If you haven't watched Katie Phang's television show on MSNBC, I highly recommend it. She is an extremely intelligent attorney and does a great job of getting to the heart of issues. Her guest was Dr. Wayne A I Frederick who is the president of Howard University and professor of surgery and he is absolutely brilliant. After a couple of students of color at Harvard University were asked what they thought that the ruling meant for marginalized communities and the country, she asks him about the impact of the recent bigoted Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.
https://youtu.be/cn6Hz5nUCYo
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Katie Phang: Dr. Frederick, hi. It's an honor to have you on the show. I straight out of the gate want to get your initial reaction to the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling.
Dr. Frederick: Yeah. Very disappointing. I think it's going to devastate the opportunities for minority populations and more importantly it's going to hurt the pipeline for well underrepresented fields such as medicine, law, dentistry, especially in medicine and dentistry, we've got a crisis. In 1978 we had more black men in medical school in 1978 than we did in 2015. So, we really have a crisis on our hands and I think this is going to further that crisis.
Katie Phang: HBCUs may be anticipating an increase in applicants, Dr. But they also remain chronically underfunded as educational institutions. Did Howard University already prepare for the possibility of this outcome?
Dr. Frederick: You know it's interesting because over the past few years, we've been making plans to expand our presence in the Health Sciences field. We only take 126 medical students every year, but this year we take 130. But we received over 8,500 applications. So, we have the desire to try to double our medical school, but the resources that are needed are on the order of about $7.5 Billion endowment to do that. Our current endowment for the entire university, not just for the medical school, is less than, just under $1Billion. That compares to at Harvard at over $52 Billion I believe. And when you look from a pipeline point of view, we send more African Americans to medical school than anyone else. And we also send more African Americans from our undergrad programs to STEM PDs. We send more in the past two decades than Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Yale, but the combined endowment at those schools is $160 Billion. So getting more applications is not necessarily gonna be desirable if we don't have the funding to take most of those.
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Katie Phang: And let's take a look, Dr. Frederick, at states, for example, like California. It's one of about nine states where affirmative action is banned. Back in 1998, California voted to ban affirmative action. When that happened, diversity plummeted. The associate vice chair of DEI at UCLA said that it's taken 25 years of experimentation through race neutral policies to make up that deficiency in numbers. So, as a university president, how are colleges and universities going to rework their admissions policies to be in compliance with this ruling, but still be able to achieve the kind of diverse campus communities we need?
Dr. Frederick: It's actually going to be very difficult. Because of you cannot use race , to have a student use an essay to explain as Justice Roberts pointed out in his opinion, explain how racism hindered them, I actually think that, in and of itself, is discriminatory because you are asking those students to defend the existence of racism that they have experienced when they should be talking about the excellence that they have achieved and the aspirations that they have in coming to college. So, you're actually putting an undue burden on those students. I think it's going to be very difficult and I think every time that we come up with a methodology to do it, it will be challenged with a lawsuit and I think that's unfortunate.
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Katie Phang: That's going to mean years of litigation, expenses that are unnecessary for universities and colleges that could be used for other things in the budget. Kind of staying on this point, Dr. Frederick, do you think universities are actually maybe abandon standardized testing scores which are also historically overvalued, but not actually accounting for the underserved (nature) of minorities' communities and maybe these universities and colleges are going to focus more on personal essays which you speak of, which are going to be time consuming and maybe wasting very valuable real estate in these essays in which students are explaining things that they really shouldn't have to explain in terms of the background.
Dr. Frederick : I think that's one area that we're going to have a challenge in and the other area I think is state institutions. State institutions that are chronically underfunded. So major flagship state universities that are chronically underfunded and it will take an out of state students to bring it more revenue because those students are charged more etcetera. They tend to use zip code as a surrogate for wealth and to try to attract and to increase the number of students that they are taking in, by taking into account zip codes and that can happen which would further marginalize students from underserved minority populations if you start using things like zip code. And I think all those surrogates, people will use school districts, zip codes, and all of those are going to eventually impact what we see in terms of the population to further, I think, marginalize the number of underrepresented minorities and those classes. And the other issue that is going to happen is once you have that happening in the undergrad level you will worsen what is already a crisis at the professional level and I think that's going to be an issue and on the issue of the essay. And in terms of resources you have to remember that first time college students do not have the same resources, they do not have the same types of counselors, the same types of mentors in their homes, they don't have parents who have attended college, and, therefore, their ability to write that essay is already compromised and is not a true reflection of their intelligence, and that can be further compromised with them, as you just pointed out, having to put real estate into defending their race and ethnicity
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