Flyers Prompt Free-Speech Furor at UCSD

There’s a continuing dispute over free speech at UC San Diego as a result of some students ripping down flyers posted by the campus chapter of the ultra-conservative Young Americans for Freedom that attack affirmative action admissions policies and racial quotas.

The YAF chapter is angry, charging that certain student groups are attempting to censor points of view contrary to their own. Gary Geiler, a UCSD sophomore who chairs the campus chapter, said Wednesday that “perhaps all but 10” of the more than 1,000 flyers posted during the past two weeks have been torn down.

UCSD administrators also have taken exception to the flyers, calling them factually wrong. They have expressed only tepid support for YAF’s right under UC systemwide policies to post “opinion literature” without interference, and have offered no condemnation of students who took the flyers down.

The YAF flyers have brought front-and-center to UCSD the national debate over admissions policies designed to bring more Latino and African-American students to college campuses.

UC admissions officials say that all students admitted to UC campuses, no matter their ethnicities, are qualified academically.

Under UC criteria, 60% of all students are admitted based on academic criteria alone. The other 40% are admitted both on academic marks and on supplemental criteria, including sports, extracurricular participation and ethnicity.

Some have charged that the supplemental criteria allow UC to refuse admission to students with high qualifications, many of them Asian, so that Latino and black students with lower marks can be admitted. U.S. Department of Education investigations are being conducted at UCLA and UC Berkeley regarding alleged bias in admissions criteria.

The YAF flyers ask such questions as: “Were You Accepted to UCSD in order to fulfill its quotas/goals? The Question is: Are Quotas Right or Wrong?” and proclaim that “Quotas Are Institutionalized Racism.”

Another flyer highlights the case of a National City high school senior, a Filipino-American woman, who held a press conference last month to complain that she was rejected for admission to a prestigious UC Berkeley bioengineering major despite high grades, and to allege that less qualified students were accepted. She has been accepted instead at UCSD.

Geiler accuses specific students from the African-American Student Union and Women’s Resource Center organizations and from the advisory Student Affirmative Action Committee of violating free speech by removing the YAF flyers.

Individual student members of the accused student organizations admit tearing down the flyers.

They say that they personally see no freedom of speech right to post flyers that contain inaccurate information and which they believe target African-American and Latino students at UCSD as “not qualified” to be at the school.

“Yes, I have pulled them down,” said freshman Brian Slack, a member both of the African-American Student Union and the Student Affirmative Action Committee.

“They are inaccurate, unfactual and offensive to me and others on this campus . . . and no, I am not in any way curbing their right to free speech.

Slack said, “They put these flyers up, and students look at them, and then turn to students of color and say to them, ‘How did you get here?’ There are students on this campus who think just because you are a student of color, you are inferior, that you didn’t get here on your academic merit.

“Taking the flyers down was just an act of justice for all students.”

Student Consuelo Scott said she pulled down several flyers on the way to class because they are “based on myth and fiction” and that any postings “should be factual and accurate.” Scott is a member of the Women’s Resource Center and co-chair of SAAC. But she said her action had no official tie to the organizations.

Scott said, however, that she now understands her action “was an error of judgment . . . an infringement of the First Amendment freedom of expression under which” YAF has the right to express its views.

The director of UCSD’s affirmative action programs said Wednesday he personally does not believe that organizations such as YAF have the right to put up information that he knows “is not factual.”

But the director, Anthony Jemison, conceded that his personal view is superseded by “university regulations.”

Joseph Watson, vice chancellor for undergraduate affairs, said the YAF has a right “to have posters and the right to address any issue even if other people do not like it and, as an institution, we will protect their rights.”

But Watson lashed out at YAF for “speaking in innuendo and using theatrics” and criticized the press for giving the group publicity.