Rethinking Affirmative Action

Catharine R. Stimpson

Today, after 30 years of vehemence and scuffle, affirmative action remains one of the most controversial of social policies in complex democracies. Not surprisingly, it has come to mean different things to different people -- cognitively, politically, emotionally.

Because of the controversy, because of its multiplicity of meanings, people find it hard to talk about affirmative action together. The purpose of this issue of Change is to ease, aid, and to help restart our conversations. To begin with definitions, affirmative action is:

1) An umbrella term for activities that executive, judicial, and legislative bodies at all levels of government have mandated. Here, affirmative action is a social policy that statutes and regulations set forth and enforce. Their purpose is to increase equity and opportunity. However, affirmative action so defined embodies two, conflicting strategies for the achievement of these goals. One is to reach out and encourage historically disadvantaged groups (primarily the men and women of racial minorities and the women of all races) to compete equitably. The second is to permit race and/or gender to become a preference in hiring, admissions, and financial aid‹in the belief that preference will remedy past discrimination.
2) An umbrella term for a broader set of activities that public and private institutions have voluntarily undertaken in order to increase diversity, equity, and opportunity. Here, affirmative action is an institutional policy and spirit. Affirmative action so defined also embodies two strategies for the achievement of its goais. One is to erase inequities‹for example, to fund both men's and women's athletics fully, without cavil. The second is to create a community that prizes diversity and differences.

The historical arguments about affirmative action, whether people use Definition One or Definition Two or both, have been serious and sometimes profound. Its supporters have claimed that affirmative action is an essential tool for the pulling down of discrimination and the putting up of justice. Its opponents have claimed that affirmative action is a misguided‹even immoral‹piece of social engineering that will, perversely, perpetuate discrimination in the name of ending it.

Unfortunately, the arguments about affirmative action often have also been stupid and vicious. When this happens, its supporters have ignored its weaknesses‹in theory and in practice. Its opponents have inflamed racial tensions and distorted affirmative action‹in theory and in practice‹for political gain.

These arguments, the serious and the stupid, went on throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, a period during which affirmative action was institutionalized as a part of American life. In the 1980s, although these arguments continued, the history of affirmative action took new twists and turns. Some bad but unintended consequences kept popping up‹for example, the continual circulation of cheap but common charges that minorities advanced only because quotas cleared the way for them. The intractabilities of inequity, and the inadequacy of good-faith efforts to contain and ameliorate them quickly, also became more obvious.

Simultaneously, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, opponents of affirmative action used real levers of power in the executive and judicial branches of government to nibble away at definitions and enforcement. Supporters of affirmative action were, then, in a bind. On the one hand, affirmative action was a part, albeit contested, of American life. On the other hand, its supporters felt embattled and on the defensive. Think of Gertrude Ezorsky's highly intelligent Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action (1991). Its purpose, she writes, is to "make alive, once again [italics mine], the rationales for [affirmative action] programs and to answer their critics."

Such twists and turns were largely responsible for changes in the arguments about affirmative action in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To note but two:

1) Following Thomas Sowell, the economist, some African-Americans‹although admitting that they were the baneficiaries of affirmative action‹argued that the game was not worth the candle, the policy not worth the price. In Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (1991), Stephen Carter made such a case pungently and persuasively. The career of Clarence Thomas, especially after his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, was taken by many as an ironic illustration of affirmative action being used and then abused and abandoned.
2) Some liberals and progressives (to apply time-worn labels) began to think about affirmative action anew. In her essay "Getting It Right," Marilyn Frye claimed that affirmative action was limited‹"most successful as a quite selective strategy of assimilation, cooptation, and tokenism" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Summer 1992). In the same year, forceful essays in The American Prospect imagined alternatives. What, asked Paul Starr, should we do instead? ("Civil Reconstruction: What To Do Without Affirmative Action," Winter 1992). "The real comeuppance for liberals," wrote Deborah A. Stone in another essay, "is that they will have to stop relying on crude symbols of race and gender, and instead develop policy positions that speak to women and blacks in all their diversity about issues of well-being, work, and family. This means going beyond the civil rights agenda of the '60s, and even the social equality agenda of the '70s and '80s...." ("Race, Gender, and the Supreme Court," Winter 1992).

In 1991, I, too, joined this call to rethink affirmative action. (See "Has Affirmative Action Gone Astray?" Thought and Action, Winter 1992). Though fearful of being miscast as a convert to the anti-affirmative action camp, I proposed that higher education should:

• Reinvigorate the moral roots of affirmative action. Construe it as an affirmative, not remedial, path toward justice.
• Use an expansive definition of affirmative action. Think of it not as employment practices in isolation, but as the content of the character of a community.
• Create a national "equity ledger" to study where equity exists, why it does so, and the role affirmative action might have played.
• Remember that higher education is an intellectual community. Support the new scholarship and curricula about diversity, not out of guilt, but because they are intellectually sound.
• Strengthen the linkages up through the educational system, or, to recoin a cliche, really build a functional pipeline.
• Carefully, scrupulously, revise the language and vocabulary of majority/ minority relations to show that we are becoming a nation of multiple minorities.
• Do affirmative action for children. Our thinking about higher education is worthless unless our children are fed, sheltered, loved, and educated.

This issue of Change, as a contribution to our rethinking of affirmative action, does not pretend to represent every opinion on a vexed subject. I regret that several authors whom conventional wisdom might call "conservative" were unable to write for us. This Change will not put forth sure answers for gaping questions, iron policies on a perplexing present. Our authors have ideas and opinions, but they also ask questions, offer suggestions, open up possibilities. Our spirit is one of inquiry, candor, a sometimes painful honesty.

What will a reader find here? Gary Orfield, in a sweeping survey of higher education in the past 30 years, asks for a renewed commitment to equity and access. Ruben Navarrette, Jr., and Michael A. Olivas remind us why affirmative action was necessary. In so doing, they show some of the errors of its opponents. Jeftrey F. Milem and Helen S. Astin, using survey data, suggest that our work for equity has produced an ironic result: affirmative action, broadly defined as a quest for equity, has significantly changed faculty minds but not faculty hiring practices. Specific disciplines and institutions might wish to test this finding.

Four essays, by supporters of affirmative action, look directly at some of its difficulties, and then they call for change. Nancy Hoffman writes about "a culture of dissemblance" and asks for a different way of creating genuinely diverse, honest communities. Similarly, Mary P. Rowe, drawing on her experience as an administrator at MIT, analyzes what diversity really might entail for an institution. Muriel Morisey Spence shows how the discourse of affirmative action might be revised. Although the military and higher education are very dissimilar cultures, William T. Yates II suggests that the military might teach higher education a lesson or two about the management of equity.

Our issue ends with hope. For Alexander W. Astin argues that diverse institutions are better institutions; that affirmative action helps us all. As a coda, Laura Bornholdt reviews a new book about the leaders of diversity. May these pages be of use as higher education asks how best to heal past pains and build fairer communities.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,
Department of English
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu