REFLECTIONS ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION:

ITS ORIGINS, VIRTUES, ENEMIES, CHAMPIONS, AND PROSPECTS

Thirty years ago — it was the spring of 1969 — University of Virginia students brought to a climax a new movement of positive action to acknowledge and confront the scourge of racism that tainted their university and denied justice and decent respect to their fellow citizens. Memories of that season of marches, midnight meetings, speeches, demands and counter demands, victories and compromises, came flooding in on me as I sat in a jammed-to-the edges auditorium in the spring of 1999. The out-of-town speaker condemned the University for what she called its practice of racial discrimination. "I don’t think you end discrimination by discriminating against new groups of people," Linda Chavez said. Our admissions policy, she claimed, "smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation." Then she told us that we must not "continue to judge people based on the color of their skin." Like other speakers across the nation at her end of the political spectrum, she told us that the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., was on her side, not ours.

I sank despondently in my seat, wondering how it was that this Orwellian Newspeak had spread virus-like through our culture. Looking about the room I wondered how many here had been infected by it, how many battles would have to be fought all over again. I wished for a time machine that would bring to the stage the young heroes of 1969. Their courage, clarity of moral purpose, and honest engagement with their past had broken the log jam of our common history. I don’t think the visiting speaker would have been a match for them.

I

The movement of ’69 was more than a decade in the making. When I joined the faculty in 1957 the burden of the University’s history weighed heavily, everywhere in plain sight for any who wished to look. Three years earlier the United States Supreme Court had unanimously and eloquently condemned the Virginia law requiring that blacks and whites attend separate (and everywhere unequal) public schools. The state’s leaders responded with defiance, vowing to shut down schools before they would let black and white children enter them together. In the fall of 1958 they made good on their word, padlocking school doors in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County. The University’s president, Colgate Darden, a decent and humane man, knew the folly and understood the mean-spiritedness of this "massive resistance" program, but he could not bring himself to mobilize opposition to it. Partly this was because he believed, as he wrote privately in 1953, that "it would be a mistake for us to recede from segregation in the public schools." Such a step, he claimed, "would impede rather than improve public education in the Southern states."

The President and the Board of Visitors also opposed the racial integration of the University. They accepted the inevitability of it reluctantly, forcing blacks seeking admission to sue or threaten to sue and take advantage of previous court orders. It was not until 1961 that the first African American entered the College, the last bastion in the University of "separate but equal" segregation. Edgar Shannon, who succeeded Mr. Darden in 1959, apparently persuaded the Board of Visitors to allow an Engineering student to transfer–in the middle of the academic year–thus heading off an inevitable defeat in the courts. All through the late ’fifties and well into the ’sixties the Administration’s cautious resistance was unchallenged by influential student opinion. Undergraduates in particular opposed and often venomously condemned each new crack in their culture of segregation. The Cavalier Daily denounced a student-faculty boycott of the nearby movie theater which admitted whites only as an affront to the University’s tradition of honor. The Student Council refused to allow a newly-formed interracial group to exist on Grounds until it promised it would never foster "demonstrations." Only then would the Council, in its own words, deem the group "worthy of the University and of Student Council approval."

By 1963, civil rights groups and discussions were a small but conspicuous part of the UVA scene. Dr. King came to speak in March of that year. The first sit-in took place at a nearby restaurant two months later. The first honor committee trial over a civil rights issue led to the dismissal of a student who slashed the automobile tires of one of the sit-in participants–and then lied about it. Student opposition to the segregation spirit of the past showed itself more forcibly with each new academic season. The Administration, however, remained cautious and aloof. Admissions Dean Marvin Perry was the only official who came to hear King speak. Dean Perry later quietly provided a student interracial group with helpful information on admissions procedures. Thus armed, students became unofficial recruiters of black applicants, traveling to a few black high schools with application forms and a message of welcome. These students were the first "affirmative action" agents at their University.

By 1965, the balance of opinion among student leaders and opinion makers, as well as in the student body generally, was moving away from the die-hard segregationists. Determined blacks were now making their way into the student body; the national mood was shifting dramatically; far-reaching civil rights laws were passed; the national civil rights movement seemed to have washed away myths that had undergirded segregation; and the cadre of progressive students and faculty grew to the point where a movement for change could be sustained. By 1967 and 1968 Cavalier Daily editors blasted the University for its "tolerance of prejudice" and the "furtherance of a sick heritage," opinions that turned on their heads the editorial pronouncements of only a few years earlier. And the Student Council, instead of harassing and harnessing interracial and progressive groups now launched investigations of racial discrimination within the University and churned out resolutions demanding positive action on many fronts.

During the 1968-69 academic year the student movement reached the peak of its moral and political persuasiveness. Fifty-two full-time black students were now in residence. A student coalition comprising the newly-formed Black Student Union; radical groups like the Southern Student Organizing Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society; and the larger "moderate" group of more traditional leaders set the agenda for University change and charted the course to the future. After one all-night meeting, the Coalition issued a bold call for action:

The Governor–a massive resistance leader named Mills Godwin–dismissed the students rudely when they called on him, making it clear that the culture of segregation would not be dismantled by the state’s elected leaders. On the University Grounds, however, the Coalition shaped Student Council action, set the tone for editorial writing and news reporting, and won critical support from the Inter Fraternity Council. Drawn into this heady ferment, President Shannon became a partner in the movement for change. Before the year was out, he accepted most of the Coalition’s demands. The Governor and the Legislature were bypassed and the Board of Visitors did not rein in the President. The University would never be the same again.

The President made commitments that year to begin to recruit black undergraduates. As a modest move in that direction he gave a young black graduate student the job of traveling about the state to encourage African Americans to apply for admission. The days when blacks could be recruited only unofficially and secretly were over. The President and the Faculty also promised to seek black faculty members, to teach a course in black studies, and to inaugurate an interdisciplinary Afro-American Studies program. It was a small beginning, but it was a beginning. The students of ’69 had started us on our way to lifting the burden of our history and realizing the promise of our future. They and their predecessors who paved the way for them are authentic heroes in the University’s history.

II

A generation has come and gone since then. A lot of history has been built on the achievements of the students of the ’sixties. The College was made fully open to women in 1970 (over opposition that was shrill but shallow), a progressive move that helped to lift another of our historic burdens and guided the University toward greater moral and intellectual clarity. Building on these accomplishments, the University began to attract the kind of talented and worthy student body that any self-respecting university should admire. Now, as you walk into any classroom or about the Grounds, you will see students from every state in the Union and 108 foreign countries along with a few (too few) Native Americans and hyphenated-Americans of both ancient and recent origin. In addition to African-Americans you will see Mexican- Chinese- Japanese- Korean- and Vietnamese-Americans, all virtually absent from the landscape thirty years ago. The revolutionized configuration of the student body has brought with it an inescapable demonstration of the old aphorism that student learning is not limited to the classroom and the library. We understand better than before the importance of what students learn from each other. The broadening of the student body has created a wider range of learning opportunities, quickened and sharpened intellectual discourse, reduced parochialism, and encouraged students to question assumptions and better understand their own inherited values and beliefs.

The presence of black students–they constitute about ten percent of the student body–works in both obvious and subtle ways to improve the quality and validate the mission of the University. For one thing, it acts as a potent check on previously unchallenged expressions of bigotry and mean-spiritedness. Racial slights and slurs persist but the presence of real people in place of the demeaning stereotypes born of innocence and ignorance is a powerful educative force for white students and faculty alike; and, in ways hard to document, that presence helps to relieve them of the hubris Jefferson long ago identified as one of the unspoken penalties of white power and privilege. For their part, black students in large numbers have become loyal alums, the number of them making financial contributions to the University slightly exceeding the alumni average. This is but one of many validations of the courage, sacrifice, and wisdom of their predecessors who made their admission possible. Their predecessors knew, and they now find, that opportunities once denied are there to be seized. Their lives are better materially, intellectually, and spiritually because they have been here. Finally, the mission of the University to serve the Commonwealth and the nation is forwarded by their presence and perseverance. It is hard to think of a greater asset for social stability and wise public policy than a racially integrated citizenry, loyal to the nation and state but vigilantly watchful and constructively critical of its actions.

The university is a better place because of both diversity and affirmative action, but they are not the same thing. They are entwined in a symbiotic relationship, but positive actions to recruit and enroll black students, although they result in a racially diverse student body, stem from unique origins and their continuation is justified because of ongoing special circumstances. The origins lie in the three-hundred years of exclusion and exploitation prescribed by the white supremacy culture. In this sense affirmative action is rooted in America’s deepest moral dilemma and goes to the heart of who we are as a people. Justification of its continuation–and, indeed, expansion and improvement–lies in the many structural and personal barriers that have yet to be removed as well as new ones society condones.

As it has become an integrated and more broadly diverse institution, UVA has simultaneously vaulted to the position of number one (some, especially Californians, would say number two) public university in the country. The commonly offered reasons for our excellence are our internationally acclaimed faculty and the rising competitiveness of the quest for admission. Faculty members decline offers from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and other famous centers of learning to come or stay here. The best students in the country often decline admission offers from once more-favored colleges and universities to enroll here. One could hardly have imagined this in 1969. Most of us who have been here for all these years, however, know that top faculty and bright students are not the whole story. The deeper explanation is that our excellence is organically related to the very opening up of the University that began with the student movements of the 1960s. Our excellence could not have been achieved by keeping our doors closed. It has been made possible by opening them. Continued excellence depends not only on keeping them open, but, in fact, on opening them wider. These are needs and ambitions no court should be allowed to repudiate.

Until very recently, the University community generally applauded its growing diversity, including especially the ten percent of the student body that is African American. Isolated complaints and challenges seemed quirky holdovers from the past. Now that has begun to change. Linda Chavez’s organization (strategically named The Center for Equal Opportunity) recently issued a well-publicized study charging that our university, along with others, practices a new form of racial discrimination in its admissions process. Blacks–as blacks–are favored over whites–as whites. Following immediately on the release of her study, the Center for Individual Rights named the University as a possible target of a lawsuit. In these new and unsettled conditions, a vigorous student debate over affirmative action emerged, revealing many more supporters than enemies. Critics, however, were more vocal than at any time in the recent past. Concern for the future caused the University Rector to appoint a three-person committee from the Board of Visitors to gather information to be ready for a lawsuit should one be entered.

III

The attack on affirmative action is national in scope. In fact, it has been building up almost from the time the civil rights movement reached its peak. Soon after the Virginia students accomplished their revolutionary changes at the close of the 1960s, a powerful reactionary movement began to take shape. We need to understand the history of that movement in order fully to understand the deeper implications and real objectives of the current anti-affirmative action assault.

It began to appear most clearly with Richard Nixon’s battle in the 1970s against school integration achieved through busing and then with the broad effort in the Reagan years to roll back the progressive racial legislation of the previous generation. Those years also saw the rise of an aggressive, confident conservative movement grappling for the moral high ground. Its crusade was funded and shaped by an ever-increasing number of well-financed and astutely run think-tanks, churning out a cascading flow of ideologically charged reports on the failures of the liberal past and the promise of the conservative future. With each new pronouncement serving as a catalyst for the next and with the cast of spokesmen broadening to include regulars on the television and talk-show circuits, the nation’s confidence in affirmative action as a means of countering the damage done by three centuries of race-based policies of negative action began to waver. Responding to the public mood, a new majority of conservative jurists began to reinterpret the Constitution, to find less and less justification for affirmative action generally. The University of Virginia is not alone as a likely victim of this judicial reaction against the 1960s freedom movement.

Radiating from the core of the assault on affirmative action in university admissions policies is a hauntingly 1984-like claim about the nature and legacy of the civil rights movement. Older writers who lived through the civil-rights era and younger ones who did not share a basic hostility to the movement’s aims and leaders and are alienated from all but a handful of black leaders today. Yet they claim that their hostility to affirmative action is rooted in their loyalty to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the authentic aims of the civil rights movement. The civil-rights "establishment," as they call it, earns only their scorn. It is, in their catechism, the great betrayer, not the champion, of African Americans and of the American Dream.

George Will, while he concedes the existence of continuing poverty and disadvantage, explains these scourges as the "terrible price" blacks have been made to pay "for the apostasy of today’s civil rights leaders from the original premise of the civil rights movement." That premise, he declares, was that "race must not be a source of advantage or disadvantage." Will’s less couth fellow journalist Rush Limbaugh wonders how "the vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had for a color-blind society has been perverted by modern liberalism." Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly, blasting "the failure of racial preferences," begin their broadside by recalling what they call King’s "heartfelt voice" envisioning a society in which people would be judged by "the content of their character rather than the color of their skin."

The "content of their character rather than the color of their skin" excerpt from King’s 1963 "I have a Dream" speech has become the incantation of choice for the foes of affirmative action. It provides moral cover by draping the King mantle over the most unlikely partisans of the civil rights movement and uses the most famous voice of that movement to condemn policies to which he and it gave birth. Ward Connerly, the Sacramento businessman and University of California regent, launched a personal crusade to win votes for the California anti affirmative action referendum on King’s birthday with the announcement that "Dr. King personifies the quest for a color-blind society." Understanding of the King legacy should help the nation "resume the journey" he started and stop the terrible "drift" from King’s ideal. That drift, as conservative Arch Puddington puts it, widened into a powerful rush "to the current environment of quotas, goals, timetables, race-norming, set-asides, diversity training, and the like." No champion of King pledging fealty to civil rights history could possibly support such things.

Except, of course, that the King that these people enlist in their cause is a figment of their imagination. The shrewd manipulation of the King myth by "color-blind conservatives" began almost as soon as he died, when his nonviolent philosophy was enlisted in the war against the Black Power movement and the outbreaks of urban violence. When the school busing controversy began in the early 1970s King’s words were misused to contain the spread of school integration. By the 1990s his words were routinely exploited as justification for rolling back integration in the colleges and universities achieved through affirmative action.

The "dream" speech is the primary text for "color-blind conservatives." King did say that his dream was deeply rooted in the American dream. But his nightmare, as he said repeatedly, was deeply rooted in the every day reality of American racism. The promise of the American dream was a promise only; it was, he said, a promissory note to black Americans that was returned by the bank of justice marked "insufficient funds." And to hope for a time when people would be judged "by the content of their character rather than the color the skin" was not to endorse "race-neutral" public policies. Before the dream of a "color-blind" society could ever become reality, America would have to give up on its color-conscious practice of racial discrimination. King saw few signs of that happening in the country responsible for his nightmares.

It is true that King’s comments on affirmative action, a policy not much out of its infancy when he was shot to death, generally included approval of a color-blind approach, but never for the same reasons championed by today’s reactionary opponents of affirmative action, a fact the Newspeakers work hard to disguise. For one thing, he knew that race-conscious policies in the 1960s would offend large segments of the white population. For another, the debate over how to counteract the damage done by racism was relatively new and many reasonable people believed that simply opening doors was the critical first step. Moreover, affirmative action in education was hardly on the agenda at all in those days when the first significant numbers of blacks were making their way into previously segregated colleges and universities. Most of the discussion centered on employment and economic inequality. Compensatory policies there were much on King’s mind. Testifying before the Kerner Commission, for example, he spoke approvingly of Prime Minister Nehru’s "preferential" policies for the Untouchables caste as India’s way of "atoning for the centuries of injustice." Instead of proposing a similar policy for America, however, he urged a sweeping new bill of rights for the disadvantaged. Slavery and segregation had impoverished many whites as well as blacks, he believed, and they should be included in any plan to bring economic justice to the country.

It was during these last three years of his life, after the passages of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that King advocated radical measures that were and are carefully ignored by "color-blind conservatives." In those years he said "We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power." Among other things, this would require facing the truth that "the dominant ideology" of America was not "freedom and equality," with racism &quo t;just an occasional departure from the norm." To the contrary, he believed that racism was woven into the fabric of the country, intimately linked to its economic system, social structure, and materialistic values. They were all "tied together," he wrote; racism was not an independent variable, standing there on its own. What was really needed was "a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society."

So much for Martin King as the moral partner of the "color-blind conservatives.

IV

It was against this background that Linda Chavez brought the anti affirmative action message to Charlottesville. She came as the guest of a new conservative student group called, without embarrassment or irony, the Jefferson Leadership Foundation. In the wake of Ms. Chavez’s UVA appearance, one Cavalier Daily columnist, a third-year College student, leapt to second her indictment of the University. He himself gained admission to the University under its only quota system–the state-mandated requirement that sixty-five percent of the first-year College seats be reserved for Virginia residents–but he saw no irony in castigating Admissions Dean Jack Blacburn, who had shared the platform with Chavez. The Dean’s policy, he said, made it easier for blacks, because they are black, than for whites, because they are white, to win admission to the University. "The admissions office should not admit minority students under a different standard than white students," the columnist wrote. He then added his coup de grace: "This is racial discrimination, plain and simple."

Of course it is not "racial discrimination," plain or simple. Newspeak again. One wants to believe that the author meant no offense, but it is hard not to find something grotesque in the claim of a moral equivalency between two diametrically opposed realities. It strains credulity to believe anyone can actually believe that affirmative action and white supremacy are occupants of a common bed of evil. The same is true for the use of such popular terms as "reverse discrimination," suggesting a turning of the tables by blacks on whites. Such assertions raise troubling questions about motives and values, not to say logic and knowledge of history. They need to be swept away before they are allowed to be used as justifications for the end of affirmative action. Gearing up for the struggles ahead of us, I sat down to see if I could fashion a metaphorical broom. This is what I came up with:

Racial discrimination, in its historic sense, meant that black people, not individually but as a race, could not

• attend schools attended by white people;
• attend schools equal to those of white people;
• drink from the same water fountains, relieve themselves in the same toilets, or wash their hands in the same basins used by white people;
• eat in the same restaurants as white people;
• sleep in the same motels and hotels as white people;
• swim in the same pools or from the same beaches as white people;
• sit next to white people in lecture halls, at concerts, or in other public auditoriums;
• sit next to white people on buses or streetcars or other means of public transportation;
• be born or seen by a doctor in the same hospitals or buried in the same graveyards as white people;
• vote or hold public office;
• expect to live in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, or attain the same standards of living as white people.

These are particular forms of historic racial discrimination. They are well known for their place in law and as the manifestations of white supremacy the civil rights movement sought to end. But we need also to recall the values and beliefs of the white supremacy culture that gave rise to and justified this racial discrimination, its ultimate reason for being. These included the belief that black people, not individually but as a race, were genetically inferior to white people and that this genetic deficiency was responsible for the fact that black people were

• less intelligent than white people;
• more prone to crime than white people;
• diseased;
• unclean;
• untruthful;
• unreliable;
• immoral;
• violent;
• sexually promiscuous;
• sexually threatening, through their men, to white women.

The list could go on. These beliefs, even internalized by some blacks, allowed too many white people to condone lynch mobs, poverty, malnutrition, and sickness; and invent means beyond counting of handing out insult and injury.

Affirmative action means none of these things. It bears no generic, historic, analogous, or constitutional relationship to racial discrimination and the white supremacy myths that created it. What affirmative action in education does mean is

• a broad effort to identify potential black applicants and to encourage them to apply for admission, often in the face of institutional and emotional barriers;
• judging each applicant holistically as an individual, not as a member of a race;
• offering admission to black students whose application materials are predictive of their success in the University;
• offering admission to some black students whose SAT scores and high school grades are lower than those of some white or Asian or Hispanic applicants who are not offered admission;
• a systematic program of encouraging successful black applicants to accept their offers of admission;
• an objective measure of the success of these actions in achieving their goals.

These are the particular forms of today’s affirmative action. They are the manifestations of a philosophy rooted in the American Dream. The values and beliefs that gave rise to and justify affirmative action, its ultimate reason for being, need to be recalled. These include the belief that

• black people, not individually but as a race, are not genetically inferior to white people;
• universities share a national obligation to acknowledge and use their resources to help overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination;
• Virginia’s obligation is peculiarly enhanced by its long history of slavery, segregation, and the denial of education to Afro-Virginians;
• the effects of historic racial discrimination are far from having been eliminated in social institutions and individual assumptions;
• abolition of affirmative action would be a major setback for the university’s effort to overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination;
• affirmative action neither excludes nor favors any individual solely on the basis of race;
• affirmative action is a positive, not a negative, action. It harmonizes with and is essential to the University’s overall mission to produce the best educated, most creative, responsible, and public-spirited citizenry possible.

Misconceptions about the admissions process often spring from an unexamined assumption that universities base their admission offers on estimates of the candidates’ academic promise. Such estimates, according to this assumption, can be based objectively on standardized tests and high school grades, with perhaps letters of recommendation thrown in. Such estimates of academic ability are obviously important. But their importance is blown completely out of proportion and their relevance skewed when critics claim discrimination because Applicant A was denied admission while Applicant B, with a lower SAT score, was not. In fact, this must be a normal part of the admissions process, essential to the university’s mission. No respectable university bases its offers of admission on estimates of academic ability alone. That would be to repudiate the fundamental goals and aspirations of higher education in America. Harvard, for example, could probably fill up its freshman class with high achievers from one or two states, most from similar upper- and upper-middle-class backgrounds–with the ironic result that they would stop going to Harvard because it did not have the cosmopolitan student body they wanted and expected.

As Dean Blackburn patiently explains, he and his associates try to take a holistic approach, judging each applicant as a whole person, taking into account, in addition to academic ability, the peculiar interests, needs, talents, skills, sex, race, nationality, and place of residence–all these and probably more. The result is that some students from every applying category are rejected: white, black, Hispanic, Asian–as well as male and female, brilliant and not brilliant, rich and poor, athlete and non-athlete, the musician and the tone deaf, leaders and followers, Virginians and non-Virginians. To say that one of these whose application for admission is not successful is a victim of "discrimination" is to empty the word totally of its derogatory meaning–making choices on the basis of class or race or category without regard for individual merit; to show prejudice–and return it to its literal meaning–to make clear distinctions; to make sensible decisions; to judge wisely; to show careful judgment. Understanding the word this way would be a good thing, but it is not likely that an opponent of affirmative action would agree, would concede that we have to make choices and that our discriminating judgment should be trusted. And yet that is precisely what a moral and fair university must do to meet its obligations to the citizenry, the national interest, and students. There is no magic formula, no fixed scale for assigning points for each human characteristic. There is discrimination, good faith, a sense of history, and the vision of a future made better by our colleges and universities.

V

So Ms. Chavez was wrong when she told her audience here that we are "discriminating against new groups of people." She was wrong when she said that our admissions policy "smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation." She was wrong when she charged that we "continue to judge people based on the color of their skin." And she was wrong when she told us that Dr. King’s legacy was on her side, not ours.

She was wrong, but she and her views continue to gain influence. A California referendum recently ended affirmative action in that state. A similar move was successful in Washington state. The University of Texas law school’s program was disallowed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Center for Individual Rights, which prosecuted the case in Texas, is currently carrying on a suit against the University of Michigan, with trial set for the autumn. And, after Chavez’s study, it has its eye on the University of Virginia. So far the United States Supreme Court has refused to render an opinion on the issue, letting battles be fought out in the various circuits. The outcome of a case argued in the District Court here and then in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond cannot reliably be predicted. A wise person, however, would approach such a challenge with a healthy mixture of apprehension and preparation.

The federal judiciary has become increasingly skeptical of any consideration of race in admissions. What is at question is the opinion written in the famous Bakke case twenty-one years ago. In that case, Justice Lewis Powell of Virginia tried to head off a categorical, mechanical formula that would prohibit race from ever being considered in admissions deliberations. Casting the deciding vote in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, he also laid out the principle that has not been repudiated by the high court. The principle is this: race may legitimately be considered where it is "simply one element–to be weighed fairly against other elements–in the selection process." J. Harvie Wilkinson, Powell’s one-time law clerk, later a UVA law professor, and now a member of the Fourth Circuit, praised the justice for insisting "that race, qua race," could be used by university admissions officers. The irony of a southern conservative saving affirmative action is easy to understand, Wilkinson writes, because Powell believed that law "had to serve the cause of social stability."

It is not only social stability that is at stake today, although that continues to be a major factor. Now, as it prepares for its defense against a possible lawsuit, one hopes that the University of Virginia will take a firm stand not just in defense, but in proud affirmation of what it has achieved in its quest to build a remarkable student body meeting the burden of history and serving the present and future needs of the Commonwealth and the nation.

Twice in its history Virginia has had to choose whether to be the south of the nation or the north of the South. Both times it chose the latter. In 1861 it overcame principled opposition from many of its citizens to secede from the Union. Its prestige emboldened the Confederacy; its manpower, leadership, and resources lengthened and made bloodier the fratricidal war; and its fight for the preservation of slavery became an indelible part of its legacy. Nearly a century later it once again overcame the principled opposition of fellow Virginians to lead the South in a crusade of "massive resistance" against the supreme law of the land which now called for an end to segregation in its public schools. That decision, like the first one a century earlier, emboldened fellow white Southerners and helped to plunge the South and the nation into a long nightmare of hatred and recrimination from which they have not yet recovered.

In this last year of the twentieth century the options before the state are not determined by region and the issues at stake may not appear to be as momentous as the crises of 1861 and 1954. They are, however, rooted in the same unresolved moral issue. This time, however, Virginia stands a good chance of being a national leader in the acknowledgment and resolving of that issue. Its president, John Casteen, was himself the Dean of Admissions in the 1980s. He was an affirmative action champion then. He stands solidly as one now. "Virginia's obligation is at base moral and to its people, especially young people," he says, "rather than simply and neatly legal." It may be required to be "neatly legal" when (or if) it is required to defend itself, but its "neatly legal" defense will be stronger when the argument is forcibly made that its "obligation is at base moral." That was the message of the class of ’69 as well. One hopes that its legacy will guide the University in the months ahead.