We were among those who supported Gov. Jeb Bush's One Florida initiative from the start, because we saw it as a reasonable effort to preserve diversity in our universities while avoiding divisive fights over traditional affirmative action programs. So far, the results have been about what the experience of other states led us to expect. After an early drop in minority undergraduate admissions at Florida's most selective state universities, the percentages generally are back near pre-One Florida levels. The results have not been as positive in the state's top graduate and professional programs, where minority enrollment is a more difficult, long-term problem.
All in all, One Florida is off to an encouraging start. However, the governor's defensive, deceptive and divisive rhetoric in defense of One Florida seems intended to create the very sort of conflict the program, as its politically inspired name implies, was supposed to avoid.
The defensiveness is odd, because One Florida has enjoyed surprisingly broad support. A couple of legislators protested in the governor's office, and some concerned parents gathered in Tallahassee. Overall, though, One Florida was widely accepted as a reasonable effort to pre-empt Californian Ward Connerly's threat to place a far more inflammatory antiaffirmative action referendum on the Florida ballot in 2000.
That's apparently not how Bush remembers it, however. He said Tuesday that opponents of One Florida had claimed "the world was near the end, Armageddon was about to occur." The governor who warned that last fall's class size amendment would "block out the sun" is in no position to criticize other people's apocalyptic language regarding education initiatives. In any case, we can find no evidence that anyone ever predicted One Florida would lead to Armageddon.
The governor's deceptiveness about One Florida also is unnecessary. The program can stand on its own merits, but Bush can't resist embellishing the record. Tuesday, he put the best spin on undergraduate minority enrollment percentages and ignored the continuing problems of minority enrollment in our graduate and professional schools. He also persisted in claiming that One Florida has achieved its results without using race as a factor in admissions.
To its credit, One Florida does indeed consider race as one of many factors in the university admissions process. One Florida's outreach programs, which identify and prepare promising minority students in our public schools, have been successful and deserve to be expanded. The Talented Twenty program, which guarantees admission to the university system to all state public school students who finish in the top 20 percent of their graduating class, amounts to a too-clever way of rewarding students in predominantly black schools without explicitly factoring race. In any case, these and other elements of One Florida obviously take race into account, and the governor and state education officials might as well be honest about it.
Finally, the governor's divisive tone in defending One Florida threatens to undercut his own stated goals for the program. Maintaining racial diversity in our most competitive universities is a daunting task, one the governor deserves credit for tackling. But getting there will require the full participation of parents, students, the education community and every demographic component of this diverse state. The governor can't possibly achieve the goals of One Florida if he keeps using political rhetoric that divides the state into Us and Them.
