Panel on affirmative action in Omaha

Affirmative action returned to the forefront of campus discussions again Wednesday evening.About 30 people, the majority being students, gathered to hear a group panel in the Boostrapper Hall of the William H. and Dorothy Thompson Alumni Center.

The event featured former Omaha Police Chief Thomas H. Warren, now senior president and CEO of The Urban League of Nebraska.

Other panelists were UNL political science Professor Byron D'andra Orey, Ramon Sanchez and Chalie Livingston. UNO sociology Professor Thomas Sanchez moderated the event.

"The point here is that affirmative action allows individuals who are otherwise qualified to be given opportunity that certain segments of our population have been denied due to discrimination," Warren said. "When you have entities or agencies that may have had a history of discriminatory hiring practices, then they had to implement strategies to address those inadequacies."

Among other things, Warren discussed working with Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey to diversify the Omaha Police Department.

"The city of Omaha had an opportunity, in some respects forced upon them, to address this under-utilization," Warren said. "As an executive, I can tell you that Omaha Police Department is one [of] the more diverse metropolitan police departments in the United States of America: 10 to 12 percent African American, 67 percent Latino, 22 percent female."

After each of the panelists made presentations, questions were taken from the audience.

One attendee asked Sanchez why minority women were counted twice for affirmative action - once for their race and once for their gender.

"Irrespective of that opportunity or that gap in the definitions, minorities and women are consistently underrepresented in comparison to the rates that they comprise in the qualified labor pool," Sanchez said. "When you're talking about recruiting women, we're concerned with [what] the availability of women is in a particular occupation group."

The panel raised issues surrounding affirmative action nearly two months after affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly spoke on UNO's campus, which saw protestors swarm for an opportunity to challenge Connerly.

Connerly is the main advocate of a petition effort that calls on Nebraska to not "discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operations of public education, public employment, or public contracting."

The panel discussion was sponsored by student government's Women's Resource Center, the Latino Political Action and Awareness Committee, Inter-Tribal Student Council and the UNO African American Organization.

LPAAC is a new student organization created in January 2008 to promote awareness and action in Latino and non-Latino issues in the local community as well as the state and pan-America communities, according to the group's Facebook.com profile.



Sports Editor Jason Sibson contributed to this report.