AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT MID-LIFE: A Proponent's Agenda for the '90s
Muriel Morisey Spence
Since its origins in the 1960s as a remedial response to mi| nority under-representation I in the workplace and government contracting, affirmative action has evolved to include strategies to increase diversity on campuses. Along the way it has become a symbol of our public policy debate about equity, race, ethnicity, and gender. As affirmative action enters mid-life, it is appropriate to assess the debate and project its contours for the near future.
This essay focuses on two criticisms of affirmative action: the charge that affirmative action undermines standards and the claim that it is unfair to white males. These challenges to affirmative action's legitimacy reveal both distorted notions of how affirmative action works and an insidious values hierarchy that puts expectations of white males over the rights and expectations of members of other groups. Affirmative action's viability for the future may depend upon a proponents' strategy that responds vigorously to these criticisms.
The charge that affirmative action undermines merit selection and the use of qualification criteria is perhaps the most repeated, and least substantiated, criticism. One way to examine this assertion is to evaluate what has happened at the nation's most competitive colleges and universities. If affirmative action in fact lowers standards, then increased numbers of minorities and white women at highly competitive schools should coincide with demonstrable declines in academic excellence among those student populations. Yet no one, not even affirmative action's harshest critics has suggested that the nation's most academically competitive colleges and universities have increased the diversity of their student bodies at the expense of their overall excellence.
Affirmative action's critics focus instead on evidence that blacks and Latinos have, at some schools, lower average GPAs and standardized test scores. They also point to lower graduation rates among those groups as evidence of academic inadequacy. While such data may justify attention to the particular educational and social needs of minority students, there are at least two reasons why they are a poor basis on which to judge affirmative action. First, since blacks and Latino students are more likely than whites to come from weaker academic backgrounds, their relative under-performance is not surprising. Second, minority group status brings special challenges to the college experience, even at the most welcoming institutions. Therefore, the performance and graduation rate data may reveal as much about these challenges as they do about academics.
Affirmative action gives students opportunities they might not otherwise have. It cannot be expected to wipe out the effects of poor high school preparation or racial hostility encountered on campus. Evaluation of minority student academic performance is appropriate, therefore, but only to assess whether students are benefitting from the educational opportunity‹the same question that justifies scrutiny of any student population's experience. Still, the debate about affirmative action remains focused largely on the academic I performance of minority students and we must seek to understand why.
The answer may be, in part, that we have all lost sight of the fact that affirmative action is designed to offset the effects on qualified applicants of historic and continuing patterns of race, ethnic, and gender bias. The current public discussion of affirmative action seems grounded in the false notion that affirmative action is an excuse to abandon qualification criteria. This distortion has become embedded in the public dialogue.
A recent episode at a leading law school is instructive. The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concluded in October, 1992, that the admissions policy at the law school of the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) violated federal civil rights laws. Because Boalt I Hall grouped qualified applicants by ethnic background before making final admissions determinations, it was engaged in impermissible discrimination, said OCR. Though it denied any wrongdoing, Boalt Hall decided to modify its procedures.
A review of nearly two dozen news reports and editorials found only two references to the fact that Boalt Hall's challenged procedures focused only on applicants qualified for admission. Comments to reporters and editorials defending the law school instead centered on why Boalt Hall should have a diversified student body. The episode did little to rebut the charge that unqualified students get admitted in the name of diversity. (It may be that supporters of the Boalt Hall policy often did mention to reporters that no unqualified students were admitted, but the point was not made in many media accounts. If that is the explanation, it underscores the need for affirmative action's proponents to undertake a stronger hand in re-framing the public debate.)
Affirmative action admissions policies would benefit from wider understanding of college and university admissions processes, particularly at competitive institutions that can admit only a small percentage of all applicants. (Boalt Hall, for example, has more than 5,000 applicants annually for fewer than 300 spaces in the incoming class.) The reality is in sharp contrast to the idea that unqualified applicants get admitted under the rubric of affirmative action.
At competitive schools, a relatively small percentage of applicants must be rejected because they cannot handle the academic demands of that particular school. There is also another very small percentage whose applications are so outstanding that admission is virtually assured. The large percentage, often well over 50 percent of the total applicant pool, consists of those who are academically capable of succeeding at the school. The tough job is choosing which of those many qualified applicants to admit.
The goal of achieving a racially and ethnically diverse student body is one factor schools take into account in making those tough choices. They also often seek to build stronger teams by admitting talented athletes, to solidify relations with alumni by admitting their offspring, and, in many instances, to promote their reputations as national schools by seeking geographical diversity in the student body. Even graduate and professional schools may have educational goals that cause them to put other factors, like subject area specialty, above numerical criteria in choosing among applicants. In this context, it is unfair and hypocritical to subject minority students in particular to the implication that they are unqualified.
A second recurring attack on affirmative action is the charge that it treats white males unfairly. This is a legitimate concern to the extent that it refers to illegal discrimination. Indeed, courts have affirmed the principle that white males are protected by statutory and constitutional prohibitions against race and gender discrimination. But the critics go much further, challenging even the legal use of race, ethnicity, and gender considerations in choosing among applicants for jobs and educational opportunities because it subjects white males who have done no legal wrong to unfair treatment. (They may also assert that affirmative action intensifies intergroup resentment and that our legal system requires not mere non-discrimination, but also color-blindness in all decision-making.)
The notion that affirmative action is wrong because innocent parties experience disappointment is at odds with traditional notions of competition in situations ranging from sports to commerce. A universal reality of competition for a finite number of positions is that some candidates, though qualified, will be turned away. This was an unremarkable and non-controversial situation throughout the nation's history so long as virtually all candidates for prized opportunities in education and employment were white males.
Affirmative action is consistent with this tradition. It adds race, ethnicity, and gender as additional criteria that may be used in choosing among the qualified. It is not an excuse to abandon qualification criteria. As in other contexts, qualification is no guarantee of selection. Decision-makers are expected to make choices that advance the overall objectives of the setting, whether it is a workplace, a sports team, or a board of directors. This may mean, for example, that a law firm specializing in real estate will choose to hire a recent graduate who took several relevant courses over a graduate with higher grades but less relevant course experience. A basketball team whose center has suffered injuries that may end his career might choose to hire a promising center over a guard with a more impressive previous record.
In these settings, the disappointed expectations of those who are qualified but not chosen may lead to frustration or even anger, but they do not justify legal recourse unless there is evidence of illegal discrimination. Why, then, is the lawful rejection of qualified applicants controversial when white males lose to minorities or white women? A disturbing possibility is that the persistent controversy' stems from an unarticulated, deeply held assumption that a qualified white male is entitled to prevail over qualified minorities and white women. The attacks on lawful affirmative action reveal the depth and breadth of racism and sexism. Our challenge is not merely to eliminate illegality. We must also confront the idea that some groups are more deserving of opportunity than others. Unless and until the wishes and aspirations of white males carry no more weight than those of minorities and white women, there will be strident critics of even legal affirmative action.
How should affirmative action's proponents respond to these potentially destructive challenges to its legitimacy? An important strategy for the future is to bring new candor to the national conversation about affirmative action. Specifically, the public policy debate should:
A challenge for affirmative action's proponents is to turn the policy
debate into a forthright discussion of these themes. As a nation, we prize
both excellence and fairness. To the extent that affirmative action is
perceived as undermining these principles, it loses public support even
though its remedial and equitable purposes remain unfulfilled.
Carl Gutierrez-Jones,
Department of English
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu