Campus That Apartheid Ruled Faces a Policy Rift
At the height of apartheid, the University of Cape Town was once a citadel of white privilege on the majestic slopes of Devil’s Peak. Tcc. However, it is also engaged in a searching debate about just how far affirmative action should go to heal the wounds of an oppressive history, echoing similar conflicts in the United States, where half a dozen states have banned the use of racial preferences in admissions to public universities.
“Are we here because we’re black or are we here because we’re intelligent?”, asked Sam Mgobozi, 19, a middle-class black student who attended a first-rate high school in Durban and finds affirmative action offensive, even as he concedes that poor black applicants may still need it.
The University of Cape Town was supposed to have settled this debate last year when its professors supported a policy that gave admissions preferences based on apartheid racial categories to black, mixed-race and Indian students.
Instead, unease with the current approach has spilled out over the past year in fierce exchanges on newspaper editorial pages and formal debating platforms. Sixteen years after the political ascent of the black majority, the university’s dilemma resonates across a society conflicted about how best to achieve racial redress, whether in corporate board rooms or classrooms.
Prof. Neville Alexander, a marxist sociologist, has roused the campus debate with the charge that affirmative action betrays the ideals of nonracialism that so many fought and died for during the long struggle against apartheid. Professor Alexander insists that the University of Cape Town, which is public, must resist pressure from the government to use racial benchmarks in determining how well the university is performing.
Affirmative action’s champion on campus is Max Price, the vice chancellor. Dr. Price contends that preferences based on apartheid's racial classifications provide a means to help those harmed by that system to gain critical educational opportunities. He estimated that about half of the most privileged black applicants would not make the cut without racial preferences. In such a situation, the said, whites would dominate the top ranks of the class, while many disadvantaged blacks would struggle with failure, reinforcing stereotypes.
Adapted from: <www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/africa/23safrica.html?pagewanted=1>. Access: August 19th, 2011.
The sentence “Sixteen years after the political ascent of the black majority, the university’s dilemma resonates across a society conflicted about how best to achieve racial redress, whether in corporate board rooms or classrooms.” means that
a) both university and society are uncertain about how best to deal with affirmative action.
b) the university’s dilemma has lasted 16 years, and because of this society is in conflict too.
c) the university’s dilemma is completely different from the conflict of people in society.
d) black people are conflicted about how best to achieve political ascent at the university.
