A Gloomy Outlook for Affirmative Action, at Harvard and Elsewhere

Early last September, the time of year when Harvard seems full of possibilities, Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok, sat down and talked about affirmative action. "It's difficult to delineate how the University has been changed by affirmative action," he said. "It's a change in atmosphere. There's a consciousness within the University that might not have been here before. Everything is not fine, but things are better here for minorities and women than they were three years ago."

This winter Leonard issued his third annual report on the status of affirmative action at Harvard, and his tone had changed substantially. "Not only have we not progressed a great deal since October 1971 (both statistically and attitudinally)," he wrote, "but I fear we have moved backward from that date in a number of areas."

Leonard's pronouncements tend to vary in tone according to the group he is addressing them to, but the theme of his annual report has continued throughout the spring, his comments about affirmative action at Harvard are those of a discouraged man who sees the University being swept along in a nationwide backlash against the principles affirmative action was designed to institutionalize.

Asked last week if he had become pessimistic, Leonard said, "Let's put it in perspective. I don't think I'd use the word pessimistic. I think I'd use two words: I'd say concerned and I would say worried. I'm concerned about a general movement in this country about the status of minorities and women. I'm concerned about the amount of effort, the scores of speeches, the number of articles that seem aimed at telling the country and the world it's useless to implement the principles of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments."

He prefers to talk about this movement--"an attack at the very quality of a group of people," he calls it--in terms of America rather than of Harvard. And for Leonard its focal point came last year in the DeFunis vs. Odegaard case, when a white man sued the University of Washington Law school for "reverse discrimination"--admitting blacks who he charged were less qualified than he was.

DeFunis's arguments and his case were not directly related to affirmative action--the programs Leonard oversees have to do with hiring, more than admissions--but they crystallized many of the arguments brought against it. The reverse discrimination DeFunis cited is an idea that comes up again and again in criticisms of affirmative action, the popular image being one of women and minorities hired not for their qualifications but to fill government quotas. "Reverse discrimination is a bunch of malarkey," Leonard says. "There's no such thing. It's a myth, a red herring."

Still, the idea is a popular one. There have been rumblings in Congress all year about abolishing affirmative action as it now stands, especially those parts of it that deal with the establishment of "goals." Congressmen seem to be afraid that those goals are actually quotas and that quotas significantly reduce considerations of merit in the hiring process. The goals system--which requires employers to file with the government numerical expectations of how well they think they will fare in increasing their minority and female representation--has drawn particular criticism from academics who see it as an abrogation of the pure scholarly values that should prevail in a university.

Affirmative action administrators, in the government and in private institutions, insist that affirmative action is a process of broadening applicant pools rather than forcing institutions' hands in hiring decisions. Theoretically the goals are not simply quotas; they simply provide the government with some indicator of how much to expect from an institution that has pledged a commitment to fairer hiring. Without them there would be no way to gauge the progress of affirmative action programs.

So at Harvard every academic department and administrative division has numerical hiring goals but those goals are not supposed to be the focus of their efforts. Instead, for every teaching appointment a department has to file a statement proving that it made a careful search beforehand and tried to find minority and women candidates, and for non-teaching appointments employers have to list openings beforehand to encourage a wide applicant pool. Once the search for applicants is made, whoever is doing the hiring theoretically proceeds to hire the best qualified person for the job; it is more likely that minorities or women will be hired than it was before the days of affirmative action simply because there will be more women and minority applicants.

But the affirmative action approach is full of problems. Its goals are close enough to being quotas to alarm academics, and far enough removed to be unable to guarantee substantive results. At institutions like Harvard, where the turnover in high-ranking teaching jobs is tiny and the applicant pool of black Ph.D.s small, affirmative action moves at a snail's pace. There are more than 700 full professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Harvard's affirmative action program projects and increase between 1973 and 1976 from nine to 15 tenured minorities and from 18 to 37 tenured women. The departmental goals are modest, seldom exceeded, sometimes not met. If affirmative action goals seem overly strict in theory, in practice at Harvard they are more often criticized for being so lenient that they do not guarantee progress.

Until this year Leonard had tried, at least publicly, to live quietly with the frustration of implementing non-goals for departments whose criteria for tenure virtually excluded minorities. But in his annual report Leonard named names for the first time, citing drops in black enrollment at the graduate schools of business and design and going on to point the finger even more directly: "It is also difficult to explain or believe that the Department of History or the Department of English cannot find a black man or woman in the entire country with the qualifications to hold a tenured position in their august departments."

Leonard says now he wrote the report "to say to Harvard, 'be careful. You have the capacity to maintain your leadership in education in the world. You ought to look to your own house. You cannot let yourself be just another institution.'" But in the same way Leonard talks about America to focus on Harvard, his comments on Harvard in general seem aimed at a few areas he sees as particular problems. One of these is the English Department, which Leonard calls "the Department of White Studies" and which does not have any black tenured professors; in its affirmative action plan it predicts that none will be hired between 1973 and 1976.

While Leonard battles departments that move slowly on affirmative action he is also dealing with people who charge Harvard with moving too slow on reforming its hiring and pay procedures. The affirmative action plan comes up for a major review by the Department of Health. Education and Welfare next year, so that all the projections and several other parts of Harvard's plan will have to be revised over the summer and submitted to HEW in the fall. Federal agencies are also investigating the University's affirmative action programs following complaints from women's groups--the National Organization of Women and Women Employed at Harvard--about Harvard's foot-dragging on hiring and pay equalization. In response to similar complaints at other universities the government required the institutions to give compensatory payments to employees.

Practically the only thing people agree on about affirmative action as a whole and the program at Harvard in particular is that it isn't working very well. It is so dependent on good faith on the part of the myriad employers here that it has not produced much in the way of concrete results, and its implications of federal tampering with Harvard's independence and devotion to quality have created a reaction against it. It's hard to tell if it will ever be possible for Harvard to increase the numbers of women and minorities here substantially at a time when opposition to its programs for doing so is becoming more and more vocal.