A diverse group of two dozen academic, legal, and political experts will gather at Brown University for a two-day conference on the past, present and future of affirmative action in America. The event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the New England Desegregation Assistance Center for Equity in Education, and the Rhode Island Coalition for Affirmative Action.
All sessions are free and open to the public.
When we talk about affirmative action, we ostensibly are talking about race, and to some extent gender. The University of California's Board of Regents narrowly passed a ban on race and sex preferences in student admissions and employee hiring to be implemented in 1998. The panelists will include Dennis Hayashi, President Clinton's appointee as director of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The conference broadens the issue of affirmative action beyond employment and higher education admission to include a panel that will address the issue from an elementary and secondary school level. Affirmative action is clearly one of the major political issues this year - what's decided politically about affirmative action is going to have repercussions for many generations, not just the current generation.