Six Professors Endorse ACLU Rights Letter

Six Harvard professors and 84 other university professors signed a statement advocating affirmative action sponsored and released yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The statement recommended affirmative action as "a temporary device" to counteract the future "generation of officially sanctioned discrimination against minorities and women."

The statement, prompted by the Allen Bakke case, encourages the use of "minority admission goals" and "classbiased hiring practices" in order to achieve racial equality in university admissions and in employment opportunities.

"Affirmative action is absolutely essential to racial progress," Thomas F. Pettigrew, professor of social psychology and sociology, and one of the Harvard signatories, said yesterday.

He added that Bakke supporters have "grossly distorted" the case in their attempt to put an end to affirmative action.

Derrick A. Bell, professor of Law and the only black Harvard professor who signed the statement, said yesterday he supported affirmative action on "moral and political grounds," but had one reservation about minority admissions.

"I'm distressed that minorities are treated differently than other preferential admissions candidates. The general community looks with more hostility on a special minority admissions program than on admissions programs for other candidates--such as athletes or alumni children," he said.

A committee of four law professors and Norman Dorsen, president of the ACLU, wrote the first draft of the statement, Ruth B. Ginsberg, general counsel for the ACLU, said yesterday.

The committee then sent the letter to university professors around the country for comment and endorsement, she added