A Debate on Affirmative Action
Tenzer, Morton J. & Coser, Rose Laub
Rose Laub Coser's article, Affirmative Action: Letter to a Worried Colleague," appeared in our Fall 1975 issue. Below is a comment we received on it from Morton J. Tenzer and Rose Laub...
...At the very least this has added another expensive and timeconsuming layer of bureaucracy within the university system, and at worst has led to the hiring, retention, and promotion of people who would not have been hired on straight academic criteria...
...This can hardly have failed to affect "excellence" in many departments...
...Examples: if one decides to give written exams to students, one does injustice to those who cannot do good thinking under pressure...
...In more recent years, however, the aberrations and mistakes made related to affirmative action have created new stereotypes and handicaps for blacks and women in the academic profession, who, in the vast, overwhelming majority have arrived at their positions through their own exertions and their own merit, but whose accomplishments are being contaminated by the affirmative action appointments...
...Tenzer that they resemble in their poverty more the old-time headquarters of a budding trade union than what we find today in the same government or in the same university administrations...
...From "Private Colleges Holding Their Own," in Science, December 26, 1975 q Rose Laub Coser Replies: I have good news for Mr...
...3. I know of cases where blacks or women have been hired with clearly inferior qualifications to other candidates for the positions because departments felt constrained to comply with goals and timetables of the sort Ms...
...Some basis on which to conduct a dialogue...
...I note that Mr...
...Tenzer believes that "academic blacks and women in general have in the past been...
...No, we would not send him to the wall or to the Gulag, but we would make it harder for him to make discriminatory decisions and to use offensive language against minorities...
...The chairman apparently couldn't take such a risk and instead hired someone (note: without peer review) whom he called a "peach...
...One could say that the whole insistence of democratic socialist opposition to the Leninist-Stalinist regimes is based on the notion that in real politics it is possible through complex processes of democratic procedures to arrive at solutions that satisfy all the players, in which no one is sent to the wall (al paredon...
...But suppose I call it the lesser-evil approach, a notion that should be dear to Mr...
...Virtually every school preparing a detailed affirmative action plan for HEW was forced to create an Affirmative Action or Equal Employment Opportunity office...
...says it is so...
...if one decides to give objective exams in order to minimize personal considerations, one does injustice to more sophisticated students...
...and nobody would want that, would they, Ms...
...If you conjure up the broken-egg image, a whole set of other images are being evoked, and I become a Stalinist apologist, a Castroite, an advocate of the off-with-their-heads philosophy, and am guilty of closed-minded self-righteousness, moral blindness and ruthlessness...
...The results of a massive educational sociology type of study that could provide data from which we could argue for decades, or subjective responses to her flat statement that she knows "of no department that has suffered in excellence by adding women or blacks...
...If they get the jobs by being "just as" good, the world will go around faster...
...I am astonished that an old socialist, and one who goes to pains to introduce himself as an intellectual, should, at times when there is a wholesale onslaught on the excellence of education by a penny-pinching federal government, by economy-conscious states, cities, and towns, at times when mediocrity in the schools is being deliberately fostered from the first grades up to graduate schools for "reasons" of economy—that an old socialist, I say, should get all that hot under the collar when women and blacks ask for their share...
...Excellence" is so difficult to measure, anyway, and if all departments are declining as a result of universally enforced government regulations, then it is difficult to measure the decline, and relative excellence is maintained...
...The man who told him at an elite institution that he "could not fill the freshman class with kikes from the Bronx High School of Science" would hardly say this today because he would be breaking the law...
...Can one offer more than gossip to help Ms...
...I am glad that Mr...
...That decisions always involve hurting some people is simply part of the human condition...
...Tenzer fighting...
...Files of such cases have been collected by the Committee on Academic Nondiscrimination and Integrity and by HEW itself, and a review of such records might persuade even Ms...
...Furthermore, these Equal Employment officers, who have to review all faculty personnel decisions, frequently have no prior university faculty or administrative experience that qualifies them to review with the slightest shadow of academic credibility the expert peer-group opinion concerning candidates for appointment...
...This is thanks to various antidiscrimination laws culminating in affirmative-action legislation...
...Coser thinks so positive...
...Tenzer agrees that "excellence is so difficult to measure anyway...
...Twenty-five years ago I was rejected by an Ivy League institution, I was smirkingly told, only because I was a resident of the greater New York metropolitan area...
...Tenzer, with his socialist conscience COMMUNICATIONS 209 of which he is so proud, not agree that people have an obligation toward their community to make up, collectively, for past injustices that this community has perpetrated...
...Well, then, I consider it a lesser evil to have some increase in bureaucracy for the greater good of implementing our professed values of equality and social justice...
...Certainly the most frightening thing about Ms...
...Are we not being asked to make sacrifices, in the form of taxes or giving time to worthy causes, in support of our values...
...as in Cuba, or to the GULAG as in the U.S.S.R.—or, in Ms...
...This is precisely why we need affirmative action: so that women or minorities won't have to be "at least" as good as white men to get the same jobs...
...Although I was trained as a political scientist, much of my truly political thinking has been shaped by the critical analyses offered in this journal...
...It would take a letter as long as Ms...
...If we have a right to be proud of our society's accomplishments (such as, for example, the democratic process), should we not also be ashamed of its shortcomings...
...For, as the sociologist W. I. Thomas already recognized at the beginning of this century: "Certain it is that no civilization can remain the highest if another civilization adds to the intelligence of its men the intelligence of its women...
...Coser that in more than one instance, injustice was done, quality was affected, and "excellence," if it existed, suffered...
...If such decisions are made through democratic process, so much the better...
...Dozens of her colleagues around the country may feel that they know of departments in their own schools or elsewhere whose standards have declined as a result of affirmative action, but who would be reluctant to single out publicly these places out of a sense of pity, helplessness, and fear of being accused of racism or sexism...
...Perhaps the following mixture of fact and subjective impression will be somewhat persuasive...
...Naturally, the editors of Dissent cannot be expected to agree with all of the articles they publish, but readers of this journal have a right to expect that such a difficult subject as affirmative action in higher education, which poses profound issues of bureaucratic control over the autonomy of higher education, (pace, Max Nomad) the use of bad means to achieve good ends, (rest easy, John Dewey) the meaning of the Civil Rights Act's prohibition against discrimination, and the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection, will be treated in more than the casual, brutal, and meretricious fashion accorded to it by Ms...
...Example: I knew a department chairman who refused to hire somebody because the letter of recommendation said that this was a man who did not tolerate mediocrity...
...indeed, I have more than once said that Irving Howe has been the most influential writer affecting my political orientation...
...Tenzer's Social Democratic heart...
...And what else is Rose Coser saying with regard to her view that "every policy will hurt some people who do not deserve to be hurt...
...Coser's original to rebut her article point by point, and it is hardly worth the effort to repudiate each step of her argument...
...To acknowledge this does not make one "brutal"—another epithet Mr...
...yet I have read virtually every issue since a fellow graduate student who was then on your editorial board brought the first issue to my attention 20 years ago...
...This whole administrative superstructure has been imposed in a time of relatively declining funding support for higher education, and has had to be purchased at a cost that might have otherwise been spent on more and better faculty...
...To use modern social science jargon: no, it is not true that all decision games are zero-sum...
...Not a single shred...
...but it could make one a bit less obtuse...
...Would Mr...
...There is no evidence," she says, ''...that the level of excellence is being threatened through numerical goals...
...Coser may believe in cracking eggs on her way to socialism, but I would have thought that other editors of Dissent had long since abjured the "off with their heads" philosophy she seems to espouse...
...It is hard to believe that we need to start all over with a catechism that begins, "Two wrongs don't make a right...
...This, I submit, is a case of misplaced indignation...
...Nevertheless, Dissent has consistently been a source, a sounding board, and a touchstone for those interested in democratic socialism and resistant to the complacencies and hypocricies of liberalism on one hand and the moral blindness and ruthlessness of the totalitarian left on the other These preliminaries indicate the standpoint from which I read Rose Coser's "Letter to a Worried Colleague," about affirmative action...
...I wonder what it is, then, that makes him so sure that it has declined as a result of affirmative action...
...Below is a comment we received on it from Morton J. Tenzer and Rose Laub Coser's response...
...Of course, one has not always agreed with everything appearing in Dissent or written by Howe (I continue to believe that T. E. Lawrence was a liar and blackguard, not a hero...
...This barely disguised anti-Semitic admissions policy hardly seemed proper then to a deeply frustrated teen-ager, nor did it seem acceptable some years later when I 207 was teaching at an elite institution and struggling against its discriminatory admissions policies when I was told by its director of admission that, if he didn't use geographic criteria, he could "fill the freshman class with kikes from the Bronx High School of Science...
...Morton J. Tenzer Comments: I am not one of the old circle of acquaintances who write knowingly to each other and to a receptive audience in the pages of Dissent...
...Tenzer hurls at me...
...Coser's piece is its tone of close-minded self-righteousness...
...It may even ease our conscience, but will not change the facts...
...Let me seize on what I think of as one glaring example of moral blindness...
...I also find it a lesser evil if occasionally—and I emphasize what I said in my first letter, that it could happen only accidentally and not as a matter of policy—a white male is not recognized for his merit, if such is the price we regrettably have to pay for abolishing systematic discrimination against blacks and women...
...Coser asserts that we all know that certain elite institutions of higher education accept students from Nebraska over equally well qualified students from New York, and that this precedent can be used with equanimity as a reassurance to those worried about the application of irrelevant criteria in hiring under affirmative action...
...Ens...
...q Grateful for Little Blessings Although 27 percent of the sample [of 100 institutions of higher education studied by the Association of American Colleges] are in "serious trouble," it is not predicted that all are headed for extinction...
...It should be clear that those truly concerned with democracy and socialism will strive for a time when, among other things, blacks and women will be admitted and hired by schools and colleges without regard to their race and sex...
...What kind of evidence would satisfy Ms...
...Or: if unions decide to insist on seniority rights they do injustice to those younger people who are better qualified...
...I suggest that he encourage some student to study the increase over the last five years or so in bureaucratic personnel in Equal Opportunity Offices compared to the increase, during the same period, in college and university administrations, including a comparison of allotment of supportive resources...
...If equality and democracy are important to us, if we believe that blacks and women have been given less than their share for decades and centuries, is it not justified, then, that we ask those who have most profited from this, namely white males, that they make some sacrifice...
...He could hardly have used this notion as a criterion of excellence had there been a search according to affirmativeaction procedures...
...4. Perhaps the worst victims of the affirmative action mania have been academic blacks and women in general who have in the past been found in smaller numbers proportional to their numbers in the whole population, but who in my experience over the last 20 years in large state universities, small elite private colleges and universities, and the Ivy League were assumed by all those I knew or ever heard mention it to be at least as good as everybody else—whether they were graduate students or full 208 COMMUNICATIONS professors...
...Has he not accepted the vast increase in bureaucracy that has come with most welfare measures, from social security and protective laws to Medicaid and Medicare...
...Indeed, the very existence of these offices is a repudiation of faculty self-governance in matters of appointment, promotion and tenure, and requires the resort to nonacademic criteria in the procedure...
...if one decides to give oral exams, one does injustice to those whose creativity is not on the verbal level...
...I appreciate and share his concern for quality of education, and can only repeat what I said in my first letter: affirmative-action procedures can help improve excellence by giving recruiters longer lists of applicants to choose from and by helping eliminate particularistic criteria and arbitrary decisions...
...Tenzer decries the growth of bureaucracy...
...or to insist with Orwell that language may not be abused, that "bad" quotas don't become ''good" goals and timetables, just because the regional director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, acting under authority granted by the Contract Compliance Division of the Department of Labor to implement an executive order...
...I have seen a number of Equal Opportunity Offices both in government and universities, and I can assure Mr...
...Coser see that some things have happened that do represent an alteration in the way things are done that is not all for the best...
...at least as good as everybody else" (my emphasis, RLC...
...Has Parkinson's Law started with the Equal Opportunity drive...
...Who would have thought that one would read in Dissent of all places the old Stalinist apologia, "you can't make an omelet," etc...
...Government policies, such as affirmative action, which enforce the use of these irrelevant criteria are inimical to long-range objectives that accept the legitimacy of racial pride and identity and sexual self-concern, but reject the concept of counting, sorting, and assigning by government-imposed criteria rather than by individual talent, merit, and effort...
...None...
...Coser's context, no one is denied a job on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other undemocratic criteria...
...Whom is Mr...
...2. Similarly, there are now many more blacks and women in line administrative positions in colleges and universities who are appointed to meet various aspects of the numbers game in affirmative action...
...It's all a matter of what name you give it...
...1. There is no question that large members of blacks and women have been moved into jobs at universities that did not exist before affirmative action...
...Many if not most of these jobs have gone to blacks or women...
...There have been lawsuits and other remedies taken by those whose equal rights were denied by these discriminatory practices...
...It is, I believe, an example at least of forgetfulness about fundamentals and at worst an example of moral blindness and ruthlessness...
...In some case, they have been disastrously unsuited by background and experience for their jobs, and while errors were also made in the old, pre-affirmative action days, the fact that so many people in important positions don't know what they are doing (and even admit it, from time to time) must have had a somewhat serious effect on the institutions they help run, and the quality of education offered at those places...
Vol. 23 • April 1976 • No. 2
