ABC's of Affirmative Action

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The following excerpts are from Provost Scott G. McNall's remarks at the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics Forum on Affirmative Action held on campus in December 1998. Other speakers included Professors Charles Geshekter (History), Peter Gross (Journalism), and Art Sanchez (Psychology). Participants discussed the legal, administrative, and ethical aspects of affirmative action in the hiring of faculty and staff.

Questions about affirmative action raise fundamental questions about what is fair in our society, and we should not pretend otherwise. But we also need to remember that affirmative action is not just a matter of right or wrong; it is a public policy issue. As a matter of public policy, we have created, and will again, laws that impact on special groups in our society. Veterans, for instance, are privileged in California in terms of hiring...

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Affirmative action programs grew out of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which had as one of its goals equality before the law, or equality of opportunity. American blacks and other ethnic minority groups (e.g., Hispanic, Asian, and Native American) felt they were shut out of educational and employment opportunities, either because of active racism or a lack of concern with their plight.

Who can forget the sight of a stoic and courageous James Meredith walking between lines of hostile whites to enroll at the University of Mississippi? Or an angry red-faced George Wallace standing at the door of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa trying to physically bar the court-ordered enrollment of black students? Or the scenes of black students assailed by dogs and club-wielding policemen because they dared to ask to eat at the same lunch counter as whites? This environment of racism and blocked opportunity called for something more than a simple policy of nondiscrimination, which the 14th Amendment theoretically guaranteed. (Eventually, women were included in affirmative action programs and, like ethnic minorities, sought to be considered for positions on the basis of their talent, not their membership in a specific social group. They sought the job training and education which would make it possible to compete fairly.)

Affirmative action was not designed to change the rules-only provide access and remove bias. The issue of rules has, however, today become a matter of some consequence in the drive to end programs of affirmative action.

WHAT IS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?
What was required under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the following executive orders, is not very complicated, but it is very important to understand just what is required because it is often misunderstood, sometimes willfully so...

First, the act as amended in 1967 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The regulations of the U.S. Department of Labor in 1971 (Executive Orders 11246 and 11375) also require a "positive continuing program" for all organizations that receive federal funding. They provide more detail about just what a positive program would look like and spell out the steps which must be taken to show that any organization, including a university like ours, is making "every good faith effort" to provide opportunities for women and minorities, or those who are "underutilized." (Please note that the term "underutilized" is employed by the Department of Labor.)

CSU, Chico's director of employee relations, Janet Saunders, carefully monitors the process for filling faculty and staff positions on campus. She must do this to fulfill our reporting requirement to the U.S. government: first, determine the ethnic and gender composition of the staff or faculty in a department or unit; second, compare the composition of the faculty or staff in the department/unit in question with the availability of women or minorities in the labor pool. If, for example, the data show that half of all of those who graduate with a Ph.D. in sociology are women, and she finds that less than 50 percent of the sociology faculty are women, then she and the department set a goal or target for the department to hire more women. She does not set, under federal guidelines or university policy, quotas. In searching and hiring, the department is expected to demonstrate that they have made, to cite again the federal guidelines, "every good faith effort" to recruit women and/or minorities, if they are underutilized in the department. Recruitment plans are part of the good faith effort, as are clearly defined qualifications.

One intention of the Civil Rights Act and federal executive orders was to assure that job descriptions reflected actual needs or requirements and then to assure that people who met those requirements had an equal chance of being hired. Another way, and an important way, to say this is that the Civil Rights Act and federal executive orders were designed to assure that everybody who was qualified, regardless of gender or ethnicity, was to have equal opportunity. Quotas are illegal and have consistently been recognized as so by the courts. On this issue, there can be no confusion. Neither should there be any confusion about the fact that affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were designed to improve access for women and minorities. Affirmative action is not about hiring unqualified people, and it does not involve quotas...

HAS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OUTLIVED ITS USEFULNESS?
It is sometimes argued that because of the dramatic gains made by women, blacks, and some other minority members of our society in the last thirty years that affirmative action has outlived its usefulness. Is this true? Have affirmative action programs successfully addressed problems relating to access, nondiscrimination, and justice? There are several strong reasons for suggesting that such programs are still needed.

Before looking at more global issues, let me present the case here at Chico, in terms of faculty and staff recruitment and student admissions. In 1997, twenty-four new faculty were hired. Of that total, twenty-one were white males and females, with white males (12) making up precisely 50 percent of all new hires. In 1998, we hired forty-nine new faculty members for the 1998-99 academic year. Only eight (16 percent) of those hires were minority men and women. White males made up 43 percent of the hires. The combined total for women and minorities was 57 percent. Of the staff hires in 1998 (94), 36 percent were white males, 18 percent were minorities. If you combine women and minority hires, they total 64 percent.

There are some interesting patterns in terms of the numbers of minority students enrolled at the university. For the most part, with the exception of African American students, the numbers of minority students show a slow, steady increase or hold constant. (The number of African American students dropped to a low of 306 in 1998, down from a high of 343 in 1995.) An intriguing statistic shows that the number of students failing to report ethnicity grew from 980 students in 1994 to 1,912 students in 1998. That is a growth from 6.9 percent to 12.8 percent of the total student body. In short, it is not clear what the patterns are, but we know things are changing. We may not be doing a good job of recruiting students who identify themselves as members of a specific ethnic group.

Orlando Patterson, in The Ordeal of Integration  (1998: 161-162), refers us to the ideas of George Caspar Homans, in seeking to explain why affirmative action programs are still needed. Homans crafted a set of sociological "laws" to explain group behavior. His first is the law of homophyly, or the notion that "birds of a feather flock together." More precisely, as he explained, people who share common sets of beliefs marry, play together, work together, get along better, and form effective teams. Imagine, for the moment, that you are the personnel officer for a plant which employs 100 people, 73 percent of whom are Euro-Americans, which, by the way, also happens to be the percent (73.5 percent) of whites in our society. Your job is to pick a person who will supervise all 100 people. In the absence of a company policy which tells you to consider gender or ethnicity, you will probably make the rational organizational decision and hire a white candidate, and you will probably hire a male, even if there were minority candidates and women whose qualifications to do the technical job were exactly the same as those of the white candidate. No surprise here. Nothing will change if there is no incentive to change. It is precisely these kinds of situations that affirmative action programs were designed to address.

Homans' second law of behavior is that people who work, play, and interact with one another become like one another and accept one another. The classic experience to which most social scientists point is the Army, which was forcibly integrated. The Army data showed, unequivocally, that mutual toleration and respect grew as a result of people working together. That same principle has been repeatedly confirmed in examining university data. Students from both majority and minority groups who study and work with members of other ethnic and social groups come to express higher levels of tolerance for, and admiration of, members of those groups, just as Bok and Bowen found in their comprehensive study, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (1998).

Based on these social realities, I suggest that reasons for continuing affirmative action programs are that by bringing together people of different world views and life experiences we increase people's respect for those who are different from them, we increase the ability of people of different backgrounds to work with one another, and we create strong communities within and outside universities as a result. This is certainly what the issue of diversity is about, or should be about, in the academy.

Scott G. McNall, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs