Affirmative Action: The Negative Side

Can you legislate equality? One major attempt to do so began with the equal-opportunity hiring practices that business and labor were required to observe by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Johnson Administration later extended these regulations to educational institutions. Since then, some 2,000 colleges and universities have been struggling both to come up with "affirmative action" employment programs* acceptable to Washington bureaucrats and to defend themselves against literally hundreds of discrimination suits, many of them brought by women's rights organizations. Along the way, the 20 leading campuses have temporarily lost more than $28 million in federal research funds--withheld as a penalty for failure to satisfy Government equal-employment watchdogs.

Has it all been worth the effort? In public, college administrators and faculty members ritually endorse affirmative action. But in private, they tell a different story. So says Richard A. Lester, a Princeton economist who visited 20 leading universities in preparing a study on the federal antibias program for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Lester's report, to be published this week by McGraw-Hill, concludes that the drive for equal opportunity in faculties has been a worthwhile effort in theory, and in practice a "painful experience" that has accomplished little for minority groups while doing violence to a long tradition of academic independence and excellence.

Lester, 66, a New Frontier liberal who was vice chairman of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, does not quarrel with the argument that minorities and (especially) women are vastly underrepresented in higher education. After all, women hold less than 38% of the instructorships and just 5% of the full professorships in U.S. universities. But he does insist that federal efforts to deal with the situation are clumsy and misguided.

"Good Faith." On philosophical grounds, Lester complains that the equal-opportunity program, which is policed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and several other agencies, represents a serious Government intrusion into the traditional freedom and independence of American campuses. Beyond that, he complains that Washington administrators are tinkering insensitively with the "highly individualistic and selective" process by which faculties award full professorships and the 30-to 35-year tenures that go with them. Universities that want to keep their federal funds are required to come up with "good faith" hiring targets; Columbia University's plan for the five years from 1972 to 1977, for example, called for the hiring of 81 to 101 women faculty members, of whom eleven to 14 would be given tenure. While this may make sense in the case of "typists, bricklayers or punch-press operators," Lester says, it is hardly appropriate when it comes to "choosing a medieval historian."

Lester points out that at the top universities only one in four associate professors may be offered tenure. By forcing considerations of sex and race into the selection process, he argues, the Government could conceivably reduce faculty quality. One effect of equal rights legislation: some women and minority instructors tend to fight back with complaints to federal agencies and discrimination suits even when they are passed over for tenure for such reasons as lack of drive or scholarship. In a number of fields, qualified scholars from minority groups are so scarce that the available talent shuttles from one faculty to another (usually with considerable pay increases at each move) in a kind of academic musical-chairs game.

Lester does not believe that "it is time to abandon affirmative action." He wants the emphasis changed. Instead of shoehorning more women and minorities into professorships, more should be lured into Ph.D. programs to begin with.

Lester would also establish arbitration boards composed of senior professors to settle complaints of high-level faculty discrimination rather than allow cases to drag through the bureaucracies and the courts.

Some federal officials agree that attempts to apply equal opportunity in the loftier reaches of academe have been somewhat ill considered. But Dr. Mary M. Lepper of HEW's Office for Civil Rights counters that too often "women and minorities are being hired and let go --it is a revolving door." She adds that Lester's complaints about ruptured faculty traditions and standards are "based in mythology." In fact, surveys have shown that from 1968 to 1972, the number of blacks on college faculties increased only from 2.2% to 2.9%, the number of women from 19.1% to 20%. The figures, which have not changed appreciably over the past two years, suggest that as yet neither side of the great faculty-hiring debate really has much to applaud--or deplore.

*Which require federal contractors holding contracts of $50,000 or more and employing at least 50 employees to submit "affirmative action plans" describing how they will increase the hiring of women and minorities.

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