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Over the past decade, conservative groups have sold baked goods on college campuses as a symbolic strategy for opposing affirmative action. The goods sold at these bake sales have different price tags depending on the race of the buyer. These bake sales were aimed at highlighting a perceived injustice in affirmative action admissions policies. Now, the affirmative action bake sale has become a hotly contested free speech issue at Bucknell University.
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency and the Democrats' firm control of Congress appear to have triggered a renewal of conservative political activism on many American college campuses. At Bucknell University in rural and predominantly white Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, the Conservative Club at the university has brought back a tried and true method for creating controversy over the use of racial preferences in college admissions.
The club has held an affirmative action "bake sale" on the Bucknell campus.
Earlier in the decade, this tactic was widely used on college campuses throughout the nation as an expression of opposition to affirmative action. Typically the student group sets up a table in a public place and offers cookies and brownies for sale to passersby. Mischievously, the students set different price lists depending on the race of the buyer. At one event, cookies were $1 for white students, 95 cents for Asian students, 50 cents for Hispanics, and 35 cents for African Americans. Through this demonstration, conservative students have established an effective real-life analogy that expresses their views of the unfairness of racial preferences in college admission practices.
When the Conservative Club at Bucknell held its bake sale this spring, the university administration quickly shut it...