Affirmative interaction
On its surface, the affirmative action debate seems simple.
Each side claims the other is discriminating based on race or gender. But in scrutinizing the social and legal history of affirmative action, and looking into the details of its implementation, it becomes more complicated. For those who want to better understand the issue, a detailed exploration of affirmative action follows.
The birth of affirmative action
Sue Guenter-Schlesinger, assistant executive vice president for affirmative action and diversity at USU, said it is important to look at the history of affirmative action in context: The program was instituted only a year after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. The act prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act likewise prohibited denying a vote to a person based on race or color. But despite this, African-Americans were still turned away from the polls, Guenter-Schlesinger said.
“Even though there’s a law, it doesn’t mean it’s going to hold,” she said.
In order to overcome the systematic exclusion that had occurred for so many years, Guenter-Schlesinger said, “there’s something more that has to be done.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 in 1965, which ordered equal opportunity in employment for all qualified persons. The order also called for federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
“You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair,” Johnson said.
USU professor of political science Anthony Peacock said affirmative action was “a very noble initiative originally, and it was the right thing to promote equal opportunity, but it took a turn for the worse in the late ’60s and early ’70s when it became a system for racial and gender-based preference.”
He said the Voting Rights Act, which is now seen as an affirmative action-type measure, was intended to overcome racist southern officials, as there were “horrible things done to black voters in the south,” Peacock said.
But now affirmative action proponents throw the word “discrimination” about very loosely, he said.
“The term ‘discrimination’ is used generically to mean invidious discrimination, which most Americans find repulsive – not hiring you because you’re a Jew or a black, for example,” Peacock said.
He said minority rights activists now frequently say they are being discriminated against because they aren’t being given preferences or entitlements under law.
Guenter-Schlesinger said affirmative action is not a preference program.
“Affirmative action never said give preference to women and minorities,” she said. “Have people hired women and minorities just because they are women or minorities? I don’t know, but if they have, that has not been within the spirit or legality of the executive order or Title VII.”
Equal opportunity was the goal of affirmative action in the past, Peacock said, but the objective has moved from providing equal opportunity to providing equal results.
In the eyes of affirmative action critics, the two goals are at odds with each other, Peacock said – striving for equal results means promoting unequal opportunity.
Affirmative action at USU
The university is committed to enhancing diversity in its workforce so the number of women and minorities are reflective of the growing diversity in America, Guenter-Schlesinger said. Today, USU’s Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity (AA/EO) Office is charged with ensuring the university fulfills the legal requirements of affirmative action, which include three steps:
1) Conduct a workforce analysis to determine the race and gender of current employees by job category.
2) Analyze the availability of qualified job applicants. This analysis is tailored to individual job categories and the geographic area from which applicants are typically pulled. For example, AA/EO will find out the national percentage of minorities or women who are qualified (i.e. have the appropriate degree) to apply for a professor position, since the university does a national search for faculty applicants. Local percentages are sought for clerical jobs, such as a secretary, which tend to attract only locals.
3) If the current university workforce makeup does not match the availability of qualified applicants, the university is to make “good faith efforts” to attract the underrepresented groups to apply for job openings.
Guenter-Schlesinger said “good faith efforts” do not mean preferring a female candidate over a male one, for example.
“Your good faith effort is made before the decision [to hire] is even reached,” she said. “You do that through targeted advertising.”
At USU, that means making special efforts to post job openings in magazines targeted especially to women or underrepresented ethnic groups.
“If you read Executive Order 11246, you will never find the word ‘quota,'” Guenter-Schlesinger said. “Our goal is to be reflective of who’s available.”
Guenter-Schlesinger said 33 out of 45 job groups at USU are underutilized by either women or minorities or both. However, the percentage of women in executive positions has moved from 11 percent to 24 percent in the last 10 years. In the same time period, minorities in tenure-track positions have increased from 2.4 percent to 8.6 percent.
“Our progress is slow but our progress is steady,” she said.
Why now?
Affirmative action debates have found new life since two landmark Supreme Court cases involving the University of Michigan’s admissions policies. Both cases were subjected to the strict scrutiny test, which asked if the policies served a compelling state interest and if they were narrowly tailored to meet that interest.
The first case, Gratz v. Bollinger, scrutinized the university’s undergraduate program admissions policy, which used a point system to determine who would attend the university. The admissions office awarded a set number of points to minority applicants.
The court agreed that encouraging diversity in higher education was a compelling state interest, but the admissions policy was struck down last June because it was not “narrowly tailored.” The policy did not take into account “individual consideration” of applicants, the Supreme Court said, but awarded points on a blanket basis.
The second case, Grutter v. Bollinger, looked into the university’s law school admissions policy, which considered race as one factor among many but did not automatically award points to minorities. The university felt it needed to admit African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans to bring a diverse viewpoint to the law school, so it strove to achieve what it labeled a “critical mass” of minorities. Critical mass meant there needed to be enough of each ethnic group so minority individuals did not feel isolated; however, the university did not set a fixed quota.
The court upheld this policy, ruling that it was constitutional. Grutter v. Bollinger is the more significant case of the two, Peacock said, because it upholds the use of race as a compelling state interest in the promotion of educational diversity.
Peacock said the Supreme Court justices in effect admitted the law school policy constituted a racial balancing system, albeit one without a fixed quota, but allows it in the interest of encouraging diversity.
Affirmative action for USU students
Admission to USU is dependent upon an index of two factors: GPA and ACT scores. Students may appeal if they are not admitted based on the index, but no applicant has appealed on the basis of race, said Joyce Kinkead, vice provost for undergraduate studies and research.
Race can be a factor, although not the only factor, in awarding opportunity scholarships and research fellowships, Kinkead said.
“We would never use race as a single criteria for awarding,” Kinkead said. “We do value a diverse student population; however, we want to make sure the students we support financially can be successful at a research university.”
Affirmative action for women
Although affirmative action focused on race at the outset, through time women were considered “disadvantaged” as well, and thus gender became a factor in affirmative action programs.
“I think without [affirmative action], corporations particularly wouldn’t have made the efforts they’ve made to place women in management and greater level of responsibility,” said Janet Osborne, director of USU’s Women’s Center. “They were looking more to gender than ability, and that still holds true today somewhat. We carry assumptions about ‘women do this, men do that.'”
Osborne said the problem is not only that fewer women are hired, but that there aren’t enough programs that provide family-friendly benefits like affordable child care. Critics of affirmative action bring up the suggestion that fewer women work because many choose not to pursue a career after earning a degree, letting their husbands be the breadwinner. But Osborne said “choose” may not be the right term.
“Is it a choice because the world of work doesn’t make it possible to have a family … and both of you pursue careers outside the home?” Osborne said. “Or is it just so hard that you as a woman decide not to have a career? Is that a choice? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
Osborne said affirmative action is still necessary to keep people focused on fairness relating to ability, because it pushes them to think beyond assumptions of gender.
“To say that women or minorities are getting the jobs just because they’re women and minorities, I don’t think holds true all that much,” Osborne said. “There may be some [women and minorities] that aren’t very qualified, but I bet there’s quite a few, in the 96 percent, that aren’t women and minorities who are not very well qualified either.”
USU was recently awarded a $3 million National Science Foundation grant, which is being used to encourage women to seek employment in the science and engineering disciplines at USU and motivate them to stay there.
Looking at the near future of affirmative action-related activities at USU, the recently formed group Aggies for the Education of Affirmative Action has scheduled a debate for Jan. 26 at noon in the TSC Auditorium. AEAA will have faculty representatives in the debate with the College Republicans and their faculty representatives.
-heidithue@cc.usu.edu