Affirmative Action
Held, Virginia
A favorite argument used by opponents of affirmative action claims that it undermines the very people it is supposed to help. Affirmative action, it is said, robs women and minority members of...
...The right has succeeded in perpetrating the fraud that affirmative action means and requires unfair preference...
...What the left must concede is that the right has correctly understood that the battle is one of images, and that, so far, the right has won this battle, largely through its advantages in the ways the media work and are structured...
...Most of FALL • 1995 • 467 Affirmative Action us know from personal experience how those with the power to decide on hiring, promotion, and admissions see outstanding merit in those most like themselves, in gender and race as well as outlook, and fail to see it in those without such resemblances...
...Fewer than 7 percent of doctoral degrees in philosophy from all institutions in 1991-92 were awarded for dissertations advised by women...
...On other measures, however, they are not faring so well...
...Similarly, unions with a long record of reserving skilled positions for a virtually all-white and allmale membership showed no signs of yielding to reasoned argument alone...
...And the number of African-Americans in the profession is still shockingly low...
...with affirmative action they can be required to show evidence of less discriminatory practices...
...The faculties of leading graduate programs are still almost all white and all male...
...That greater diversity in education and employment benefits everyone is a story that could be made compelling...
...Some of us can remember when Harvard had not one single woman among the over four hundred members of its senior arts and sciences faculty, and yet was claiming that no discrimination had occurred because Harvard simply picked the "best people...
...In philosophy, again, it has been widely believed that new Ph.D.s who were women or minority members had an advantage based merely on group membership, not talent...
...468 • DISSENT...
...But this is not the society that would exist without affirmative action, so the choice is not between bias-free employment and education decisions and maintaining affirmative action...
...And women and minority members sometimes agree: because they are faced with slurs and innuendos about how they got their jobs or promotions or admissions only through affirmative action, they think they might be better off without it...
...The fact that quotas are not only not required but not permitted does not dispel the fables of minority privilege or gender advantage...
...My own academic field of philosophy is supposedly characterized by the ideals of reason and impartiality, and philosophers might be thought among those whose judgments would be least affected by bias...
...of the 19861988 Ph.D.s, 62 men and no women were Associate Professors and 23 men and no women had tenure in 1989...
...But if affirmative action gets submerged in the current frenzy of white male resentment, the modest progress toward greater justice in employment and education of the past few decades may be overwhelmed...
...It should be everyone's goal to bring about a society in which this would be standard operating procedure...
...But the perception in the profession shows no signs of abating...
...Does discrimination continue in more than a few isolated incidents...
...It is highly unlikely that such practices would have changed without the background threat offered by affirmative action...
...There is no doubt at all that it would be better to get a job or a promotion or a school admission based on unbiased judgment that one deserves it rather than through the pressure exerted by affirmative action programs...
...The statistics on the widening gap between rich and poor or on growing poverty and homelessness have been washed aside by the stories of shiftless, violent youth and of welfare fraud...
...Reagan's mythic welfare queens stay with the audience, while the statistics never move it...
...What needs to be addressed is the very different question: given continuing discrimination, is it better for women and minority members to face the slurs and innuendos from the position of having a job or a promotion or a degree, or to face comparable slurs and innuendos about a lack of competence or merit from the position of not having the job or the promotion or the degree...
...It seems part of the wider success of the right wing in persuading voters to accept their myths, and to imagine, still, that the programs of the Radical Right may bring them greater prosperity or social stability...
...Or we can remember when the members of a previously allmale law school faculty proclaimed that they had "solved" their woman problem because they had hired one woman...
...Affirmative action, it is said, robs women and minority members of the respect they deserve for getting hired or promoted or admitted to colleges or professional schools...
...66% of the women [with 1986-1988 degrees] were employed on a full-time basis in the academy, while 65.9% of the men were...
...Then they would be able to feel they got where they got through their own talents and merit, and everyone would agree...
...What affirmative action does require is some evidence that patterns of discrimination are changing...
...The choice then becomes a great deal more realistic, and which judgment to make becomes much more clear...
...The puzzle is how so many who would be harmed by the ending of affirmative action fail to see how they would be harmed...
...A report on the status of women in philosophy states that the perception that women are doing very much better than men in obtaining jobs in academia is not well founded...
...Report from the Committee on the Status of Women, American Philosophical Association Newsletters, Spring 1993, p. 42...
...Yet bias remains prevalent...
...No reasonable reader of an even semi-responsible newspaper can doubt that it does...
...The idea that objective criteria such as test scores and grade-point averages can eliminate bias—for instance, in school admission policies—ignores the extent to which such scores inadequately assess whatever talents and merit are worth developing or employing...
...The facts refute such claims...
...Although women have made significant inroads into the lower ranks of the profession and into the less than leading institutions, they are still passed over for the more privileged positions that have lighter teaching loads and chances to direct dissertations...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
