After a fair amount of consideration, I’m weighing in with Tyler on this one. Here are my reasons:
AA continues to be mostly, on CC anyway, a lightning rod issue – with way less light than heat, on the board as a whole. The phrase excites & ignites, with more emotion in the argument, less reason, less actual helpful research, & often with very little understanding of history – including the reasons for AA’s beginnings (whatever one thinks of those reasons), the actual policies & practices of colleges which employ it, & why they do so (again, irrespective of agreement with that), & definitely with very little contextual understanding of the reach of the U.S. constitution & the scope/limits/definition of civil rights.
This is to contrast the topic with other forums & subforums, such as LD, such as college majors, etc. The latter do exist mainly to share information & offer advice, rather than to argue & condemn. AA threads often start (or begin as detour posts in the middle of other threads) with misinformation at the starting gate. Then we have student upon student debating whether an inaccurately stated policy (!) is good or bad, followed by page after page of name-calling & character assassination of either a contrary opinion OR a poster who dares to correct misinformation. It seems to me this is contrary to the purpose of a true discussion board such as CC, which attempts to be a constructive communication site.
In addition, AA is an admissions topic, and thus i.m.o. belongs primarily in the Admissions forum (as opposed to where we’re talking about it now). People can argue about just how important factor it supposedly is in admissions, and just how much supposedly any single candidate is affected by it – more than by other factors of diversity, more than the quality of an application, more than an academic & e.c. record – but, whether big or small, it’s a potential admissions question.
Even though I’ve stated recently a weariness to discuss it further, I understand that some will want to, and that doesn’t bother me. I don’t see a need either to restrict its location or to highlight it. I like that other posters engage in a kind of regulation of the volume by referring newer posters to the search feature. That’s another reason why I would not like it redirected to a special forum or subforum. I think new posters tend to go to Admissions first. (Even as a parent, I think I did.) Thus they would tend to search in Admissions first for AA discussions, if they wanted that topic.
I don’t know about FAQ’s or about merging the ‘race uknown’ thread. The one thing I’ll say that I did like about an AA discussion a couple of years ago is that some of those threads (may have been also in Ivy League, because some flowed out of Princeton debates, etc.) contained some hard information from a Source (AdOfficer). She/he stated some reasons, stated some history, explained how the process worked, had some facts & figures which did bring light into the discussion. I’d like for others to be able to find such actual information in the future, as opposed to wild speculation feeding the debate.
And no, I would not prefer a decision which places burdens on volunteer moderators, whatever the ultimate decision is.