The Progress of a Bad Idea

...But what is more important, statements such as Pottinger's reveal either an appalling ignorance or a zealot's interpretation of the function of legal sanction...

...The University of California at Berkeley for months resisted disclosing some of the information that OCR demanded...

...More frequently, regional OCR offices are constrained to soften their approach...

...Guidelines" and "regulations," though offered in great abundance, are as deliberately vague and enigmatic as the smoke and fire of a mysterious oracle...

...The "proportion-to-applicant" rule, because it is less extreme, is all the more strictly enforced, and many universities are being held in a quasi-probationary status until they accept it...

...Contrary to OCR's charges that black candidates are being denied placement due to discrimination, the situation has now grown so lopsided that, according to the AAUP Bulletin (March 1972), "Harvard and comparable institutions have been warned against raiding black colleges...

...A timetable for this "achievement" was required immediately...

...OCR accepted this plan, and a new rule - "proportion-to-labor force" - might have been born, had not OCR's regional office changed its mind one year later when it claimed that Brown's discriminatory problem was too "deep" for such a plan to work...

...Qualification," as interpreted by the universities is an obstacle that OCR is trying to remove from the path of affirmative action...

...But "most" or "best" are adverbs rarely used by OCR in conjunction with "qualified," and even "qualified" itself has a habit of slipping away from the words "minorities and women...

...Order 4...

...We desire to appoint a Black or Chi-cano, preferably female...

...It is easier to couch its directives in vague and indeterminate language, and then watch the radical, liberal, and conservative members of each campus fight it out among themselves...

...This reversal is the sine qua non of the affirmative action "principle," and means that the rule of group representation has now superseded, as a basic, institutional necessity, the rule of individual worth...

...With its history of unwisely mixed idealism, enthusiasm, and governmental authority, its effect has been a familiar one: not only does it tend to destroy precisely what it tries to protect, but it totally destroys what it is most thoroughly successful in protecting...

...Are you or are you not ordering Davidson College to submit the...

...Everyone knew that a quota system - no matter how carefully administered - distorted the justice of fair employment at an individual level...

...The word "affirmative" suggested strength and moral certitude, "action" suggested vigor and perhaps a touch of crusading ardor...

...A Background If the quota "principle" of affirmative action seems to have sprung up suddenly and surreptitiously among us, it is because the ideology of affirmative action has had years to grow without our realizing that any "principle" was involved...

...On the one hand, they want to avoid endangering the financial status of the university and incurring the wrath of the more radical students, administrators, and faculty members...

...Life, Oct...

...and it was here, in appointments to highly qualified positions, that the insensitive mandate of quotas committed its most glaring injustices...

...Your prompt response to my letter of May 12 with four candidates, all of whom seem qualified for our vacancy, is greatly appreciated...

...The quota system as it is now being implemented at universities - under HEW's euphemistic guise, "affirmative action" - is a spectacular failure for the civil rights movement and an awesome tragedy for the university...

...In March 1971, a similar charge was levelled against the University of Oregon on similar grounds: that only one minority candidate enrolled out of several minority applicants...

...During the early sixties, at the zenith of the civil rights movement, "affirmative action" seemed to be nothing more than a political slogan...

...If Davidson College is being ordered to report to you, I would also appreciate your citing to me that...

...Proponents insisted that racial proportions were only to be an indicator of possible discrimination, that individual "equal opportunity" was still their paramount goal, and that, in sum, affirmative action was only a particular means to a general end...

...I would greatly appreciate your drawing to my attention your Ph.D...

...Dear...: We are looking for female...

...Letters on campus bulletin boards now read: "The Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington is seeking qualified women and minority candidates for faculty positions at all levels beginning Fall Quarter 1973...

...In practice, affirmative action programs are supervised and enforced by OCR's ten regional offices in all universities receiving over $10,000 in federal funds...

...Now, the speed with which HEW is forcing universities to realize this final "proportion-to-population" rule varies from campus to campus...

...This led professor Seabury to respond in Commentary (May 1972): "Does HEW now regard universities as federal projects...

...program simply because only one minority student enrolled out of over 100 applicants...

...and members of minority groups...

...Since there is no indication that any of them belong to one of the minority groups listed, I will be unable to contact them...

...These proposals were at least partially realized...

...Contrary to the age-old auspices of "equal opportunity" under which it was introduced, the net effect of the affirmative action quota system has been to popularize and institutionalize an unprecedented relationship (or lack of one) between opportunity and reward...

...so that) employment practices will not perpetuate the status quo ante indefinitely...

...The backward reasoning of "affirmative action" is that proportional representation will somehow guarantee fair judgment of merit...

...With the Supreme Court unwilling to rule on the matter and the most vocal university groups siding with OCR, university administrators can hardly regard their own compliance as voluntary...

...By 1969-1970, university faculties were being ordered to comply...

...If the written affirmative action program proposed by a university is not sufficiently extensive, extreme, or specific, OCR can reject it again and again any number of times until federal officers are satisfied that the university is acting in "good faith...

...students who are in those categories...

...Affirmative action" is a quota system, and a quota system requires an institution to treat an individual not on the basis of his effectiveness or merit, but on the basis of any group characteristic, from race to age to economic background to the first letter of a last name, that is not subject to individual choice...

...At this stage, a new category is pulled out of OCR's cryptic lexicon: the category of the "qualifiable" candidate...

...The result is peculiar...

...After reviewing them, OCR can either accept or reject all or any part of the program...

...The enforcement of any quota system is a relatively simple matter, and the enforcement of affirmative action is no exception...

...The Ideal Quota The Office for Civil Rights never itself proposes standards for university hiring...

...These it will now spend diligently to ensure justice qua group - an effort, not many years ago, considered racist...

...OCR's "New Speak" The Office for Civil Rights, like any bureaucracy possessing great powers and questionable motives, has difficulty explaining clearly how its programs work...

...And once "qualifiable" candidates perforce become "qualified," OCR pulls another deft, syntactical maneuver by grace-lessly demanding that all departments "hire and promote qualified women and minorities...

...Each regional OCR office has its own fluctuating whims and fancies...

...In the nature of the practice, the principle has changed from discrimination to 'representation.' Women, blacks, and Chicanos now are to be employed, as a matter of right, in proportion to their number, and the principle of professional qualification or individual achievement is subordinated to the new ascriptive principle of corporate identity...

...From such loaded language we can infer only one, very simple distinction: "goals" are quotas that HEW happens to approve and support...

...The resulting academic recruitment policies must be puzzling to candidates of any race or sex who have grown up with old-fashioned notions about civil rights and academic liberalism...

...OCR has ruled, for instance, that unless the department can prove that the qualification is necessary, any qualification "which tends to discriminate according to race and sex" (continued on page 28...

...Third, "goals" or "guidelines" are only confusing synonyms for numerical quotas, and no one - either inside or outside HEW - has yet offered a reasonable explanation how a "goal" differs from a "quota...

...Only from their record of rejections can we extrapolate the operational principles toward which OCR is headed...

...2) an article "The Drive Toward Equality" in Change (October 1972...

...etc...

...HEW's attempts to justify affirmative action as a legitimate prerogative of federal government and executive mandate has led to a number of faux pas...

...Ever since 1965, this distinction between means and ends has been evaporating...

...Frequently, OCR must infer racial or ethnic origin from related data (e.g...

...Graduate students, faculty members, or anyone else interested in the debate over campus "affirmative action" programs may want to write to the University Centers for Rational Alternatives, 110 West 40th Street, New York, NY...

...On the other hand, OCR desperately wants people to understand that its role is to persuade universities to do what is right (by enlightening them with "guidelines" and "goals"), rather than to require rigid compliance (by enforcing quotas...

...The rationale for this divergent standard seems to be based on practical considerations alone...

...Yet, despite the euphoria, the "principle" of affirmative action had still not been accepted...

...It is an outside, regulatory institution...

...Faculty hiring at Brown University offers still another innovative interpretation of "good faith" employment practices...

...Contradictions are replaced by confusion...

...Professor Sidney Hook of the University Centers for Rational Alternatives has asked HEW the simplest of rhetorical questions: "What is the cognitive difference between saying (1) 'You are to aim at a quota of 20 percent redheads for your staff within two years,' and (2) You are to set as your goal recruitment of 20 percent redheads for your staff within two years...

...Even some OCR offices evidently thought it unfeasible to demand an across-the-board female plurality of faculty members - in toto and in each department - since women do in fact slightly outnumber men in the population at large...

...Moreover, campuses with particularly radical faculties frequently go beyond anything OCR might require...

...President Spenser of Davidson College, after reams of exasperating correspondence with OCR, found he could never determine precisely what his local office wanted or under what authority it acted...

...Pottinger is singularly intent on putting law to a quite different task: to inspiring attitudes of "good faith...

...For this reason, it is difficult to know just what HEW considers "reasonable" when it insists that universities hire as many minorities as "would reasonably be expected by their availability...

...Ironically, this may have allowed affirmative action quotas to be wielded more openly against the university than against any other federal contractor, since Title VII specifically prohibits enforced quotas as a means to eliminate discrimination...

...As you know, Northwestern along with a lot of other universities is under some pressure...to hire women, Chicanos, etc...

...But "affirmative action," according to the text of the Order, is a different "concept...

...It absolves OCR of guilt, and rests the responsibility for quotas on university policy rather than on OCR's interpretation of federal law...

...Dear Sir: The Department of Economics at Chico State is now just entering the job market actively to recruit economists for the next academic year...Chico State College is also an affirmative action institution with respect to both American minority groups and women...

...Late in 1971, San Francisco State College, responding - at least in part - to OCR's persuasion, called for "an employee balance which in ethnic and male/female groups, approximates that of the general population of the Bay Area from which we recruit...

...report...

...If - as some claim -OCR is attempting to bring about a "New Reformation" in civil rights, then Pottinger has encountered an old Calvinist dilemma: how to keep an absolute insistence on "good faith" without "good works" from degenerating into oppressive demands for "good works" with no real need for "good faith...

...If so, how far down the road of government control have we come...

...Stanley Pottinger resolutely affirms that "the difference is not a matter of semantics...

...Whenever it appears to OCR that the wrong side has won at the university level, it can always use its power of veto...

...it simply accepts or rejects whatever programs are offered by campus administrations...

...if the university is not coerced in any way, "goals" are not even goals...

...President Kennedy, who coined the phrase in 1961, used it as a vague exhortation - to the effect that Congress and the Executive force states to take "affirmative action" against civil and economic injustices suffered by minorities...

...On the other hand, they feel an obligation to award candidates solely on the basis of merit...

...They can also join the Committee on Nondiscrimination (444 Park Ave...

...As the bureaucracy sees it, goals are "reasonable" and "produce results," while quotas are "rigid," "exclusive," and "compel" employers to make unwise decisions...

...Universities are being compelled to do what the Act forbids employers to do...

...The procedures alone have had their difficulties...

...goals remain as a barometer of good faith performance...

...One of OCR's adamant demands is that departments make "vigorous and systematic efforts to locate and encourage the candidacy of qualified women and minorities...

...The latter is defined as the requirement that "no person may be denied employment or related benefits on the grounds of...

...Complete records of the current racial and sexual composition of university employees, both academic and non-academic, and specific affirmative action "timetables" and "goals" showing "planned" and "attained" progress toward an "acceptable" composition are compiled by the university administration and sent to OCR...

...Quite simply, it describes a group of candidates whom the department does not presently regard as qualified, but who had better be qualified soon if the department wants to prove it is "serious" about affirmative action...

...churches and schools) may follow such programs voluntarily...

...Ultimatums are not, as yet, being issued...

...Many university departments have found it demeaning and a breach of inviolate academic tradition that an outside organization should gain immediate access to confidential records...

...President Spenser, incidentally, has yet to receive another answer...

...The question is especially critical for the future of the universities, whose worth to our society and to civilization has been sustained - throughout history - by an almost religious insistence upon merit, equal opportunity, and the very highest levels of professional excellence...

...To the movement, the purpose of an ideology had been realized, and the goals of a crusade had become enforceable edict...

...In only one way did the early slogan prefigure the later "principle": "affirmative action," as Kennedy envisioned it, implied that the federal government should, by seizing a certain moral prerogative, override the parochial standards of slower, less activist institutions...

...The Women's Equity Action League) who have already criticized the effectiveness of OCR because it has not to date terminated a university contract...

...Late in 1972, the Office for Civil Rights reached what may be a portentous decision: it declared it will no longer consider individual cases of discrimination (these will now go to the EEOC), but instead will concentrate only on "patterns of discrimination" (i...

...Spanish sur-named candidates"), or require members of a department to identify each other's race, or use what it calls a "visual survey...

...Affirmative action, according to its advocates, would allow overall racial proportions to be used as "lawful" evidence, and thus provide federal authorities swift means of circumventing individual court cases in forcing employers to abandon discrimination...

...The University of Michigan, for example, whose proposed affirmative action programs were repeatedly rejected throughout 1971 for indefinite and inadequate "numerical goals and timetables," was told by the local OCR office that it must "achieve a ratio of female employment at least equivalent to their ability as evidenced by applications for employment" - that is, to the number of female applicants...

...Reading the full text of this correspondence, one suspects that OCR, more interested in repentance than compliance, would almost prefer the manifest guilt of an obstreperous refusal to a dispassionate willingness-to-obey-if-ordered...

...And in still later correspondence: "Your letter does not respond to this essential question...

...Executive Order 11246 includes the proviso that all employment in the contractor's institution must comply...

...The original argument of the civil rights movement was that fair judgment of merit will eventually lead to proportional representation...

...Industries employing unskilled or semi-skilled workers were made to comply first...

...Formal homage is still commonly given to "merit" and "qualification" and "excellence," but these are becoming bare vestiges of a bygone era...

...There are endless variations in OCR's standards...

...With matchless zeal, affirmative action is attempting to foster what is best for both, and in fact its advocates claim that the fair treatment of minorities and the well-being of academia is its only reason for existence...

...As the phrase implies, affirmative action requires the employer to make additional efforts to recruit, employ, and promote qualified members of groups formerly excluded, even if that exclusion cannot be traced to particular discriminatory actions on the part of the employer...

...Although nineteen minority students had actually been offered positions, OCR never mentioned that fact in its report...

...It is of no use to argue that federal contracts or grants may involve only one specific area of the university (usually research in the sciences...

...Public interest, Fall 1972...

...The most extreme and far-reaching of these principles is the following requirement : that the proportions of racial and sexual categories of faculty members to the faculty as a whole be made identical - eventually - to the proportions of racial and sexual categories in the population as a whole...

...Later, federal authorities devised means of including within their executive domain higher-skilled and professional employees...

...It "requires the employer to do more than ensure employment neutrality with regard to race, color, religion, sex, and national origin...

...The ideal solution, of course, is to find enough candidates who are both women or "minority group persons" and who are well-qualified (or at least not utterly unqualified...

...This, in sum, has been OCR's most positive statement on the issue...

...In short, the words were simply a rhetorical strategem that could evoke all the grander idealism we now associate with the Kennedy era...

...Elliott Richardson, until recently Secretary of HEW, for instance, defended affirmative action by claiming that it is government's "vital interest" to assure "the largest possible pool of qualified manpower for its projects...

...From all sectors of the business, professional, and academic communities there soon arose serious and embittered criticism...

...It is ludicrous to call the result of arbitration between two institutions, one of whom is invulnerable and carries life or death punitive power over the other, an "agreement...

...As they wended their tortuous path from slogan to law, the words "affirmative action" attached themselves to all sorts of notions vaguely associated with civil rights...

...A department of one mid-western university was recently charged with discrimination in its Ph.D...

...According to Bell: "What is extraordinary about this change is that, without public debate, an entirely new principle of rights has been introduced into the polity...

...Title VII prohibits discrimination among employers except where educational institutions are concerned...

...In the most recent policies of the Department of Labor and HEW, and in their response to such criticism, we are finally witnessing the emergence of what Bell has accurately identified as the "principle" of affirmative action quotas...

...Letters between departments now read: "Dear Colleague: Claremont Men's College has a vacancy in its...Department as a result of retirement...

...From the outset, OCR has a rough idea what "guidelines" it considers "acceptable...

...10018, or subscribe to their newsletter, Measure...

...Not surprisingly, this is a solution that academic departments are now spending a great deal of time and energy pursuing...

...HEW's answer: "quotas" must be filled without fail, while "goals" are only an "indication of good faith" - again, law is thrown back into the phantasmic realm of spiritual purity...

...Affirmative action" is coming to be defended and enforced by its executors as a philosophy in its own right: not so much as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, necessary not because it best insures non-discrimination and the primacy of merit, but because it is thought overt discrimination is the only way a society can achieve true equality...

...OCR does not dare issue specific figures and face unified resistance among universities...

...OCR sometimes tries to convince, and sometimes makes outright threats, but it dreads the prospect of giving a simple order, of stating honestly what it in truth demands...

...But the reasoning ought to be set straight...

...Newspaper editorials lauded Title VII together with affirmative action as a "law with a conscience," as civil rights transformed into "the law of the land...

...It is for this reason, it is because individual merit is being rescinded by group privilege, that the issue of quotas has such profound significance...

...According to the simple law of supply and demand, departments must now offer a significantly higher salary to a minority candidate than to a similarly qualified non-minority candidate - if they want to keep him (or her...

...The language of this order particularly distresses departmental chairmen who know that to survive and excell departments must look for something quite different: namely the most qualified candidate of any race or sex...

...In practice, some large universities (e.g., The City University of New York and New Mexico State University) have been threatened with termination of funds even though they proved that they had done everything in their power to comply, and that OCR's hazy "guidelines" were at fault...

...We desire to appoint a black or Chicano, preferably female...

...S., New York, NY...

...In universities holding federal contracts or grants, where affirmative action has had such extreme and notorious consequences, they are enforced by HEW and HEW's Office for Civil Rights...

...OCR has chosen the path of coercion, in part to justify its own existence as an office that is "doing something" about civil rights, and to satisfy some groups (e.g...

...In a June, 1972 speech, he declared: "I am convinced...that the spectre of lost autonomy and diminished quality among faculties is one which obscures the real objective of the law against discrimination...

...First, for the words "agreement between" ought to be substituted the words "command by" OCR...

...There are very good reasons why HEW follows such a policy...

...Stanley Pottinger, Director of OCR, offers the following ambiguous observation: "Good faith efforts remain the standard of compliance set by the Executive Order...

...HEW's Office for Civil Rights repeatedly emphasizes that a "good faith effort" is all that is necessary for university compliance (quite rightly, since qualified minority applicants may not be available in every instance), but just as emphatically OCR insists that "the best evidence of good faith is a good result...

...From a legal standpoint, the case of the university is somewhat unique since universities are not covered by any part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...

...the AT&T case...

...The programs are drawn up individually with each institution, and are designed to rectify the employment practices of any academic department "having fewer minorities or women in a particular job classification than would reasonably be expected by their availability (Revised Labor Dept...

...Protesting these arbitrary enforcement tactics, William J. McGill, president of Columbia University, claims that OCR is disregarding established precedents of labor regulation: "One of the greatest achievements of American law has been construction of the rules of orderly conflict between management and labor, embodied in our now classical concepts of labor law...We do not now have such formal procedures...

...In general an affirmative action program has come to mean any timetable by which an institution modifies its entrance procedures and requirements so that its membership will include certain predertermined proportions (most frequently, equal to proportions in the general population) of "recognized" racial, ethnic, or sexual categories...

...This remains a characteristic of affirmative action today...

...Early in the Johnson Administration, the idea assumed crude legal shape...

...Indeed, Pottinger seems surprised and embarrassed when asked to examine only the substantive effects of his office's "guidelines...

...In June of 1972, President Nixon signed an amendment to the Civil Rights Act which now includes universities under Title VII...

...Affirmative action," according to OCR, is an "agreement between the Office for Civil Rights and the university" that departments shall "make an effort" in "sincere and good faith" to fulfill certain "goals" with respect to minority employment...

...10016) which has been expressly organized to combat all forms of reverse discrimination and the associated dislocation of academic integrity...

...He finally wrote: "If your 'request' is in reality an order, I would appreciate your stating this in clear and unequivocal terms...

...Our doctoral requirements for faculty will be waived for candidates who qualify under the affirmative action criteria...

...Such a demand was never necessary...

...law which gives HEW the authority to issue orders to any college...

...The "proportion-to-population" rule still applies to racial minorities, but for women, they will allow a principle somewhat less extreme: that the proportion of women faculty members to the entire faculty be identical to the proportion of women applicants to applicants of both sexes...

...If the university refuses or is slow to comply with its own guidelines, or if it denies access to its departmental records, OCR may, after a formal hearing, "cause to be cancelled, terminated, or suspended, any federal contract, or any portions thereof...

...Thus, good faith or bad faith, if the university is coerced into compliance, "goals" are quotas...

...Because most major universities are 30 to 60 percent dependent upon federal funds, they are effectively at OCR's mercy...

...In most instances, departments consider this a small price to pay for a solution to the quota system dilemma...

...In theory and in ordinary practice, the purpose of law is to proscribe, regulate, and influence definable acts and tangible procedures...

...May 1972) under the questionable authority of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act...

...Departmental chairmen know very well this is the only way they can successfully survive the "system...

...It relented only after OCR made repetitious promises that such records would remain "secret" - and after OCR directly charged UCB with "non-compliance...

...If a department cannot fulfill its quota with what it feels are qualified candidates, pleas to the university and to OCR that it has made superhuman efforts to recruit such candidates will rarely be of much avail...

...Premises have been replaced by conclusions, means by ends...

...8, 1971) Second, the words "make an effort" in "sincere and good faith" ought to be deleted entirely...

...Private businesses, though long exempt from anything but "non-discrimination," lately seem vulnerable to affirmative action quotas administered by the EEOC (viz...

...But there are exceptions, and in the West, regional OCR pressure seems particularly intense...

...Most of these were made available through the generous cooperation of the University Centers for Rational Alternatives...

...But this has probably come too late, judging from the most recent interpretations of Title VII, to have much effect on HEW's policies...

...As it was finally passed in 1964 the Act included no mention of "affirmative action," but legislative blueprints under that name continued to be discussed as enforcement tactics...

...State laws prohibiting employees from revealing or recording their race on institutional records (laws once thought to be "pro-civil rights") are yet another obstacle to OCR...

...But as trans-cendentalized law or legally enforced moral crusading is wont to do, affirmative action betrays and finally defeats its own purposes...

...On September 24, 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, and affirmative action, with its unprecedented "quota" approach to fairness in hiring, was made effective law for all institutions and corporations receiving federal funds...

...Once the implication of the italicized clause is accepted, that universities cannot rid themselves of discrimination because they cannot even identify it (invisibility, alas, is the very nature of "cultural" and "institutional" discrimination), and once it is decided that discrimination must be eliminated, then an external quota system is inevitable...

...A law's consequences, he implies, should not be allowed to "obscure" the intentions of its maker...

...Justice qua individual, once the legitimate concern of civil rights activists, is no longer worthy of OCR's resources...

...I do not believe I can state the question more clearly or directly...

...Preference will be given to women and minority group candidates in filling this position if candidates of equal quality are identified...

...Direct quotations from Stanley Pot-tinger are taken from (1) a speech to the National Association of College and University Attorneys (Honolulu...

...Title VI prohibits discrimination associated with all government contracts and programs except where employment is concerned...

...They are nothing at all...

...Brown administrators, after having their first program rejected, proposed in December 1970 to make the proportions of minorities in their faculty the same as the proportions of "available members of such groups in the labor forces...

...In businesses holding federal contracts, such programs are enforced by the Department of Labor's Office of Contract Compliance under the aegis of Executive Order 11246...

...The Question of Merit While officials at OCR are poring over columns of statistics and debating among themselves - presumably - which group quotas shall best ensure group justice, chairmen of university departments are facing the peculiar difficulty of trying to comply with their campus' racial and sexual timetables while maintaining the academic quality of their departments...

...Institutions which employ members are liable to have such a program forced on them by federal law...

...Good works" are the only reliable measure of "good faith," and fulfilled quotas are the only certain means of satisfying OCR's demands...

...With every university trying to fulfill its quota, the current competition between academic departments for minority or women candidates has reached a fever pitch of intensity...

...Sacramento State recently sent out letters which read: "Sacramento State College is currently engaged in an Affirmative Action Program, the goal of which is to recruit, hire, and promote ethnic and women candidates until they comprise the same proportion of the faculty as they do of the general population...

...Affirmative Action" as it is defined in Johnson's Executive Order - and this cannot be over-emphasized - is essentially and explicitly different from simple "Non-discrimination...

...Once specific programs had been developed by the Department of Labor and HEW, and a wide variety of contracting institutions had succumbed, complaints were raised against the surprising stringency of affirmative action's statistical demands...

...I should very much appreciate it if you could indicate which of your 1972 candidates are either Negro or Mexican American...

...e. quotas...

...Professor Hook has concluded that the supposed clarification is nothing more than a "semantic evasion...

...Quali-fiable" is a word OCR uses repeatedly in its correspondence with universities...

...Some institutions (eg...

...What is Affirmative Action...

...Only now have they assumed a definite, almost doctrinal shape...

...June 30, 1972), and...

...Now, the argument has been reversed...

...Congress began to give serious attention to "affirmative action" legislation when it was proposed as part of the Civil Rights Act...

...When OCR resorts to threats, uni versities genuinely fear for their own survival, for behind such threats are hair-trigger methods of sanction: after a thirty-day notice and without any specific charge of discrimination, HEW may begin procedures for suspension of funds...

...For the sake of clarity alone, the smoke ought to be cleared from such innocuous phraseology...

...OCR, obviously, cannot claim to represent the conscience or the inner wishes of the university...

...Should present trends continue, future generations may look back on the affirmative action years, a most peculiar aftermath of the civil rights movement, as a period when our society began to discard "equality of opportunity" for what David Bell has called "equality of result" (phe...

...Professor Paul Seabury (Commentary, Correspondence, May 1972) has concluded that the "Executive Orders in the name of Affirmative Action clearly contradict the letter and the spirit of the Civil Rights Act as well as the intentions of its sponsors...

...In 1962 and 1963, it found its way into a number of minor executive orders, but its function was always more symbolic than legal...