October 24, 1996
Campus Climate Working Group (CCWG) lecture on Affirmative Action
The Campus Climate Working Group (CCWG) focused its third lecture of the semester on the issue of Affirmative Action. Dennis Hayashi, director of the U.S. Department of Human Resources’ office for civil rights, and Randall Kennedy, professor of law at Harvard University, debated over the definition of Affirmative Action and the direction it should take. Hayashi argued that rather than focus on specific quotas for women and people of color, the policies should exist to help anyone who faced an unfair disadvantage, including people from those groups. Kennedy was more emphatic about the need to temporarily take factors such as race and gender into account to “get past the burdens of the past.” Both men agreed that a color-blind approach to race relations would not work.
The full Sophian article on the lecture can be found here (1, 4).
[Last updated on October 16, 2018]