SHIFTING GEARS: How to Get Results with Affirmative Action

Nancy Hoffman

Despite the increasing numbers of white academics who publicly support the goal of hiring a more diverse faculty -- not only out of a concern for fairness, but because they relish the rich possibilities of intellectual and social exchange in a community that, in President Clinton's phrase, "looks like America" -- race relations in academia are even more strained than they were two decades ago.

Faculty who believe, as Gerald Graff has said in his new book, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (Norton, 1992), that multiculturalism brings with it opportunities for renewing intellectual life, differ significantly from those who agree to the letter of affirmative action and hold to nondiscriminatory policies, but who do not see diversity as a good in itself. This latter group values justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity, while the former not only holds these values, but would seek a diverse faculty and student body even had there been no past discrimination.

And nowhere is the significant difference in these attitudes about affirmative action more apparent than when white and black faculty participate in the search process. I realize that much of what I say in this article could, with some qualifications, apply to relations between whites and other under-represented groups‹even though the original affirmative action legislation and regulations were designed for African-Americans‹but I have limited my focus to the current tension between blacks and whites, which has deep, historical roots.

Much of the problematic discourse that has grown up between black and white faculty around searches is caused, in part, by an over-reliance on the machinery of affirmative action to not only solve problems of underrepresentation, but to ensure that our faculties are diverse. Affirmative action is no more than an imperfect process for ensuring fairness and remedying past discrimination‹but affirmative action cannot produce candidates, or fill the pipeline to graduate education unless there are significant improvements in the schooling of African-American children and youth, and a much greater number of African-American students who complete the PhD. Furthermore, the diversity on campus that many of us seek for its own sake is not the intent of affirmative action. However, there are a number of ways we might reconfigure our practices if we are to make diversity a goal.

On the basis of any number of factors -- income, educational achievement, housing, neighborhood quality, infant mortality, health -- a significant segment of the minority community is not doing well. The civil rights movement, anti-discrimination legislation, and affirmative action have produced a substantial African-American middle and upper-middle class, but the disparity between poor and prospering blacks has grown. (The income of the bottom quintile of black families declined by 17 percent between 1973 and 1987, while the top quintile rose by 33 percent.) The policies of the 1980s have resulted in a more segregated society, one less concerned with social justice and integration, one more mean-spirited, self-protective, and edgy about race than it was two decades ago. After 12 years without a moral presence at the federal level, or an integrationist grassroots movement, the broad coalition that once existed among whites and blacks has withered. For over a decade there has been little encouragement from any quarter for whites to interact with blacks to discuss and engage issues of race.

This history is replayed on today's campuses in very particular ways. Looking back over the 25 years since the beginning of the civil rights movement, the early 1980s marked the high point for black and low-income student participation in higher education. While there are certainly many more African-Americans in visible leadership positions in academia today, the percentage of minority faculty has barely changed. (It was 9 percent in 1981 and 11 percent in 1987.) Today's leaders came of age supported by the civil rights movement, and they do not appear to be replacing themselves.

Furthermore, except for the small number of elite schools with need-blind admissions and large endowments, the end of discrimination in admissions has not meant the end of segregation by income. Indeed, as public and private tuitions rise and aid declines, flagship public institutions are becoming the schools of choice for students with excellent suburban high school preparation and average family incomes in the $65,000 range. Low-income and minority students needing the most support as they encounter academic culture are now likely to be funneled- into poorly funded community and state colleges where faculty must be more occupied with basic skills than with recommendations to graduate school.

Probably most familiar are the data that show that higher education is especially inhospitable to black male students: between 1976 and 1990, black female participation rose 15 percent, while black male participation declined 10 percent. Since this article focuses particularly on the hiring of black faculty, one particularly disturbing statistic is worthy of note: the participation of high-ability low-income students, many of whom are members of minority groups. This is the group that federal legislation most clearly intended to aid, and the group most likely to choose research and teaching careers. Drawing on data from three longitudinal studies of undergraduate student participation in higher education since 1970, Arthur Hauptman and Maureen McLaughlin conclude that "students of high ability and low socioeconomic status are still one-third less likely to enroll than students of equal ability who come from the highest socioeconomic status" ("Is the Goal of College Access Being Met?" American Higher Education. Purposes, Problems, and Public Perceptions, The Aspen Institute, 1992, page 123).

The obvious key to filling the immediate need for more minority faculty is the available pool of graduate students and new PhDs. Although the number of institutions searching for African-American candidates has grown significantly, the pool has not. And this has been the case for some time. Recent reports from the National Research Council indicate that there was a slight upsurge in 1991 in African-American PhD recipients (35 more) over the 933 recipients in 1990, although this 4 percent increase ". . . still fell short of the 1,013 black recipients who earned doctorates in 1981"; about 40 percent of these are in education.

It is important to note that the overall percentage of new PhD recipients with confirmed plans for academic employment was lower in 1988 than in 1975 -- 12 percent lower in the case of African-Americans. (Increasing numbers of PhDs are apparently choosing private industry, government service, and the like over academe.) Other reports, such as the American Council on Education's Minorities on Campus: A Handbook for Enhancing Diversity, confirm the under-representation of minorities:

Shortages of minority doctorate holders in science . . . and engineering are acute. Among the 3,341 doctorates awarded in the United States in 1987 to U.S. citizens . . . in the physical sciences, 35 (1 percent) went to blacks, 75 (2 percent) to Hispanics, 228 (7 percent) to Asians, and 10 to American Indians. Similarly, of the 1,908 doctorates awarded to citizens . . . in engineering, 25 (l percent) went to blacks, 34 (2 percent) to Hispanics, 326 (17 percent) to Asians, and 7 to American Indians. (1990, pages 5-57)

Sheila Tobias, the researcher who coined the phrase, "math anxiety," and who has now turned her attention to the teaching of math and science, wrote recently:

By the year 2000, 30 percent of our nation's youth will be black or Hispanic, yet virtually no black or Hispanic students are currently choosing careers in mathematics or in mathematics education. In 1986 only nine American blacks and Hispanics received doctoral degrees in mathematics, and only a handful of the top 10,000 black and Hispanic college freshmen indicated an interest in majoring in mathematics (Succeed with Math: Every Student's Guide to Conquering Math Anxiety, New York, College Board, 1987, page xvii).

Even sociology, literature, and psychology -- disciplines of entry into the academy for African-Americans -- still have very small numbers of black faculty. My own university, for example, has a very aggressive affirmative action policy and leadership from the president, but when the English department made two recent searches for candidates to teach African-American literature, its offers were countered by richer schools promising candidates higher salaries, minimal teaching responsibilities, home mortgages, and other perks. And as far as I know, no African-American candidates have applied for positions at my university to teach Renaissance or eighteenth century literature, although we would like to send a signal that African-Americans do not teach African-American studies only.

There are, of course, important changes for the better, although they are tinged with irony. First, while minority participation in doctoral study lags, there has been slow and steady progress in transforming curricula to include issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. A growing number of white academics, largely humanists and social scientists, devote their intellectual lives to empirical, anaIytic, and theoretical work that has at its foundation the questioning of such terms as "domination," "oppression," "inclusion," "exclusion," "female," "male," "voice," and "silence." Indeed, analysis and interpretation that turns on race or gender has given a lift to the scholarship of a number of weary professors. The curriculum has changed; and in some quarters‹notably literature, history, and sociology departments‹there is more attention to race, class, and gender than ever before in our intellectual life. Second, even those faculty whose fields do not lend themselves to the study of race and ethnicity have come to expect the presence of minority professionals and students in their departments and programs.

This is all to the good, but it is not good enough. The same white academics who theorize about race in their research, add new texts to their undergraduate reading lists, and talk easily about diversity, often operate in academic environments where there is very little relaxed collegiality between blacks and whites. Whites who participate in anti-racist work feel‹or are made to feel‹like interlopers; they have come to fear and resent rejection. Those interracial relationships that do exist appear fragile.

A personal example may help illustrate the point. Several years ago, a group of white academic women, troubled by our limited and superficial interactions with black undergraduate and graduate students, met to discuss the situation. Asking ourselves first about our relationships with black colleagues, we discovered that all but two of us had no sustained relationships, either personal or work-related, with any black colleagues despite their presence in our institutions. Secondly, we asked ourselves in which situations we did interact with our black colleagues. The answer was on search, review, and promotion committees, where we had each experienced tensions around racial politics that had been nearly unbearable; indeed, these experiences had left a residue of suspicion that tainted all our interracial communication whether or not we had been the white supporters of African-American candidates.

To sum up, the scarcity of new black PhDs, the persistent rhetoric of "needing a black" for purposes of the statistics of a search, the genuine interest in a diverse curriculum taught by a diverse faculty, and the backlash from the conservative quarter of white academia have exacerbated the tensions between the very blacks and whites who should be most able to make common cause.

The result, to use Darlene Clark Hine's phrase, is a "culture of dissemblance" around issues of race in academia. A form of coded speech characterizes interracial conversation as well as conversations about race between whites. Nowhere is it more pervasive and disturbing than around the affirmative action hiring process where jobs with life- long tenure are at stake, along with definitions of what constitutes a field, discipline, or specialty. There are, of course, black faculty routinely hired and paid on the normal salary scale of their institutions, but let me give a few alternative scenarios that I suspect will be very familiar.

First, the success story. As the data' above suggest, one serious problem in making affirmative action work in the academy today is simply a matter of numbers. There are almost no black PhDs in various specializations such as physics, for example, so the likelihood that there will be fit between the needs of a physics department and the spe- I cialty of the black physicists entering the job market is pretty low. This is also true in English and sociology. Even if there is tacit agreement to overlook "fit," to embrace the candidate's research publicly while admitting privately that it is his or her racial identity we want, first the candidate must be persuaded to apply, and then to accept. The competition to "sign" a faculty member can set off a bidding war escalating the prospective candidate's salary substantially above the departmental average. At elite institutions blacks and other minority candidates are discussed like commodities with extraordinary exchange value, and the same set of blacks appear to circulate from institution to institution, leaving disappointment and frustration in their wake.

And then the scenario of failure. The search committee knows that the list of candidates will be rejected by the affirmative action officer, the dean, the provost, or by the committee members themselves if there is no black person listed; they phone black experts around the country urging them to produce a body for the search. Despite unspoken reservations either about the field or the competence of a candidate, a black chemist or philosopher gets invited for an interview, gets on the short list, and gives a seminar, but then is rejected -- an outcome some white committee members may have tacitly agreed to from the start -- leaving the minority committee member(s) angry, and white activists guilt-ridden.

When scenarios like these are played out, everyone speaks in code. How could they not? Sometimes black faculties' anger erupts directly against white committee members, but more often feedback escapes into the "air" of an institution, fueling rumors and innuendos. In coded speech, certain whites become known as "racist" or "ignorant," while certain blacks become known as "angry" or "difficult." Much of the discussion that goes on among whites, even "good" whites, about search processes and specific candidates is unthinkable in interracial company. (For example, the familiar: "We're only asking her in because she's an African-American.") To adapt a Spike Lee phrase, in public these days, whites are concerned to "say the right thing." Where there are connections and an attempt to understand the power asymmetry and other differences between whites and blacks in academia, these are currently -- and have been more often -- between two relatively powerless constituencies: black and white women concerned about the intersection of race and gender.

The negative climate, I believe, is making us hard and cynical. Many whites (and blacks too, I suppose) feel weary of counting race and ethnicity for every committee, weary of worrying over the workload of the untenured minority search committee member(s), weary of the same politically correct discussions. This weariness would be irrelevant, of course, the tensions tolerable, if we were successful. But, although most would not put it this way, we have come to substitute keeping oil on the machinery of affirmative action for producing results.

If a truly diverse faculty is our goal, it is time to shift our emphasis from a search and hiring process to the preparation of minority students for academic success. If we are to attempt to change the results, we have to change our approach in three ways: first, we have to confront, analyze, and interpret the data from two decades of attempting to equalize opportunities and outcomes for minority faculty and students; second, we have to be willing to evaluate, and even consider modifying affirmative action and other regulatory policies by which we have been governed; third, we have to get ourselves personally involved in the schooling of minority students. We have to think in fresh ways.

The first issue -- confronting the data openly -- is simple to state, but difficult to achieve. It requires that we take more responsibility for the problems surrounding minority student achievement, not as a national problem we decry, but campus by campus, department by department, program by program. For example, standardized test scores, retention rates, average grades, and incomes of undergraduate students by race are not made public at most institutions‹let alone discussed‹because.... We cannot even speak words of explanation. We must begin to do so, if we are going to figure out what has gone awry. We do not even know about the results of our own campus-based programs designed for fostering minority student achievement. Few white faculty know the number of minority graduate students in their fields, or the size of a pool of minority candidates for any search.

The second issue -- an evaluation of policy -- is much more difficult to formulate. One way to start is to ask whether there really is a mismatch, as I suggested above, between the goal of diversity and the intent of affirmative action policies. I am not ready to argue for the immediate abandonment of affirmative action, but I am arguing that a method for preventing discrimination is not the same as a broad, well-funded, long-term set of social policies aimed at supporting and holding ourselves publicly accountable for minority achievement. And I am certainly arguing that regulatory systems, once implemented, should not live beyond their usefulness. We need to begin such a discussion in academia. If an institution is to have a consensus about diversity rather than non-discrimination as a goal, I suggest it develop the following policies and practices.

First, search committees might acknowledge the probable contradiction between hiring a black and filling a particular position. If the former is a primary goal, then there are two radical solutions: search directly for a minority faculty member no matter what her specialization and re-adjust the assignments of other faculty as necessary; or second, rewrite the position description so that it is broad enough to appeal to a candidate whose research questions may reformulate the traditional center of a subspecialty or discipline.

For example, in a search I know of for an urban education policy person, the black candidates were coming at the questions not from the perspective of federal and state policy, but rather from the perspective of the effects of inferior schooling on black kids. They did not fit the urban policy position description, and the search committee did not think of changing its requirements: urban education policy (with "policy" at the center) has been the standard field or specialty for several decades. Some institutions implement policies that actually combine aspects of these two proposals: the provost agrees to hire a person who fits the position description along with any other qualified minority faculty member who turns up in a search even if the fit is not right‹but this is not a strategy for tight budgets.

While these proposals may alleviate some tension between the letter of the law and the goal of diversity on campus, they do not address the most serious problem: how to increase the number of minority students completing the PhD and choosing academic careers. Which brings us to the third issue: becoming personally involved in the schooling of minority students. It is not news to say: We need systemic, widespread, adequately supported policies and programs to improve the education of minority students at every level. It may be news to say: Every college faculty member should see as her institutional responsibility participating in activities to improve the schooling of minority students. Indeed, such activities would be a much better use of time than sitting on endless search committees whose prospects of success in hiring a minority faculty member are 10 to 15 percent.

By way of example, let us start with something as simple as advising. Although we know that retention improves if students "connect" with faculty members who take a personal interest in them, first-year students at many universities are no longer advised by faculty but in anonymous, often understaffed advising centers. The link with a faculty member is particularly salient in retaining minority students and women.

As for outreach to high schools with large numbers of minority students, the task goes far beyond sending the admissions officer to search for top students. Teachers in inner-city high schools need the support and collegiality of postsecondary faculty in their fields. While faculty around the country have become involved in myriad schoolcollege collaborative projects, many operate without institutional support or rewards.

There are, of course, numerous foundation, federal, and state projects to support minority achievements. Some I of these are producing results, but too I often they are the responsibility of overburdened black faculty and student support personnel. I am thinking of such programs as the Florida Endowment Fund supported by the McKnight Foundation, the Dorothy Danforth Copton Minority Fellowship Program funded by Danforth, and such campusfunded efforts as Temple University's Future Faculty Fellows Program ) But in the end, the issue is less which program, and more the commitment of faculty not only to search for, but to share the responsibility for producing the next generation of minority scholars, researchers, and teachers.

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