THE WAR ON DRUGS HITS WU

The Bush administration's recent decision to enforce the provision of the
1965 Higher Education Act that denies financial aid to students convicted
of drug offenses ushers in a self-defeating new chapter in the classist and
racist Reaganite war on drugs in America. The consequences of this recent
move for elite universities, including WU, will prove to be equally
counterproductive, by helping to stifle the laudable strides made in the
last 20 years to diversify college campuses once populated almost
exclusively by the rich. Whether one looks within or without the
university, the consequences of enforcing this law demand that it be
repealed. There is no fun in bemoaning the logistical absurdity of the law
evident in the fact that as it stands, lying on one's financial aid
application can be done with almost perfect confidence that the application
will not be audited.

It is more interesting to explore the statute's ideological origin. There
is no apparent logical connection between drug use and standards for
financial aid (one has a legal, the other a financial nature) unless one
looks to the logic that plagues the American criminal justice system.

The law simply follows a nationwide concentration of police vigilance on
minority and impoverished populations. This in itself is unjust, but the
injustice is compounded by other manifestations of the same ideology. The
law simply cannot be executed justly in a country that is still plagued by
racial profiling, and its consequent arbitrary inflation of minority drug
convictions.

But we need not follow left-leaning rhetoric to be struck by the absurdity
of the law. Politicians of all ideological stripes cite education as a key
problem in economically depressed areas of the country. And recent studies
have shown that many college graduates from such communities are returning
to them after graduation.

In this scenario, any law that limits access to education emerges as
counterproductive to community development. Ironically, by limiting the
improvement of communities through education, the law does nothing positive
to confront the supposed connection between drug use and poverty of which
so many supporters of the law complain. Even if this is indeed the
problematic connection at hand, this law aims at the wrong end of the
connection. Increased access to education will simply reap more benefits in
poor communities than an absurd law falsely positioned as an incentive for
students not to use drugs.

Proponents of the law will counter this point with the fact that many
students will be able to obtain financial aid after a term of probabation
or after undergoing a rehabilitation program, and will cite the latter as a
source of community development. Poor students, however, cannot afford to
have their education derailed for a month, let alone a year, and the
opportunity cost of their time in rehab would be similarly disastrous.

One of the biggest strides that elite universities have attempted to make
in the last 20 years is to attract students of greater economic and racial
diversity. If it is at all enforced, this law arbitrarily limits the WU
applicant pool in one of the most destructive ways possible, by serving as
a roadblock to the diversification of this campus.