A bake sale on the University of California, Berkeley campus Tuesday afternoon stirred up national attention with its pricing.
Baked goods were sold to white males for $2, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1, black men for 75 cents and Native American men for 25 cents. Women could purchase baked goods for 25 cents off those prices.
The bake sale was an effort to protest legislation that would require admissions officials to take an applicant's race, gender and ethnicity into account when making admissions decisions.
The bill was passed by the California state legislature and must be either signed into law or vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown by Oct. 9.
Bake sales like these have been held on college campuses since the ‘90s. In some instances, like at Bucknell University, the College of William and Mary and the University of California, Irvine, university officials stepped in to stop the sales.
Clay Calvert, a UF professor of Law of Mass Communication, said this type of interference violates students' First Amendment rights to freedom of expression on college campuses.
"This is precisely the type of speech that the First Amendment was intended to protect," he said. "The reality is that such bake sales call attention to larger issues over which there is much disagreement in the United States today."
The UF College Republicans hosted a similar sale in February to protest affirmative action.
Eric Weber, executive director of the organization, said the bake sale was not meant to be racist but to draw attention to the argument that affirmative action systems should be based on socioeconomic status - the real culprit, he said - rather than race.
Under regulations made by the Florida Board of Governors, the body that regulates all Florida public universities, discrimination based on traits like race, sex or national origin is forbidden.
Programs to increase diversity, on the other hand, are not.
However, UF does not currently employ any type of affirmative action when making admissions decisions. Admissions officials take a holistic approach - looking at all factors of a candidate, including socioeconomic status, according to the admissions website.
"Florida is working in the right direction," Weber said.
"We were just trying to say that we disagree with the fundamental belief that affirmative action has to be based on race, when socioeconomic status seems to be the real issue."
