Conservative student activists have, in the past few years, begun taking pages out of their progressive counterparts' playbook--staging "in your face" protests with mixed results. You might remember the affirmative action bake sales that sprang up at schools around the country a couple of years ago; you might also recall the anger and shock they induced (intended) and the censorship they incurred (not intended). FIRE kept a comprehensive case file on these sales and their administrative aftermaths; the bottom line was that schools seeking to shut such sales down were operating according to an ideological double standard in which campus policies on free expression took a back seat to administrative desire to protect the sensibilities of under-represented groups.

That was the legal side of things, anyhow. There remained the question of whether the affirmative action bake sales would have any constructive impact on debates about affirmative action on campus and elsewhere. And there remained the question of whether the campus conservative groups who staged these protests did more to hurt their own reputations than to advance either insight or dialogue.

My own feelings about these sales were mixed. I thought they were a sad way to say something substantive about affirmative action, but a very effective--if inadvertent--way to say something about procedural double standards on campus.

I have similar mixed feelings about another sort of "in your face" conservative agitprop, the mock scholarship dedicated to white people. A couple of years ago, Roger Williams students made national news when the College Republicans sponsored a "whites only" scholarship as a way of protesting the use of race in decisions that ought ostensibly to be merit-based. The CRs created the scholarship--for which about 15 people applied--in response to the administration's compilation of a list of scholarships reserved for people of color. Controversy ensued ... and, interestingly, the national and state branches of the Republican party severed ties with the Roger Williams CRs shortly after. The scholarship--which died out after the first year--was designed to provoke reaction. As the leader of the CRs explained it, anyone attempting such a move must "be ready for hypocritical charges of racism, and be ready to be attacked ... but once they attack you, the hypocrisy is exposed."

That's just what the College Republicans at Boston University are doing. With the approval--though not endorsement--of administrators, they have created a "Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship" that is aimed at protesting racial preference-style affirmative action as the "worst form of bigotry confronting America today." Applicants must have a 3.2 GPA, must be at least 25% white, and must submit as part of their applications essays on their ancestry and on "what it means to you to be a Caucasian-American today." The winner will receive $250. "If you give out a white scholarship, it's racist, and if you give out a Hispanic scholarship, it is OK," says the CR president. "It is the main point. We are not doing this scholarship as a white-supremacy scholarship." I believe him--but there are many who will not, and he is clearly aware of that. Hence his rationalization, and hence my own reservations about the wisdom and utility of the CR's project.

My issue with undertakings such as these is that they strike me as being of limited intellectual value. They are confrontational where they should be reasoned; they are simplistic where they should be nuanced. They do little to advance understanding, and plenty to encourage people to operate according to gut reaction rather than to think with their heads.

Affirmative action is something this country is actively debating--or trying to debate. Doing so constructively requires temperate, intellectually solid defenses of both sides of the issue. Agitprop is not that, and when applied to issues such as affirmative action, it seems to me to do little more than further polarize an already terribly polarized situation. For the same reason, I have no patience for anti-military protesters who disrupt campus job fairs by holding queer kiss-ins and so on. No one learns from behavior like that. But plenty of people are angered. And that takes us that much further from the kind of civil, reasoned exchange that we should be trying to have about our country's hot button issues.

I'd love to know what readers think about styles of protest on both left and right, as well as about how students who want to raise awareness about issues--which usually amounts to promoting a particular view of an issue--can do so responsibly, with the greatest prospect of real, lasting success.

For me, the problem with performances like the "affirmative action bake sale" is that they misrepresent how affirmative action works.

In such bake sales, different minorities are charged less than caucasians for the same cookie. But that's not affirmative action.

In admissions, affirmative action is all about how you weigh different aspects of a student's application. Does the white kid from a private high school with a 3.5 GPA have his GPA weighted the same as a minority kid from an inner-city high school with a 3.0 GPA? Is that .5 objectively better? As many reports have shown, university admissions is all about making rather arbitrary choices among a group of basically equally capable students. Students admitted from the wait-list often go on to do as well as students admitted right off. So it's rarely the case that "more capable" white students are denied admission over "less capable" minority students. Instead, minority status is simply one aspect of an application that might be compared with white students' community service or after-school activities.

From various reports I've read, this is also the case in the workforce. An employer generally has to make a rather arbitrary decision among a group of equally capable (on paper) candidates for a job. Choosing a minority is ultimately not much different than choosing the funny candidate (or, as in the case of a friend of mine recently hired to a junior executive position, being hired because you have a good music collection, even 'tho the job has nothing to do with music).

At the same time, I know this isn't always the case. Affirmative action has been abused, and as I've argued here and at the ACTA blogsite, affirmative action is ultimately not a good strategy (class-based, rather than ethinicity-based, affirmative action might be better in certain circumstances).

But let's remember that the "affirmative action bake sale" is as ideologically-skewed a model of how a.a. actually works as the "Bush is Hitler" comparison is a model of Bush. Both are about shaping the debate in reductive, moronic terms and making your opponents seem like idiots. (Like "the death tax" rather than "the estate tax," or "right to choice" rather than "right to abortion.")

The main purpose of political speech, it seems to me, is to persuade people to adopt your view of a given issue, or at least to move them in that direction. Yet increasingly, political speech (in which category I'm including things like demonstrations) seems quite unfocused on this goal. Indeed, much of it is so obnoxious in tone that it is likely to drive the wavering into the arms of the other camp.

One legitimate objective of political speech, of course, is to firm up the base and to develop and test memes which can be used with a broader public. But a lot of the stuff being said doesn't seem to fit in this category, either. There's lots of speech going on which seems primarily intended to (a)make the speaker feel good about himself, (b)communicate to his desired in-group (social and/or professional) that he is on the right side, and (c)express his primal rage that someone dares disagree with him.

The conservative/libertarian tactics that you mention may have some possibility of changing minds, but not much.

Sophmores will be Sophmores.

Not much chance of these tactics changing minds, no. But exposing the hypocrisy of AA proponents is valuable in its own right, isn't it?

Not much chance of these tactics changing minds, no. But exposing the hypocrisy of AA proponents is valuable in its own right, isn't it?

Sure is, especially in light of their annoying habit of playing the racism card right off the bat (speaking of which, does that tactic ever change minds?).

But this is a legitimate tactic. The bake sales expose the ugly core of AA -- racism -- and probably are more convincing than people would admit, especially on a college campus. Students, by definition, have not been personally harmed by AA, since they made the cut. These sales help correct that by applying bias to them personally; as with other types of racism, it's much easier to ignore the negative effects (or pretend they don't exist) if you're not subject to them.

In fact, that's a great point -- if the bake sales 'won't convince anyone' and 'don't further the debate', then isn't the same true of the (very common) nearly identical sensitivity training exercise of playing at reverse racism? What's the objection here? Is it because it will invite charges of racism? Seems kind of silly to let the AA partisans control the debate with ugly slurs, especially since they're the ones that should be justifying the status quo.

Alvin,

For someone who complains about the misrepresentation of AA you seem intent on doing plenty of it yourself.

First off, it's not about 'a white kid from a private high school' vs. a 'minority kid from an inner city high school', it's about a white kid vs. (some) minority kid -- they don't care about your sob-story background when doling out the points, and they certainly don't report the proportion of inner-city public schoolers to US News. Actually, that's not right either -- asians and Jews get hit harder than whites.

And let's not pretend that there's 'hidden competence' or some alternative conception of 'capable' -- the schools have no problem applying the supposedly problematic SAT-and-GPA metrics to non-minority applicants, so at least one of these methods has got to be wrong. Given that black students at the AA-heavy elite institutions tend to drop out in far higher proportion than the whites, I think we can infer which one it is!

Really, I'm shocked that you're trying to argue that a program whose whole point is to boost members of certain preferred minorities doesn't try to do exactly that; the doublethink at work here is very disturbing.

Mr. L: You'll notice that I wrote above that AA is misguided precisely because it's based on racial thinking. Your point isn't terribly interesting.

You're also wrong about how admissions committees work. Students are "scored" based on various categories: GPA, SATs, extracurriculars, community service. My example of rich-white-kid versus poor-black-kid was *not* an example of how admissions committees think, but of the thinking behind affirmative action policies in general. Admissions committees don't run fantasy-football-style "heats" in which individual students are pitted against one another. As I wrote above, most admissions decisions come down to arbitrary decisions about fairly equally capable students. If these decisions weren't arbitrary, a Harvard-admitted kid would also get admitted to nearly every other university -- and that's rarely the case.

I'm not talking about "alternative" ideas of capability. I'm talking about how we interpret a GPA or SAT score. In an ideal world, schools would recognize that SAT scores are entirely correlated to income. Nor am I defending affirmative action. Instead, my point was that protests like these bakesales are simple-minded and about misrepresenting the debate.

The main point of protest, as others have mentioned is to inform and persuade. There is nothing wrong with noisy, or aggresive demonstrations if the situation merits it, say in a confrontation with nazis. But an infomation picket should emphasize the persuasive.Humor is good too. One has to judge the situation and act accordingly.