.
In my circle of friends I don’t remember anyone who went on college tours, and I don’t think my parents or I ever considered seeing any of the schools where I had been accepted. As a result, the only two schools that I knew anything about were the University of Chicago and Cornell University, where my parents had been students.
However, even in high school I wanted to move to California and one of the schools that accepted me was U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley was a school that I admired and it would have provided a great way of moving to California.
Unfortunately, the admissions department at Berkeley had noticed my Spanish surname and had stamped “Affirmative Action” on the acceptance letter. The term “affirmative action” implies that the recipient is disadvantaged in a some way that can be remedied by giving him or her some sort of preferential treatment. That was clearly not true in my case, and Berkeley had no reason to believe it was true. Both of my parents had gone to grad school. My father, the source of my hispanic heritage, had a Ph.D. in physics as well as an M.D., and comes from a long line of physicians, scientists and engineers.
Yet, the presence of the affirmative action label caused two problems. First, I couldn’t really be sure that I would have been accepted at Berkeley without my Spanish surname. Also, I could hardly keep my surname and ancestry a secret, so I would have to worry about whether my teachers or classmates would believe that I deserved to be there.
These two problems encapsulate my dislike of Prop. 16. It may level the playing field to a limited extent but it comes at a big cost. Aside from denying an opportunity to a qualified individual who is not part of a historically disadvantaged group, it also harms qualified individuals that are part of those disadvantaged groups. Those individuals are implicitly told that, based on merit alone, they are not qualified for their position. And they are placed in an environment where they are surrounded by people who, quite rationally, also have reason to believe that those individuals are not qualified to be there.
The irony is that most of the individuals that get caught in this situation would qualify for admission based on merit alone. It is the mere existence of affirmative action that causes their self-doubt and allows people around them to make incorrect assumptions about whether they deserve to be there. Essentially, Prop 16 creates an excuse for racist behavior.
In the end, three things happened: I didn’t go to Berkeley (although I later went there for grad school); I attended an Ivy league school that did not appear to care about my ethnic background; and, finally, I joined a majority of Californians in voting against Prop. 16.