The Numbers Racket on Campus

...You get paid to go to college...

...It seems to me that there is a sharp difference between quotas and a practice that was authentically attempting to train and, in that sense, to liberate people from cultural constraints so that they could then move into the broad stream of effective national life and be treated as equals by other people...

...In fact, one theory behind this has been that you can catch the people who are late maturers and late learners, put them through the paces, and at the end of a year or two they may be able to pass into the world of the university and do very well...

...A: Do you think that the performance of minority students who are admitted on a marginal basis to the university under affirmative action can in general be accelerated up to the level of their other classmates - say, by tutoring...

...Now the Indians went very far and this has had very bad consequences...

...To have equality of opportunity does not mean that the sociological results are going to correspond to the sociological categories, and there are many reasons for this which have absolutely nothing to do with the writings of Mr...

...In New York City you get a salary if you are a qualified minority student...

...There are a couple of Indian states where the thing became so ludicrous that all of the castes except one or two became officially registered as 'backward.' There is a very good book, incidentally, on the Indian experience by Donald Smith called India as a Secular State that goes into great detail about this...

...A: In your article you said that "affirmative action was altered by a Labor Department order based not on the Civil Rights Act but on revised presidential directives only months after the Johnson order was announced...

...I am thinking, especially, of a number of new, state colleges...

...The other side of it, of course, is that the more one subsidizes the notion of mass education, the more difficult it is to sustain the idea of higher education...

...S: My feeling is that the practices of HEW should be brought into line with the Civil Rights Act - to make it in that respect legal - and that the honest thing to do would be to investigate all individual complaints and discriminations...

...If you go back for example to the 1950s, you had at that point, I think, possibly an overstress upon credentialing excellence...

...The moment you set up one category of castes that are eligible for preferential treatment, everybody else wants to get on the bandwagon...

...Or you may institutionalize double standards within the student body somehow, but only as they sort of unravel the whole fabric of academic standards...

...A: Do you believe that the legislators who originally framed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and favored affirmative action knew that this provision would eventually lead to some sort of quota system...

...If you eliminate these tests, you then get back into the question I was talking about earlier, the psychic trauma when people get thrown into an institution where they cannot float...

...A: What do you think will be the long term effects of affirmative action on the hiring and tenure granting procedures of university departments...

...In that case the institution might lower its criteria to make it simpler so that it won't be so painful for these people...

...They just didn't understand the university and the unique decentralized character of the thing...

...His criticism is especially directed toward HEW's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which is now requiring the vast majority of American universities to implement sweeping "affirmative action" programs under the authority of federal contract compliance law...

...For example, the law school test: one may object to it on the grounds that it is somehow invidious, but it has been proved to be a very effective predictor not only of how a student is going to do in law school but also how he is going to do when he gets out of law school...

...It has been proven time and time again in California that the academic performance of junior college kids coming into universities is just about as good as those who were admitted at the beginning...

...California's master plan has a triple-tiered arrangement: junior colleges, state colleges, and the university...

...Stanley Pottinger Director of the Office for Civil Rights in California there are quite a number of them - they have been doing this kind of thing tor a very long time for students who aspire to go on for a full four years of university education...

...Jensen, but have a great deal to do with mysterious elements in our culture...

...However, that isn't going to satisfy those people who are concerned about equality of results, because you might end up, for example, getting more Chinese in a mathematics department when what HEW calls for is more blacks...

...This is something, however, that is made possible by a very intense dedication to teaching in these junior colleges, and I think this could be very greatly strengthened...

...A: Let's take on the issue of quotas or preferential treatment in student admissions...

...This is one reason, I think, why the HEW people when they moved into the universities never knew what was going to hit them...

...Norman Podhoretz Editor Commentary they shouldn't belong to...

...Of course, if you go in that particular direction, you don't really need any kind of testing at all - other than of a person's ability to relate to a group, where you all sit around and contemplate your navel and think about things and so forth...

...It is very hard to do this because organized groups have got their clutches on a part of the pie...

...The question is what the special forms of damage are...

...It is like oil depletion allowances...

...I do know that the principal sponsors, men like Senator Humphrey for example, denied that quotas would be a consequence of this...

...There must be a certain point that you get to where the ludicrousness of this becomes apparent...

...But you have to be careful that in 'weighting' your standards you aren't also getting rid of them...

...In some of the better junior colleges...

...S: I tend to be optimistic in the sense that I cannot imagine that these practices will be uniformly institutionalized...

...Two articles by professor Seabury on the significance of "affirmative action" have recently appeared in Commentary: "HEW and the Universities," February 1972...

...And I see some signs that this is already happening...

...S: It's a middle-ranged bureaucracy that's inspired by a moral fervor...

...That isn't to say that all of them are like that, but that there are quite a large number who view their roles in negotiating with universities as that of purifying universities...

...Do you think that the racial and ethnic discrimination of affirmative action seriously endangers these principles of academic excellence...

...This, I think, is something that some of the enthusiasts should pay attention to, because an excess of their particular virtues can breed a mighty powerful reaction...

...This means there is a terrible pressure upon university administrations to place top priority on hiring people in particular affirmative action categories...

...The dropout rate in New York is absolutely phenomenal...

...But that is not the case in a large number of other places...

...That's one kind of thing...

...That was something that a lot of the HEW people really didn't think about...

...If one argues, as some do, that these standards for admission and these internalized standards for evaluation in the university are devices to trap people into the system by emphasizing standards which are so-called 'middle-class standards,' then the conclusion is that you are inveigling them into a system that The adoption of quotas would be the most radical change one can imagine in the American ethos...

...An Italian is disqualified because he is not the right color...

...And quite rightly so, because there are a lot of kids who come in and really don't want to do it...

...California, for example, was one of the pioneers in the development of the junior college system...

...It may be true tha some university departments may have been too lax in their procedures of hiring, that they haven't cast their net broadly enough because they have been lazy - without attributing here any discriminatory motives...

...S: I am not a cultural historian, but there is after all something of a Zeitgeist, a spirit of a particular period of time, that works its way in rivulets and eddies throughout your culture, and I think this is one of our problems...

...Instead of objecting to the categoric system, you invent some other category that can be protected...

...A: Let's discuss some of the arguments in favor of affirmative action...

...In the more specialized fields, you want to know whether someone does or does not know chemistry or physics, or whether he is competent enough to be admitted to an engineering school, or having gotten out, whether a firm should employ him...

...It is interesting that Stanley Pottinger is an appointment not of Elliott Richardson but of Finch...

...What we are now getting is an enormous backlash in the opposite direction...

...This, is a matter of extreme, private disgust among a number of black and minority scholars who have gotten where they are by virtue of their own achievements and qualities...

...It was what I call the Hyman Rickover effect of the 1950s, where many ambitious universities pressed very, very hard to become the best, the greatest, and so forth...

...Now, I'm not saying in any way that one ought to have a double standard and that universities should somehow be exempt from the ordinary rules of law that apply to everybody...

...How do you evaluate somebody who hasn't been evaluated...

...But nevertheless, there are so many scandalous instances of pernicious reverse discrimination going on that it would be rather nice to see HEW looking into these, but I haven't seen a single shred of evidence that HEW cares at all about the victims of its own current policies...

...I must say that if I were black and a scholar, I would share that disgust...

...that is to say, in the sense that you would agree upon a set of so-called goals which wouldn't radically require you to substitute those discriminatory categories for the categories normally used...

...Who and what forces are to be blamed or praised for this shift...

...S: You have to look back into the origins of this thing...

...There, the internalized sense of excellence in scholarship is very strong...

...Most of the energy that goes into this comes from non-minority, middle-class whites...

...A: Is there any way to reconcile the idea of affirmative action quotas and these principles of academic professionalism...

...You do need tests to see how people are going to be able to perform...

...there cannot be a university or college anywhere in the country today that does not know that where basic grievances exist, those who are aggrieved will turn to every available source for redress, including the Federal government...

...It's simply no longer education if the institution becomes trampled by an extraordinary number of people who are pushed reluctantly by their parents or by other incentives into the system...

...I am told now that the HEW Contract Compliance' office for higher education has in the neighborhood of 500 employees, including almost a hundred of these who negotiate with universities A: What makes HEW officials so determined and eager to wield their power against the universities...

...In choosing their own successors, they will choose people who will be equally mediocre so they are not threatened...

...Once you get these privileges, you keep them...

...It has a demoralizing effect upon everyone concerned...

...Making up for society's injustice,' I guess, is one way of putting it...

...That's the bureaucrat's approach to it, which is another thing that has struck me about HEW's affirmative action...

...The improvement of American colleges and universities in the thirties, forties, and fifties was accomplished over the dead bodies of mediocre people...

...Professor Seabury: I do...

...Is there any way to bring them together...

...But it is true that there is a very sharp distinction between a brick layer's union and a faculty of the university...

...This indeed is what has been happening...

...Now when one expands into wider areas, subsidizing children of minority families, you get more people who can then actually afford to come in, so the mass of the student invasion is infinitely greater than it was twenty or thirty years ago...

...There is a coincidence in time between admissions quotas, the assault on standards and tests, and a very powerful anti-intellectual movement which is really basing its conception of education upon spontaneity, intuition, and a kind of rap session where the idea is the man...

...A: Could or should the goals of affirmative action be reached by any other means besides quotas...

...It's easy to administer affirmative action where you are dealing with a large category of uniform types...

...It shouldn't be looked upon as a matter of minorities alone...

...You are going to have people coming in to tenure positions who are going to be there for an awfully long time, and if there is one thing people don't like, they don't like competition...

...I have never thought that it was possible at all to establish uniform laws of excellence...

...Who is to say whether this surgeon is any good...

...As I said earlier, we are passing through a very strange period in American history and you never know when these things terminate, and also - this is another thing that troubles me sometimes - you don't know what the reactive backlash might be when people have had enough...

...S: The question is, what are the agencies of altering the nature of human beings...

...In the university, the basic agencies of decision are departments, but if you take an industrial firm, someone goes to a central hiring office and gets a job...

...colleges are not expanding, and at this very moment of constraint you're getting this clout coming in from Washington when the slots you have open are very few...

...When I compare the language of these two orders, I see a substantial shift in both the theory and practice of affirmative action...

...Looking at this problem from HEW's point of view, do you think they should wait for complaints or that they should investigate each case on their own...

...A: Could HEW adopt any better procedure...

...Having said the generalization, let me qualify it...

...If you are looking for sociological equality of results, this is an entirely different matter...

...A: Do you share the common fear that the quota system might become so absurdly extensive that it would set ratios for every imaginable racial, national, political, or geographic group - that is, set ratios for everything...

...As many people have pointed out, the equality of opportunity is really not the same as the equality of results...

...The issue here is our confidence in a person who is moving into a very responsible position in the real world...

...It seems to me that this has a very pernicious effect - and rightly so as a number of black educators have pointed out - upon the morale of people who then begin to think that the only reason they are being hired, for example, is because of their color and not because of their intrinsic qualities...

...I was rather interested, for example, when Congressman Podell of New York became concerned with the problem of discrimination, that his first reaction was to demand of HEW that they also include religious groups...

...The terrible risk is that we might return to practices that would make the post-Reconstruction period appear to be a paradise...

...If you wipe out these standards, who is to know what a doctor's degree really means...

...Society too, if you look at it from a different perspective, has always counted on the reasonable accuracy of the credentialing practices of schools, so that when you are getting somebody from a school, what he is known to have accomplished is an indicator of whether you want him...

...What was begun, as I pointed out in my article, to alleviate the condition of blacks has now become a gigantic crusade for all sorts of categories...

...And surely they must know that if the university does not voluntarily deal with the issue, a vacuum is created which the government, like nature, abhors...

...These are two, entirely different ways of looking at equality...

...S: You can approach that question from two directions...

...The judgment of competence evolves upon a very narrow group of prudential scholars working in the field...

...It has always been the case that there has been a very high dropout rate in the state institutions that practice it...

...In practice, open admissions as in the New York City system has, in the real world, various disastrous consequences...

...Within the last year or two, he has become widely known for his outspoken criticism of "affirmative action" in the university...

...Now it is unfair to wholly interpret the question you asked in these terms, except to see that in many schools it is already happening in a very powerful way...

...Edgar C. Friedenberg talks about 'real' education as being shared experience and that the main object of education is to establish a sense of community among students...

...The differential skills in a university faculty are so vastly greater, so much more diffuse...

...A: When we talk about academic standards of excellence, what exactly are these and how can they be measured...

...I think that there are certain types of institutions which are going to be very badly affected, where the principles of real professionalism are being modified to the point of being sabotaged...

...What exactly should be done about affirmative action...

...It tended to place far too much emphasis upon scholarship and research to the detriment of anything else...

...Now, of course, the argument which is made by those who did turn in the direction of quotas is: how are you otherwise going to achieve social justice...

...This is the kind of phony, underclass radicalism which would prevent minority students from acquiring the very competitive skills that they need to go out and live in the world...

...What there is is a kind of internalized ethic where - in seeking out new scholars for your faculty and promoting them - one is really searching for the best one can get...

...The Alternative: In your article in Commentary (February 1972) you wrote that what has distinguished the American university over the last four or five decades has been a singular insistence upon excellence in scholastic achievement...

...These institutions that are now going back to mediocrity in the guise of social justice are going to have some trouble...

...But what was then attracted into it, I think, was a wide variety of compliance officers who were really coming to reform society with a messianic impulse...

...I would think some of the very best universities like Harvard, Columbia, and so forth are not going to be endangered by this...

...The whole business occurs at a time when there is a kind of generalized assault upon the merit principle, so what we are talking about is not something that is a matter of higher education, but goes into the whole institutional life of the country...

...This has always been a problem in any institution of higher learning...

...What is the difference in principle between lowering the cutoff line on the SAT scores of a minority college applicant and, say, adding ten points to a veteran's score on a Civil Service Exam...

...When you apply preferential treatment at a very advanced stage - here, I am thinking about academic recruitment - one establishes, in effect, double standards...

...That is the way I think it ought to be...

...Now, I said a year ago when I began getting interested in this that the effect of HEW's policies was going to breed more oppressed groups...

...Some people begin to play games with institutions that have lost a sense of their authentic and special role...

...The language and practices that develop in HEW are imitative of those that the Labor Department is using, so that the particular procedures, the particular modes of compliance investigation and compliance are derived from the industrial sector...

...The source for the orders is the Department of Labor...

...They are going to fight to keep it...

...That would be a helluva job for a federal bureaucracy to engage in...

...It requires universities to establish their own set so that they are not liable under law to be found in violation of the Civil Rights Act...

...Where exactly did this demand to achieve racial equality at the expense of all other considerations come from...

...One of the great risks in this business is what I call 'do-it-yourself affirmative action which is in a sense less sanctioned by the practices and policies of HEW itself...

...State universities in the Midwest were the ones which I believe pioneered the notion of open admissions: namely, everybody certified with a high school credential got to come in...

...S: The standards, of course, are the standards of scholarship and teaching...

...The fact that it began to be implemented with no public discussion whatsoever and the fact that this change began to be implemented mostly through the activity of bureaucrats is an astonishing feature of the national life at this time...

...Don't proponents argue that it is now recognized that certain minority groups have suffered social and legal injustices in past decades and centuries, and because of this, because blacks especially suffer from what educators call 'an inferior educational environment' in upbringing, that affirmative action requires universities to counteract this bias by waiving admission in the minority's favor...

...Some particular categories of people - whether we like it or not - like to do certain things that other people don't and they happen to be good at it because they are very motivated to do it...

...This economic favoritism is breeding vast ethnic discontents in the student bodies of New York universities...

...That is the development of an immense bureaucracy in Washington to deal with these problems of compliance...

...Each is rendered as a counteracting of a previous condition...

...S: It is possible to imagine ways in which the impact of quotas could be somehow modified...

...In this interview, The Alternative discusses with professor Seabury the short and long term effects of "affirmative action" quota systems as they are now being administered by American universities...

...This means you have to exclude from consideration everybody who is disadvantaged by not being 'disadvantaged.' A: Considering how deeply the motto 'to each according to his ability' is rooted in American culture, and particularly in American universities, what are the social and intellectual forces pushing affirmative action...

...And I see some signs that this is already happening...

...A: What do you think would be the long term effects of affirmative action - of the principle of inclusion - on student admissions, where we see an increase in open admissions policies or a greater breadth of admissions...

...The length and types of training involved in becoming competent are so different than those that might apply in a brick layer's union...

...It would be an embarrassing thing for them to do...

...S: I really don't know...

...And that is not something that the university alone is afflicted by...

...S: I haven't given enough thought to this question of admissions policies except in the more grievous instances and the grossest contrivances...

...S: In general, this applies to everybody...

...It is very interesting, for example, that HEW never itself sets its own quotas...

...S: It's the old parade of the horribles when one imagines these nightmares...

...Unfortunately, one of the strangest, current problems facing universities all over the country is the very tight budget situation...

...and "The Idea of Merit," December 1972...

...This is something that the government of India discovered to its great dismay in the 1950s and 1960s when they were dealing with the backward caste...

...It seems to me that the basic rule in all of this is to think about what the consequences are going to be of practicing things of this sort...

...This order reshaped it into a weapon for discriminatory hiring practices...

...That way lies madness, of course...

...When he came to OCR, I am sure this was a very modest kind of enterprise...

...The first direction is how all of this might benignly affect academic hiring practices...

...When you are dealing with a minor, fractional form of discrimination, I suppose an argument can be made that it is going to have some good consequences...

...S: I am not in principle opposed to the idea of open admission...

...This is a very interesting kind of a problem...

...It isn't true that you can do this as a temporary measure until you have redressed past wrongs, until you have reached some new, equitable standard, before you go back to ordinary practices...

...If an improvement may be seen in this sense, it ought to be incumbent upon departments to pay much more attention than some of them do to really going out and searching, rather than doing so routinely...

...Now what is happening all over the country is that a wide range of affirmative action programs are now being put together by very alarmed administrations threatened by the cutoff of federal funds and also by a combination of pressures within individual colleges which themselves want to do the very thing HEW is doing, only they want to do it even more so...