AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The following excerpts are from a Crimson roundtable on affirmative action held last week with Mary Jo Bane, associate professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Meldon Hollis, administrative aide in Harvard's affirmative action office, and Harvey C. Mansfield '53, professor of Government. Mark E. Feinberg, Laura E. Gomez, and Jonathan S. Sapers moderated the discussion.

Crimson: The first question is for supporters of affirmative action: What is it that you support, and why.'

Hollis: That's a useful question, because affirmative action has almost become a perjorative term. In its narrow sense, affirmative action is a policy required by federal contractors that has to do with employment. In a broader sense, I think it is social policy. If through an analysis of society, one finds that identifiable sub-groups of society are differentiated by significant gross disparities, one has to make the decision of whether or not that's good social policy, or whether or not it is in the interest of the society generally to try to shrink those disparities. One can do that by sort of saying. "Things will some day be better." Or one can decide that it is a significant enough disparity and a problem, to do some sort of intervention.

Bane: It seems to me that the spirit behind affirmative action is partly that there are groups in the society who historically have been kept from educational or employment opportunities for discriminatory reasons. And the point where we are now requires not just sitting passively and waiting for discrimination to stop, but indeed, as you say, to take some positive measures to help bring those people in.

Mansfield: Affirmative action is getting to be a perjorative term, and deserves to be still more so. There are two objections that can be made. One is made by many people, it is the justice of punishing a group of individuals--a group of people themselves may not have discriminated. And then rewarding a group instead of an individual--that is, rewarding individuals who may not themselves have suffered, or suffered deeply, discrimination. But! think still worse than the injustice of affirmative action is the indignity of it; it's demeaning character and the underhandedness of the way it's applied. I can illustrate that point: it's impossible for affirmative action appointments to be announced in public because to speak of someone as an affirmative action appointment is to insult that person by implying, or even saying that that appointment would not have been made on the basis of merit.

In addition, I think then that there are mainly three bad consequences of affirmative action. First is that the Blacks get to thinking in negative terms, in terms of what they suffered, instead of in terms of what they can contribute to American life. And second, the air is filled with accusations of racism, or sexism, or ageism, or some other - "-ism," and this poisons the atmosphere. Affirmative action makes that kind of accusation institutional and routine. A third objection I have is that affirmative action has been widened from its origin in the Civil Rights Act to include groups like women. Hispanics, and others who haven't suffered in any way comparable to Blacks. Blacks, I think, really are a special case. That there are other injustices to other groups in society is undoubtedly true, but they are nothing like on the level of injustices that were done to a group that was actually enslaved. So I think affirmative action allows women and Hispanics to ride piggyback on the injustices done to the Blacks, without having to make a substantial argument on their own.

Bane: Obviously, I'm going to have to speak to the women's issue here. I think it would be good at some point to try to be more specific about what we are all talking about when we talk about affirmative action in various kinds of situations. Thinking personally about how I deal with admissions committees or arguments that I make to faculties and so on, I do find myself calling attention to the fact that we ought to give some special attention to women: that they have tended to be underrepresented in our student body and our faculty. Let's make very, very sure that we are not holding it against them that they are in fact women, that we are in fact stopping discriminating. I think that you can't deny that women have been discriminated against in the admissions policies of Harvard College. I've been in more situations than I care to remember, where I had to be a lot better than the men I was competing with. But I do agree with both of you that the reparations owed to Black Americans by the society are greater than those to the other groups that we are talking about.

Hollis: Where the tension in discussions tends to come is when some say that what affirmative action means is either an absolute preference or some sort of compensatory action over and beyond a neutral consideration of the factors. I would argue that in some instances, it is appropriate to go beyond a neutral consideration of the factors, that is, weighing them all equally. The real problem comes, of course, when an individual says that "I have been wronged as an individual. This is reverse discrimination. I was not here 20 years ago, I did not do the hiring, and you're discriminating against me as an individual. "That is a tough situation, and what we try to do is litigate those issues around individual rights, at least the Supreme Court has said that you can't have any category that conclusively excludes people on the basis of race or sex. I don't know whether or not that resolves a lot of the tension and lack of satisfaction around the issue, but at least it seems like it is a fairly peaceable solution to the problem. One that has its problems, but in my mind, has less problems than some of the other approaches that we might design.

Mansfield: In the first place, Professor Bane, I like the pride in your statement, "I had to be better than the men against whom I competed," and that's why I think pride is the essence of this situation, more than justice. Both of you spoke of the need for diversity, and both of you, I think, spoke of equal opportunity. I think what we have to expect in America is that equal opportunity will bring diversity. The way to diversity is through equal opportunity, and not through affirmative action preference. That is our principle, it is essentially a liberal principle. It is also a principle on which almost all Americans agree, and if we depart from that principle--which I think affirmative action does--then I think we're heading out to open sea, and I think that's our present situation.

Hollis: Equal opportunity as a concept has a serious problem, however, and that problem is that we take the distributions of burdens and benefits as they stand. Now, it's very easy to say, "I want the best development officer in any Ivy League institution anywhere in the country." The fact is that there are few Black development officers in the Ivy League institutions of the country, and it's not because of the peculiar skills required. It's because historically, alumni officers and development officers have a peculiar recruitment process--it's done through who you know, and who has always been doing this work. By going to the equal opportunity analysis at this particular point in history, one locks in the burdens that some people have historically carried. Unless there is an affirmative effort, a positive effort directed at accommodating that fact, then we will never get to the point where equal opportunity means what it appears to mean from the language.

Mansfield: Equal opportunity, is our liberal principle, and I don't think it is true to say that Blacks have not had a lot of opportunity within the, say, last 15 years. Before that, you wouldn't find very many Blacks in development offices and high positions in universities. But I think there has been a great change in the situation in this country, and I'm almost 50 years old, I grew up in Washington, D.C. a Southern, segregated city. When I look back at the difference between how Blacks were treated then and now, I see an enormous progress. The trouble with affirmative action is that it denies that this progress has occurred or has been in any way sufficient because that progress is based on the wrong principle, in this case, the principle of equal opportunity.

Hollis: I am one of those that argue that this progress that you refer to is illusory and not real progress. In 1950, for instance, 83 percent of the Black males in this country were in the work force. If you look at 1980, it's down to 71 percent. The progress that people refer to is the right to sit next to people in restaurants, if they have the money and the job to buy their way into the restaurants. This campus, for instance, still has not reached the high mark of 2 percent of its faculty being Black, and that's 20 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Mansfield: There are two things that can be said First, that there are so many other new opportunities for Blacks paying opportunities, that I think, a lot of them don't go into university administration. It's certainly the case that the best Black undergraduate students don't go to graduate school anymore to become professors. The percentage of Blacks going into academia is lower now than was a generation ago. And second, as with regard to employment, I was, of course, referring to racial discrimination, and not to employment. What's happened in employment is in great part connected to what's happened in the Black family and also in the American family in general.

Crimson: Does affirmative action take on a special character in a university where meritocracy has usually been seen as the highest principle.'

Mansfield: Yes, indeed, I would make a distinction between admissions and hiring. I would make a distinction between those situations where merit is expected and required, and a situation where a community must be filled and sustained. An undergraduate body is a kind of community. If it doesn't have a substantial proportion of Blacks and women, then it is defective as a community. One could easily fill up places at Harvard with 100 people with the highest SAT scores. We've never done that. We didn't do that before affirmative action, and we're not going to now, and I think that makes perfect sense. But you can't go around making "affirmative action" appointments on the faculty, and have people look at them and wonder whether they're here because they deserve to be, or because of affirmative action.

Hollis: Universities have a special duty in the area of affirmative action, and in addressing the problem of underrepresentation of people in various segments of society. We argue that they need certain kinds of skills, and the only place they can acquire those skills is in universities. Universities are gatekeepers and have a certain special duty in that regard I find that a lot of the choices that are made, particularly in faculty decisions and when one talks about mid-level and upper-level administrators has to do with this quaint thing called "fit," much more than it has to do with this thing called "objective qualifications." I have had, since I've been on this campus, a number of people comment to me about people not fitting; not that the people didn't have the qualifications, not that they didn't have the background, not that they would not make a contribution. It has something to do with what makes people who are here feel comfortable. And it has to do with some sense of having to share prestige, and share some other things that we like to keep to ourselves.

Bane: I'm pleased to hear Professor Mansfield say what he did about admissions policies, because I think the diversity of the student body is the right thing to keep in mind. I think to some extent, some of those same arguments were applied with regard to faculty, that there is an advantage to a university to having Blacks and women among its faculty. In paying attention to affirmative action, we've broadened our recruiting pool, we've made some special efforts to go out and bring people in to be interviewed who might not have been found by the old procedure. One more kind of personal thing since you brought it up. Was my being a women a factor in my appointment. Well I think it probably was, I think I would be foolish to deny that Do I feel terrible about that. Will no it's important for this school to have some women here. I would not have liked to have been hired just because I was a woman, I would not like to feel that somehow I was inferior to my peers. But to have that taken into account when they were looking at me, and being able to say. "Oh, yeah and she's a woman too, and that's nice, because that will be helpful with our women student, and with providing a women's perspective." It doesn't destroy my pride.

Mansfield: I think that when you speak of diversity, you must remember that diversity means diversity of contribution that each person is not just bringing characteristics, but bringing contributions to a community. I don't think it is necessarily the case that each racial or social or economic group in the United States is going to be like each other group. That I think is wrong, and that I think, is another mistake of affirmative action. Affirmative action freezes the status quo: it makes it seem that the professors which are the most highly prized and the ones which Black has been excluded from, are the ones which they should want the most.

Bane: It may very well be that groups dillerentially prefer to be lawyers than to be college professors. Well, so be it I don't think we're at the stage yet where we can say that so complacently though, because I think we still do have a history to get over. But I do think that the place where the University really should be worrying the most about the problem is at the level of educating the--students for example, making sure that the women are at least encouraged to take some math courses.

Crimson: To get more specific Nationally, 4.9 percent of post secondary teachers are Black. At Harvard, in 1980, 2.3 percent were Black, in 1983, 1.4 percent were Black. Why has the percentage of Blacks gone down.'

Mansfield: The situation is desperate. There are very few Black graduate students at Harvard.

Hollis: We must look beyond just how we produce one or two more sociologists in our department but begin to identify and encourage young under graduate minorities to move into the academic arena, whether it be teaching of administration. They can be persuaded, all of the choices are not made based on income. I don't know why people would suggest that Black people more than other people, want out of society nothing but money rather than prestige or a certain kind of relaxation. We must begin to stop pretending that there is an automatic conflict between equity of increased access and excellence. There is a lot of room between what is available and the ability to maintain both diversity and excellence on this campus. We must begin to move minorities from just those race focused activities such as the affirmative action office and the minority recruitment office, those offices where they are segregated and move them into finance. They have the ability to move into finance, they have the ability to move into governmental and political relations they have the ability to move into alumni affect. They have their own networks and they will bring more people into the University. But we've got to move to a critical mass on this University, and not into grate units, one person at a time.

Mansfield: About Mr. Hollis remark about Blacks looking to find jobs outside the automotive action area. I think the best way to do that however would be to abolish alternative action and do away with those special appointment which are institutionalized by alternative action. This, I think, would move us away from the tokenism of the 12 percent across the board approach Blacks now are perfectly capable of organizing themselves as individuals, and as a group to undertake positions which are not especially set up for them.

The responsibility should be placed on the Black students themselves, primarily they should be asked to think about what they want to do about what they want to choose, and what contribution they can make both to Harvard, and to their country. They should be asked to make their claims on the basis of their own drive as to what they can contribute not on the basis of past injustices, where they always have to accentuate the negative and, in effect, ask the white majority for justice on the basis of their own weakness.

Hollis: To the degree that you can not find tenured Black faculty on several faculties on this campus. I think that students can make decisions, but those decisions are less well-informed, and they are less well-prepared when they leave here, to interact fruitfully with society, and indeed, to accomplish the things that you would have them make choices about.