To the Editor:
Without going into detail about Paul Seabury’s “HEW & the Universities” [February], which comments on the effects of affirmative-action for women at the University of Michigan, I would like to say, first, that affirmative-action efforts tend to upgrade universities’ standards since they uncover qualified women who would not otherwise have been contacted and, second, if Mr. Seabury had not arrived on the Michigan campus with a preconceived idea of what was going on, he might have discovered the real facts of affirmative-action and faculty standards at the University of Michigan. Women do not ask that standards be lowered, but equalized. Most women presently holding academic positions are better qualified than their male colleagues. The picture presented by the article is inaccurate in fact and in implication. It does a disservice to COMMENTARY.
Virginia Davis Nordin
Chairwoman
Commission for Women
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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To the Editor:
As a female employee of the University of Michigan, I have followed the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s investigations into charges of sex discrimination in employment practices at the university with great interest. I have also had an opportunity to study comparable investigations being done at universities throughout the country. As a result of this “expertise,” I would like to comment on Paul Seabury’s article.
In brief, I feel Mr. Seabury’s tone is condescending and sarcastic, and that his article represents one of the finest examples of biased reporting I have read in many years. . . .
Mr. Seabury indicates that HEW policy implies the necessity of hiring unqualified or marginally qualified faculty. With this I must disagree. Highly competent women and minority-group members, who have achieved an outstanding degree of respect within their fields, and who, because of their sex or race, have often been denied entrance into tenured professional ranks, represent a potential labor pool which can only serve to increase the quality and prestige of affected disciplines. These individuals historically have been “invisible.” HEW’s requirements upon institutions of higher learning will serve to strip away the veil. I can only consider this a healthy step. . . .
Sally Buxton
Office of the President
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Paul Seabury’s lament conjures up images of the last British colonialists in India, sipping tonic and wondering what happened to those “golden days.” Somehow the Indian nation survived and learned a wiser course than the former mother country—or our own country, for that matter. Somehow, I also believe, the universities will survive this “crisis,” and Mr. Seabury will even receive his pension checks on time in the years to come.
Joyce Mitchell
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
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To the Editor:
Paul Seabury’s description of “affirmative-action plans” can be illustrated in every particular by the plan now being implemented at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA). Beyond publicizing them, however, the article does not consider how such programs can be fought. Perhaps the following history of the actions taken at SUNYA will provide an example of what can be done.
In January of this year, I contacted the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith in connection with the SUNYA plan. The ADL considered that this plan would make a good case on which to focus national attention because every objectionable feature appeared in official documents. Subsequently the ADL wrote to the President of SUNY stressing the following points:
- In the SUNYA plan departments were asked to anticipate vacancies over a five-year period and indicate how many “could feasibly be allocated to minority members.”
- Another statement said that “the University will defer the filling of some positions until qualified minority members and women are added to the staff of the University.”
- The Vice President for Student Affairs announced his policy in these words: “Temporary preference in the hiring of new personnel must be given to members of minority groups with particular emphasis on the appointment of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Indians, as well as to women.” His memo went on: “As a guideline, I would urge that no fewer than one of every three new and vacant positions be filled with minority members. Additionally, one of every three positions should be filled by a woman.”
- SUNYA’s Vice President for Academic Affairs stated that “ten faculty vacancies were specifically earmarked for the appointment of women and minorities.”
- A press clipping quoted another Vice President of the University as announcing “a policy of one-to-one hiring of minorities affecting all of the administrative staff. This means that for every white (non-minority member) hired, a minority member is hired.”. . .
The ADL letter stressed the illegality of points 1 to 5, above, and argued that “discrimination is always perpetrated against an individual, not against a broad and nameless mass. The right to be free from discrimination is an individual right, as the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held, and it should not be abridged or modified on the basis of the individual’s race or the history of his race. ‘Justice’ for a group is utterly meaningless if it requires injustice toward individuals.”. . .
Sunya’s response to the ADL (dated March 27, 1972) was a bland statement of agreement with the ADL in opposing all forms of discrimination. The letter denies that the affirmative-action program “sets racial quotas or [requires] preferential treatment,” but completely fails to deal with the specifics of the ADL’s letter. The ADL’s original charges were printed on March 3 in the New York Times, one day after the Times had editorially supported Mr. Seabury’s position. The Sunya story was picked up by the Albany papers and by other papers in upstate New York. . . . The director of the Sunya Office of Equal Employment Opportunity tried to smooth things over by explaining “none of the memos or statements were issued as policy . . . they were merely suggested guidelines. . . .” He went on to say that the guidelines in question “would be illegal if effected as policy.” As they were issued, however, “there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. . . they are suggestions, not policy.”. . .
Nevertheless, Sunya issued a new statement on affirmative-action policies on April 14, 1972, which contains some definite improvements. The program now claims that it “supports the selection of the best-qualified people regardless of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” although goals are still to be established and evidence of good-faith efforts to recruit minority members and women must still accompany the proposed appointment of a white male. . . . And a department with a black or female candidate still has a better chance of gaining a new position or retaining a vacant one. But the new statement does go on to say that “there will be no termination action or denial of reappointment of qualified personnel solely to support the Affirmative-Action Program”—a welcome guarantee, though hardly an ironclad one, since terminations or “non-reappointments” partly to support the affirmative-action program are not precluded. But ADL involvement continues at Sunya, and further changes are still likely.
Clearly, then, there are definite advantages in enlisting the aid of an outside organization with some moral authority and a legal staff. The publicity generated by ADL has even increased campus awareness of the issue—another source of pressure on the administration. The Sunya President is now on record as being opposed to discrimination—reverse or otherwise—which puts those who argue explicitly in favor of reverse discrimination on the defensive. In the early stages of my involvement with affirmative action, I regarded it as a triumph when a radical assistant professor decided that it would be an injustice to terminate him for the purpose of replacing him with a black. The disadvantage of groups like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee is that their involvement risks falsifying the issue as between Jews and blacks. Some of my New Left Jewish colleagues are particularly incensed that what they regard as opposition to black interests is supported by a Jewish group. Unfortunately, groups like the ACLU and the AAUP are at best divided on this issue. The only university organization actively fighting the discriminatory features of affirmative action is the University Centers for Rational Alternatives, which is now in contact with the ADL and the AJC.
The issue will probably not be resolved until a university refuses to cooperate with HEW, and takes the matter to court. Since undertaking legal action could easily result in suspension of contracts for the duration of the litigation, even the prospect of victory may not be enough to motivate the fight. In the absence of a favorable court ruling on affirmative action as applied to universities, the best one can do is to put real counterpressure from off-campus organizations on a university and its board of trustees. This can have the effect of strengthening an administration in its negotiations with HEW, and softening the worst aspects of resulting policies. Perhaps if an administration perceives that a public controversy will result no matter what it does, the chances of its going to court are increased.
Malcolm J. Sherman
Department of Mathematics
State University of New York at Albany
Albany, New York
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Paul Seabury writes:
The letter from the Office of the President of the University of Michigan prompts me to make one point clear: in visiting Michigan, and other campuses, I had in mind simply to deal with the HEW situation, and not with the merits of individual instances of purported discrimination. HEWs procedures, and its quota system for rectification of inequities, were my basic concern. I now know no more of the local merits of the “women’s case” at Michigan, although it was there that I did become aware of the sharp friction between “women’s-group” criteria for quotas and minority-group criteria. I have noticed that women’s-group responses to my article typically avoid mention of this contradiction; their “labor-pool” formulas, various as they are from instance to instance across the country, in most instances employ academic criteria for credentialling. They tend to employ and stress that magnificent word “qualified,” while some minority groups employ its non-identical twin, “qualifiable.” In the hands of federal bureaucrats, and others, the word “qualified” is as malleable as clay. Consider, for example, Revised Executive Order No. 4, which has gone into effect this past month. This Order now asserts that the measure of competence to be used in hiring new staff shall be the level of competence of the least competent currently-employed staff member. In CUNY, women’s-group representatives are pressing this pernicious formula on university administrators. One can easily imagine the Gresham’s Law effect of such a federal order upon academic quality.
The statistical data on academic labor pools employed by women’s groups, being non-qualitative and based upon quantitative data alone, are no guide to excellence in hiring. A residual chivalrous instinct made me loath, in previous writing on this subject, to make mention of other statistical data in my own special professional field—data which, if employed in quotaed recruitment, could result in pernicious discriminatory effects of a different character from that which would result from the data women’s groups employ. A recent, and unpublished, survey of articles published over the last decade in our chief professional journal, the American Political Science Review, indicates that 3 per cent of them were written or co-authored by women. The anonymous screening procedures employed by this journal in evaluating quality are absolutely impeccable: referees (including female scholars) recommend publication or non-publication with no knowledge of the author’s identity. A large proportion of published articles are written by quite young scholars on the verge of their careers. Now, who would wish to use such statistics as basis for a “labor-pool” hiring formula? Yet are they any less reliable indicators of scholarly promise of individuals than the equally foolish formulas employed by women’s groups?
The quota method of rectifying “historical injustices” by visiting new injustices upon members of a new generation of young scholars eats like an acid into the professional standards of all scholarly disciplines, demoralizing all concerned. In this respect, I must draw attention to the letter from Professor Mitchell, which sarcastically implies that my concern for academic excellence arises out of anxiety for scholars of my generation. Her analogy to British colonialists might conceivably have been amusing if one were able to avert one’s eyes from the current scene of university and college recruitment and placement. Here, large numbers of young scholars are now being compulsorily excluded from consideration because of sex and race. I suppose that most terrible simplifiers, wishing to wipe out historic injustice by visiting it upon a new and innocent generation, need some anesthetic for their consciences. Professor Mitchell evidently prefers persiflage.
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