Fair Game

...Is Lepper trying to give us good news: Have opportunities in American education been opened up at such a sensational rate that groups discriminated against a few years ago are now ready to compete at the highest levels of academic accomplishment...

...and most of us owed our presence on campus to the open-handedness of parents and the G.I...

...If not so many are dropping out, one may suspect that standards have been lowered to accommodate the slow learners...

...If I am unable to churn up more passion over this indubitable loss, perhaps it is because I remember from my own college days, ages before Open Admissions, the large numbers of white male clucks who passed through my alma mater without discomfort...

...Last spring I had a long meeting with several of these professors, mostly old-timers who reminisced about the days when City was the glory of New York...

...One day within the halls of this academy, a prominent female member of the new guard smacked a prominent member of the old guard on the jaw...

...The old-timers argue most vociferously that politics was at the heart of the introduction of Open Admissions in the first place-"Better let them in than have them burn the place down"-And that politics has since tainted decisions on hiring, promotion and tenure, with "radicals" being favored...

...Having thus guaranteed everyone a chance at success, we can leave the scholars to their eccentric ways, making certain only that they are underpaid...

...It is a statistical system that deals more with the hiring of typists, bricklayers or punch press operators...

...Sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, the study found that the government's "affirmative action" policy of forcing colleges to hire women and blacks has had the effect of reducing faculty quality and academic standards...

...Open Admissions Alas, rejoicing is premature, at least in the case of inner-city youths...

...that phony new courses have been started for the benefit of students who can't cope with real courses...

...I suppose he decided he had already had enough publicity...

...With what profit to them and with what loss to the schools, though, remains a question...

...Today, they form a faction that is trying to get rid of the college president, Robert Marshak, along with the man he brought in to head the history department and help carry out Open Admissions...

...Marshak, with whom I talked briefly, emphasized the remedial program available to new students, and had an assistant send me a batch of data on drop-out rates at City...

...Well, since there is usually only a passing relationship between a diploma and its recipient's fitness to do most jobs, sheepskins ought to be made even easier to come by than they already are...

...Living in a society where a college degree is valued for the crassest reasons, where it is nigh indispensable for making one's way, many come out of high school ill-equipped to go much further in that line...

...there colleagues do not speak to one another in public and speak most disparagingly about one another in private...

...Nowhere has the fight over Open Admissions been conducted in a less elegant fashion than within the history department of New York's City College...

...This lady used to teach political science at California State University at Fullerton...

...He defends his department's efforts at innovation-such as a course on the history of one's own life-As a response to the needs of a new kind of student...

...Knowing that scholars are notoriously unfit for business, the personnel people will, let us hope, content themselves with an occasional PhD for cachet and by and large settle for ordinary degrees...

...Whereas admission to college must take into account sex, race and other deprivations, admission to graduate school should take into account nothing except brains, aptitude and a willingness to study...

...As for those few who find themselves with a taste for scholarship, they may continue on-but only if they have the ability...

...They maintain that the entrance of large numbers of ill-prepared students has led to a lowering of academic quality...

...that the faculty is under pressure to be generous with grades, sparing with Fs...

...I left City College soured by the whole argument...

...Graduate school ought to be difficult to get into, difficult to stay in, thoroughly elitist...

...Perhaps they may become sensible enough to accept the two-year thing for jobs that now demand, for no good reason, the four-year thing...

...They were in college for exactly the same reasons that youths from the inner city wish to be there, as a step toward well-paying jobs...

...The society cannot doom to lifelong failure youths whom it has already failed in childhood...

...What's to be done...

...We are only asking universities to hire based on merit, and using standards of merit, there is no doubt that higher education will be the richer for bringing in women and minorities to represent the pluralism that exists in American society...

...Bill rather than to any remarkable attributes of our own...

...College should be a faster, cheaper interlude for the great majority of inmates...

...Some of the charges are being investigated by a committee of the Faculty Senate...

...She also said, according to the New York Times, whose typesetters may have garbled her sentence: "The charge that women and minorities are not prepared as potentially excellent educators as white males cannot be substantiated...

...Apparently one utters the obvious at the risk of becoming known as a racist or a sexist, for that is all the report's author, Princeton economist Richard A. Lester, actually did...

...But through Open Admissions and other recruiting devices, large numbers of the "disadvantaged" are now getting into college...

...Fair Game by walter goodman Affirmative Action Some weeks ago, a report on the Federal program to impose greater "equality" upon university faculties produced a small commotion, making new news out of what had long since become old news...

...If large numbers of students are dropping out, one may rejoice over the number who get through...

...There is nothing edifying in listening to a group of professors characterize their chairman as a liar, or hearing the chairman describe his senior colleagues as incompetents...

...No doubt it brings its benefits-but the intellectual give and take that occurs in few places outside of college can scarcely be enhanced by the presence of lots of people who found high school trying...

...Then, even if more of them turn out to be male Orientals than seems appropriate to the statisticians at HEW, well, tant pis...

...Yet now that college has become such a gateway, it cannot be a cloister...

...Although he has nothing complimentary to say about the school's Black Studies program, he denies that students are getting a free ride...

...If colleges were not the main gateway to a decent job, there would be no lines to get in...

...From college, holding onto their readily won diplomas, young folks of all sexes and shades can go into corporations, where in a short time they can be trained to do whatever jobs need doing...

...The responses from interested parties ran according to form...

...As he summed up the issue in an interview: "The whole affirmative action system, by which it is determined whether a university is underutilizing women and blacks in tenured positions, should not really apply in choosing a medieval historian...

...that brighter students are shunning City College and going elsewhere...

...A vice president of the National Organization for Women charged: "It's a move to consolidate the 'old boy' system of male superiority...

...Cheap Diplomas Barring a quantity and quality of remedial help that is beyond the capacities of our colleges, how can Open Admissions do anything but lower academic quality...

...My efforts to organize a meeting with members of the department who share his views, similar to the meeting I had with the other side, failed when the chairman suddenly became unavailable...

...minority groups are not clamoring for a monastic existence of scholarly endeavor...

...A black administrator at Harvard declared: "To suggest that affirmative action is lowering standards is very close to what I consider an intellectually racist approach to minority hiring...

...One can find in such figures what one wishes to find...

...Mary Lepper, director of the higher education division, took "strong exception" to the notion that "affirmative action is lowering the excellence of higher education...

...The problems for them are rather closer to home than medieval Europe...

...On both sides, the issue of Open Admissions has become mired in careerism, ideology (when a member of the new guard came around with a petition for prisoners' rights, a member of the old guard asked him whether he had one for the rights of their victims), and personal feuding...

...The chairman of the history department, for his part, marks down such charges as the grumblings of a few fogies of little academic distinction and conspicuous reactionary tendencies...

...If some education accompanies the experience, that must be a cause for joy-but first things first...

...Over at the Office for Civil Rights, the HEW agency that has been pressing affirmative action programs on our major universities under the threat of withholding Federal money if the percentages of minorities and women on their faculties are not deemed satisfactory, the reaction was piously muddled, true to the traditions of the place...

...I could get no response from him to my phone calls or letters...