Honestly, that was my first thought after reading the responses on this blog to my column yesterday on holistic admissions.

First, Mr. Szarzynski, I never said that the UW admissions policy is rejecting white students in favor of unqualified black students. I have actually never made that argument. The argument that I have consistently made about holistic admissions since the controversy began is that the policy is an attempt to make the UW more racially diverse without a serious discussion about why there are so few minorities in the system to begin with.

Again, as I have said before, the policy is racist in that it is the insidious and patronizing form of racism that in essence says to the minority students in Wisconsin: "You can't succeed without our help, so we're going to change the standards so you can get in." That is the racism that I see in the policy. My outrage over the holistic admissions policy has never been that it necessarily discriminates against white students, but that it does nothing at all to seriously help minority students succeed.

Now, I am fairly certain that Mr. Lichtenheld and Mr. Szarzynski and many others on the Left will not believe that or will somehow find a way to twist that around in an attempt to portray me as some sort of knuckle-dragging, neoconservative racist, but I really do care a great deal about the problems within our inner-cities and minority students. It damages all of society for such a large portion of its members to be trapped in a continuous cycle of poverty and underachievement. It need not be this way, but in order to address the problem we have to start talking seriously about socio-economic factors and the culture of inner-cities. Reducing class size is not the solution to the problem.

According to statistics compiled by The McGraw-Hill Company, a leading textbook publisher, MPS schools have an average class size of about 17 students. A far cry from 40 per class as Mr. Szarzynski alleges, isn't it? Would a reduction to 15 really make that much of a difference? I doubt that very much. We should instead begin focusing on changing how we teach in our inner-cities and how to get parents more involved in their child's education. That is how we will ultimately solve the problem and improve minority achievement in our schools.

Mr. Lichtenheld actually helped prove my point when he said that "Whether skeptics wish to admit it, there is a clear connection between race and class in America. Holistic admissions policies are, in part, built on these realities. They don't stand to provide 'handouts'; only to acknowledge the inherent disadvantages that come with being a particular skin color." That is the problem that I am trying to address; it should not be that the admissions policy has to compensate for the failure of the public school system. By acknowledging these "realities" the admissions policy does nothing to actually correct them. The focus must be on repairing the broken system -- not by throwing money at it, but by actually working in the inner-cities with the students, parents and teachers to find a way that will actually work, not just make a few politicians and bureaucrats feel good about themselves.

There are two central premises of Mike Hahn's article today -- one factually inaccurate and the other disingenuous -- that warrant what I hope will be a terse response.

1) UW is rejecting qualified white students for unqualified minorities.

The holistic policy does no such a thing. This type of preference is not only illegal under federal law, but has been deemed undesirable by university admissions from across the country. The type of affirmative action practiced by UW is only relevant for candidates of comparable credentials.

Mr. Hahn asserts -- without a crumb of evidence, I might add -- that UW is so desperate for minority students that they lower their standards for the predominantly unqualified minorities of the Milwaukee Public School System. Not true. Like all elite colleges, the number of qualified students that apply -- i.e. those that are expected to meet the demands of the university -- is much higher than the number admitted. Every year, UW turns down thousands of students whose credentials were lower than those admitted but who are nonetheless qualified. This gives the admissions a lot of breathing space for those they admit, and allows them to implement a holistic approach, of which race is just one element among many considered. The surplus of rejected qualified students undoubtedly includes minorities, the likes of which I can personally count as acquaintances and friends.

But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence against his argument is that minority drop-out rates are comparable to those of their white counterparts. According to BH statistics, the retention rate over three years is 76 percent for minorities and 83 percent for whites. Considering the manner in which the cost of college disproportionately affects those with smaller incomes and the feelings of isolation and alienation that many minorities likely feel at UW, I would have expected this slight difference to be larger than it is. Regardless, the statistic demonstrates that the credentials of minorities and whites at UW are almost the same. In this context, Mr. Hahn's notion that UW is recruiting illiterate youth from the inner-city becomes all the more absurd.

2) MPS fails minorities. It is the real culprit.

As a graduate of an MPS school, I can personally attest to the fact that it is not the school system, but the legislature which refuses to fund it properly, that is the problem. Simply put, smaller classrooms are the answer. Perhaps Mr. Hahn can enlighten us on how teachers can educate properly in a class of 40 students who mostly come from impoverished, broken homes, but I doubt it. Kids from these types of backgrounds need small classes and good teachers.

I said above that Mr. Hahn is disingenuous in his analysis of the problem with education, because I sincerely doubt that he would support what's necessary to fix it: more money. As "Michael Johnson" wrote in the comment section, it would hardly be a surprise to see a column next Tuesday about the need to cut education funding.

A final thought: Where are the vitriolic columns about the legacy bonus?

It seems that holistic admissions policies are indicative of our society as a whole. Yet I struggle with critics of affirmative action who cry "discrimination" without acknowledging that race is only one among a slew of factors considered in this university's admissions process. Such selective criticism radiated from Mike Hahn's Tuesday column, which stated:

"The whole issue of the holistic admissions policy is emblematic of another phenomenon in education: namely 'social promotion.' We all know what this practice is: passing along students who aren't really ready for the next level of education because we don't want to hurt their self-esteems and so they can be with their friends."

Give me a break. Students are let into this university on merits other than their academic achievements all the time. A friend of mine, for example, openly admits that the only reason she was accepted to UW was because her uncle is the former chancellor. We admit students with 17s on their ACTs simply because they know how to throw or catch a football. Admissions gives preference to international students or those hailing from outside Wisconsin just to balance the school's demographic representation. A generous donation from a parent or having a big booster for a relative is all one needs to get special admission treatment at this university. Many of these students "aren't really ready for the next level of education", but that doesn't prevent acceptance letters from being sent.

I wonder if Mr. Hahn is aware that the largest affirmative action campaign on this campus is not to pack lecture halls full of black or Hispanic faces, but to get more women involved in the sciences. Indeed, admissions at this university is not a blind process on many fronts.

But should they be? Proponents who advocate abolishing the race element of holistic admissions ride on the assumption that, forty years after the Civil Rights era, we are a colorblind society. Really? Policymakers are legitimatizing racial profiling of Arabs at airports for "national security reasons". Several months ago, a black student at a school in Jena, Louisiana actually felt compelled to ask the principal if he could sit under the "white person" tree. People blast immigration because it's causing the "invasion of Hispanic culture". Yet we have the audacity to claim that race no longer matters?

Why should admissions procedures be blind if our society is not? Holistic policies may be sexist, racist, and favor the wealthy, the well-connected, and the athletically endowed. But we live in a sexist and racist society that favors the wealthy, the well-connected, and the athletically endowed. It's hypocrisy to expect the former to change without the later.

Despite these realities, I find it unproductive for Kyle Szarzynski to claim that opposing holistic admissions "effectively amounts to giving up on the struggle for racial equality." This logic allows critics to frame the debate in social welfare terms and accuse universities of giving "handouts" to undeserving (or "unprepared") minority students.

Mr. Hahn actually provides substantive argument: that the problem lies in the shoddy state of K-12 education. But of course, access to a quality education directly relates to socioeconomic status. And socioeconomic demographics -- some of which Mr. Hahn cites in his column -- reveal that minorities overwhelming tend to bear the brunt of poverty and lack of opportunity in this country. Whether skeptics wish to admit it, there is a clear connection between race and class in America. Holistic admissions policies are, in part, built on these realities. They don't stand to provide "handouts"; only to acknowledge the inherent disadvantages that come with being a particular skin color. They don't stand to provide equality by themselves, only to acknowledge that inequality exists--and that it has a significant impact on students' achievement.

Of course, it's hard for any of us to admit that we might not be "self-made"; that our skin color, gender, socioeconomic class or personal connections have propelled us into a nurturing environment that is as much responsible for our success as our skills, intelligence and work ethic. The privilege we've inherited might be invisible to us, but not to others.

Some people call this "white man's guilt". I call it a dose of reality, even if most people find it difficult to swallow.

I had been waiting for the first "Liberals Persecute Conservative at UW" article this semester, so I wasn't surprised to read Joe Trovato's piece in Friday's opinion section. His article was the usual lamentation, deriding campus leftists for silencing conservative speech -- i.e. the "rude reception" David Horowitz was recently met with at the Memorial Union Theater. It is a shame that many well-meaning progressives give credence to this argument. I should preface with stating that the perception of Madison as a city unwelcoming -- let alone hostile -- to conservatives is, at the very least, not as true as Mr. Trovato lets on. A daily glance at the Herald Editorial section, for example, should satiate conservatives with a healthy serving of gun-totting, Muslim-bashing or American nationalism. Or they can take a stroll on State Street and spit on the homeless. But there is certainly no denying that Madison discourse is left-of-center. I'm just not understanding why this is a bad thing. In a university setting, debate is not only good, but necessary. The dialectic of ideas buttresses the truth better than any environment of intellectual conformity ever could. And yet, we all agree that some ideas -- Nazism, Satanism, Stalinism -- probably won't contribute to meaningful discussion. Our university's search for truth -- likely accompanied by genuine concern for human welfare -- mandates a transcendence of tribalism, superstition and prejudice of all kinds. Many conservative ideas fail this test. Ask yourself if the following ideas really contribute to intellectual debate: 1) Homosexuality is immoral because Hebrew tribesmen a couple of thousand of years ago said so. 2) If you don't believe that America is the greatest country that ever existed or ever will exist, then you are suspect at best, a dirty traitor at worst. 3) Most homeless people live as the do by choice. 4) Any American foreign policy decision must be considered a priori altruistic. 5) Racism in America doesn't exist. I could go on. The aforementioned ideas aren't given credence at UW -- or any other elite university, for that matter -- because they add nothing valuable to an argument. Conservatives have a right to say what they want, but they can't expect people at institutions like UW to take them seriously. I'm sorry that Mr. Trovato feels so persecuted, but rather than crying about it, maybe he should ask himself why his ideas are looked down upon. Maybe he should ask himself why only 5 percent of UW faculty political donations went to the Republican Party in 2006. Maybe he should ask himself why the American university has become synonymous with left-wing thought. Warning: the answer might be painful.

Certainly, a person who has visited a region can be considered for more proficient in the particulars of said region than someone who has not. However, having not visited a region does not mean one’s opinion on it is inherently flawed or incorrect. To say otherwise is the rough equivalent of saying one should not consider being shot in the face a bad thing if one has never been shot in the face. I’ve seen the situation in Iraq, Mr. Lichtenheld, and I don’t need to step on a roadside bomb to know and opine that it is indeed desperate.

-By Gerald Cox

Obviously, I expected a bit of a backlash toward the Salas piece and for the anti-illegal-immigration proponents to come out of the woodwork. However, What I saw in my mailbox just hours afterward shocked me:

We Americans are tired of people breaking our laws and then people like you making excuses for it. We as a country cannot pay for the third world .You need to come to Phoenix and see what your city will look like in a few years if we dont [sic] stop the invasion, and that’s what it is. We are losing our soverighnty[sic] as a nation. The American culture is being shoved aside. I am tired of seeing my Flag [sic] burned and the mexican[sic] flag raised. We are tired of listening to people like you. We are fed up with your multi culturalism [sic] crap and left wing lunacy.

Shortly thereafter, I got another email from a man who vehemently disagreed with my assessment, but put this at the end:

One last thing, not that you have done this, but you might have noticed that there are people who will say that anyone who is anti-illegal immigration is a racist. Keep this in mind: I have worked with many ethnic groups in my 54 years of life and I consider myself a very tolerant person. I am not racist for simply wanting my immigration laws enforced. Propaganda includes using the race card and is a misuse of the word. There are millions of American citizens that feel this way. Illegal immigration is only the tip of the iceberg in regard to how the corporate elites and the members of the Builderberg’s and the Rothchild’s of the world want to do away with countries and their sovereignty. The North American Union is well under way which will do away with the US, Canada and Mexico, creating a single entity and illegal immigration is leading the way. The Constitution will cease to exist. Our federal government is ignoring our laws to integrate the Mexican culture into ours and there’s a lot of people in this country who don’t care to see there own culture disappear.

How can you argue that the situation has nothing to do with race and then go on about the threat of “integrating Mexican culture with ours?” How can you say there is no race involved when you have people like Tanya and John Snyder (first email) saying their tired of this “multi-culturalism crap?” I reject the idea that race is not a factor in immigration. Certainly, there are cooler heads that prevail in this debate and obviously see this as an issue that has nothing to do with race, but it’s obviously still part of the problem on both sides of the argument.

However, there was one point that I would like to clarify with this. In my article I made the point that the proposed legislation could open the door to in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants, both illegal themselves and born in this country. This caused a few problems:

I’m confused, I thought children of illegal immigrants that are born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens?

The follow up:

Yes, you are confused - this discussion has nothing to do with US citizens, it is all about people NOT BORN in the USA who commited the crime of entering the USA illegally. As far as the children go, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The reason why I included this point is because there seems to be a little discrepancy, which I’d be glad if someone could clear up.

In-state residency requirements for the purpose of in-state tuition stipulates it as follows:

3. Any adult student who is a dependent of his or her parents under 26 USC 152(a), if one or both of the student’s parents have been bona fide residents of this state for at least 12 months next preceding the beginning of any semester or session for which the student registers at an institution.

Under this rule, it wouldn’t really matter if the student is 18 and a legal resident “" if they are a dependent, which I would assume a good portion of 18 year olds are, they would not be able to claim residency because their parents are not legal residents. Therefore, native-born students who are the children of illegal immigrants would not necessarily be guaranteed in-state tuition in every case.

Furthermore, the mention was also made because several anti-immigration proponents would like to see a revision or reinterpretation to the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to native born residents. They cite the fact that this was used to guarantee citizenship to the freed slaves after the civil war. Many cite this as a loophole that did not take immigration woes into consideration. I obviously disagree with this interpretation and would hate to see an amendment revised to deem children illegal upon birth.

As for those who say we should blame the parents for crossing the border in the first place and basically “too bad their parents are criminals,” I say, “have some sense.” The children in question have been educated by the state of Wisconsin and you’re just going to kick them out even though they’re willing to pay tuition everyone else in the state is paying? I mean, if the state of Wisconsin has already invested in their education and those children are still willing to invest more, we’re just going to lose a productive and soon to be legal member of society because their parents committed a crime?

Which brings me to this rebuttal made in the comments:

In-state tuition is $7,010 for 2007-08. Out-of-state tuition is roughly THREE times as much at $21,010. Each illegal alien allowed in-state tuition would cost $14,000 per year. Just how did the proposed law deal with the loss of revenue? Did it short-change the University or increase taxes?

Ok, first off, if we’re going to treat these immigrants as “Out of state,” switching to in-state tuition doesn’t lose us any money. We have a quota of 25% out of state residents who can be accepted to UW. If you move these immigrants off out-of-state tuition, someone else will fill the gap. The only displacement you have would be those students who don’t get it because there are a few more people in the pool of applicants. If we use comparison to Washington state, who implemented similar legislation, you’ll get an increase of 550 students apply, 400 or so of them the children of illegal immigrants. The state doesn’t get shortchanged. It might get slightly more competitive, but if they’re qualified, why not? After all, we educated them to this level in the first place and they’re willing to pay.

Plus, let’s say it was the case that those who lived in-state were part of the in-state quota while paying out-of-state costs: How many children of illegal immigrants do you think could find 21,000 dollars to attend college? You really think that would drain the state of millions of dollars in revenue? I think not.