Wesleyan University’s affirmative action bake sale, staged by two students on October 26th, has generated more sputtering controversy than most, largely because one professor, Claire Potter, intemperately called the event racist. Late yesterday, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, published a remarkable discussion of the controversy and the uses of the word “racist,” a term that unfailingly emerges whenever a student bake sale, with different cookie prices for different racial groups, defies campus orthodoxy by satirizing college admissions based on race. This afternoon, Ward Connerly, the nation’s principal activist fighting race and gender preferences, will speak on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown, Connecticut.
