Under attack in government and private institutions nationwide, affirmative action was the subject of a vigorous discussion sponsored by the Black Students Association last night.

According to BSA Vice President Luanda M. Williams '99, students packed the Kennedy School's ARCO Forum to hear four panelists discuss the question: "Affirmative Action: Equal Opportunity or Reverse Discrimination?"

Bob Zelnick, an ABC News correspondent and author of Backfire: a Reporter Looks at Affirmative Action, attacked racial-preference programs, asserting that they amount to discrimination against non-blacks.

Zelnick said that affirmative action perverts the intent of lawmakers in the 1960s who enacted federal legislation designed to eliminate all forms of racial inequality. By equating race with a form of merit, Zelnick added, racial-preference programs have sown the seeds of civil disharmony and racial strife in American society.

Further, affirmative action provides minorities with an "excuse for failure" by placing racial preferences over legitimate criteria, like merit, in admissions and hiring, Zelnick said.

Theodore M. Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, sharply disagreed.

Shaw said affirmative action programs can be both positive and negative, and that the difference lies in their implementation. He described society as a "zero-sum game" and asserted that there is a large degree of competition between blacks and poor whites for jobs in a troubled economy.

Shaw pointed to continuing discrimination on the basis of race, both in the market and in electoral voting, especially in the South. Shaw recalled a conversation he had with conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, in which, he said, Buchanan admitted that regardless of class, being white in American society is an inherent advantage and being black is a liability.

Errol Smith, chief executive officer of Smith Friday Enterprises and vice chair of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), the California state referendum that repealed affirmative action programs in state hiring and university admissions, shared some of Zelnick's criticisms.

Smith, who is African American, said he opposed racial preferences, in large part because they create feelings of inferiority among minorities and the "lingering presumption" that they are less competent than whites.

Racial-preference programs, Smith asserted, not only make blacks and other minorities defensive in justifying their successes, but also contribute to the "Balkanization" and fragmentation of American society along racial lines. He lamented what he described as the loss of a coherent, unified sense of what it means to be American.

Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, who teaches the popular Core Curriculum course "Justice," defended the justice of affirmative action programs.

Sandel, a liberal political theorist, conceded that affirmative action is a form of discrimination--but a form with the right purpose.

Discrimination occurs everywhere, he asserted, pointing to preferences for people from rural states, for musicians and for athletes in university admissions.

The importance of racial diversity to universities is a legitimate basis for preference programs, the professor said.

Planning for the panel discussion, which was part of the BSA's celebration of Black History Month, began in the summer, according to Williams.

The discussion was organized by BSA Lecture Series Chair Dionne A. Fraser '99 and was moderated by Dr. S. Allen Counter, associate professor of neurology and neurophysiology and director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations