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Preferencing legacies hypocritical move

Even after Michigan voters stamped out preferences for minority applicants five months ago, universities across the state and country continue to give legacy students similar advantages. If the movement to ban affirmative action was intended to make college admission fairer by considering only merit, yet legacy students are still given preferences, then what exactly entails being qualified?

Legacy students are given preferences in admission because their parents are then more likely to donate to the university. In the age of slashed state funding, it is understandable why colleges continue to do this. While that doesn't make legacy preferences any more fair, it does allude to the complexities of college admission, which proponents of Proposal 2 were all too happy to overlook.

Affirmative action opponents portray the preferences given to minority students as unwarranted advantages granted to undeserving students. By overlooking other groups receiving preferences like legacy students, supporters of Michigan's so-called civil rights initiative were pushing a policy that was both ignorant of reality and inherently racist in its unqualified indictment of minorities. And voters bought into the rhetoric. Affirmative action is necessary to help identify qualified minority students who can compete at the college level.

A larger problem is that people often narrowly define who is unfairly advantaged in admission. Not only are legacy students getting a noticeable advantage in the admission process at universities, they also have the added advantage of having a parent who has successfully graduated from that university. Underrepresented minorities often do not have the latter advantage, and now Michigan and several other states are denying them the former. Is that really fair?

To create an admission system in which all people are evaluated by what they have accomplished, the foundations of the debate about fairness, equality and advantage need to be restructured. Why are people so uncomfortable with minorities getting a boost in admission while they continue to ignore boosts given to legacy students and athletes?

Part of this debate needs to be focused on answering the original question of how exactly do we define "qualified." While the answer to that question is not simple, it certainly cannot be addressed with merely test scores and GPAs. It inevitably has to consider the many nuanced situational factors that affect the achievements we see on paper.

Iran sends message with hostage crisis

Everyone can breathe easily, because after nearly two weeks of tense negotiation, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Wednesday, April 4 that the 15 sailors taken hostage in the Persian Gulf would be turned over to the British Embassy in Tehran. I guess we can all stop thinking about Iran now, right?

Wrong. That the British sailors are out of harm's way is no indication of Iran's desire to make peace with the West. The situation was doomed to spiral into a convoluted blame game from the moment it started. When members of the Iranian Coast Guard captured the British crew members at gunpoint March 23, Iran's government denounced the ship's "illegal entry" into Iranian waters.

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Not so fast, said the British Foreign Office, which maintained that the two patrol boats on which they were operating were well within Iraqi waters. Throughout the negotiation process, both sides emphasized that the other was in the wrong. Now, after the matter, neither side appears ready to back down on their claims.

I say, what difference does it make? The distance between where British officials claimed the ships were and where Iran says they were is less than two nautical miles, in waters whose borders have long been under dispute. Even if the Brits were in Iranian waters, as they have confessed on Iranian television (confessions purportedly made under coercion), Iran's reaction made about as much sense as a lifeguard taking children hostage for swimming out past the buoys.

Iran's decision to capture those crew members, who, according to the British Ministry of Defense, were "engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters," sent a message to the rest of the world: We are Iran, and we play by no one's rules.

But that didn't stop Ahmadinejad - just like economic sanctions from the United Nations haven't put a stop to his nuclear ambitions. Talk about sending mixed messages; it would be much easier to believe Ahmadinejad's claims that Iran's nuclear plans were for energy-related purposes if not for his nasty habit of encouraging Palestinian attacks against Israel, and of his wishes for the "disgraceful blot" of a country to be "wiped off the face of the earth."

In the meantime, Ahmadinejad continues to defy the international community's demands to halt the enrichment of uranium and appears, to some extent, to be involved in aiding insurgent efforts in Iraq.

Estimates say Iran will have nuclear capabilities in eight to 10 years; a new war could come sooner. It doesn't have to, but U.S. foreign policy over the past 30 years suggests it may be inevitable. Iran took a huge gamble by holding those sailors hostage. And they dodged the bullet this time. Next time they might not be so lucky. But on the bright side, we might finally find some WMDs.


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