November 13, 2000 Opinion Let's Be Clear About Affirmative Action By Faye J. Crosby When George W. Bush referred to "affirmative access" during the final presidential debate, Vice President Al Gore candidly said he didn't know what that meant. Unlike most Americans, though, Gore does have a clear understanding of affirmative action. UCSC Photo Services As Bush demonstrated, affirmative action has come to mean different things to different people. Yet research shows that people's ideas of what affirmative action is and how it works shape their reactions to it--more so, even, than their political affiliation, their gender, their race, and their affluence. That's why it's a pity that clear, accurate information is hard to come by. Some opposition to affirmative action is grounded in racial and gender prejudice, mixed with self-interest. But opposition also springs from miseducation. In employment, affirmative action has been the law of the land since 1965. Today, affirmative action regulations apply to tens of thousands of organizations, including most of the largest employers in the nation. Affirmative action affects one in four employed Americans. Yet virtually no textbook in American civics, politics, or government explains how the law operates. The gist of the 1965 law is simple: The federal government and all federal contractors above a certain size must be affirmative action employers. A federal contractor is an organization that does business with the federal government. The private organization that does not want to be an affirmative action employer has the option of declining government contracts. At the core of any affirmative action plan is a comparison between utilization of qualified individuals in designated categories and their availability in the workforce. Designated categories are determined by gender (females) and by ethnicity (African American, Asian American, Latino/a American, Native American). When utilization roughly matches availability, everyone is satisfied. When utilization falls short of availability, corrective actions must be considered. How is availability determined? The Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) helps employers determine the figures. So does the nonprofit American Association for Affirmative Action. Companies can now purchase computer programs that calculate the availability of people by category in certain occupations in defined regions. Political figures from Jesse Jackson to Gerald Ford point out that affirmative action is not about hiring people who fall below the grade. Even Ward Connerly, arch opponent of quotas, has publicly endorsed classical affirmative action. For many, the rub occurs when a well-qualified candidate from one of the designated groups is hired, retained, or promoted instead of another candidate who seems to be even better qualified. If a man scores 85 on the test, how can it be fair to hire the woman who scores 83? Tests sometimes contain bias. A raft of research studies document the persistence of bias in both the construction and the administration of numerous screening and other tests. Consider the studies showing that African Americans must meet more stringent requirements for housing mortgages than white Americans. If one has reason to suspect that bias may have crept into a test, then it is only fair to adjust the scores to correct for the bias. Moreover, diversity in talents and backgrounds is usually important to organizational vigor. When affirmative action operates through monitoring and correction, slow steady progress is made for women workers and for ethnic minorities. Economists have documented the progress. Economists have also documented that affirmative action employers are more profitable than comparison organizations. If considerations of fairness are important in employment situations, they are absolutely vital to the educational enterprise, especially in public education. Admission to the best universities is a matter of competition, especially for professional schools. It can feel galling when a white student with good grades and high test scores is refused admission to a law school while a competent student of color with lower scores is admitted. But if the school knows that it disproportionately admits white students and if it has reason to suspect bias in the educational system, the school may devise and deploy race-sensitive admissions procedures to assure diversity in the student body. A diverse student body benefits everyone. Some benefit is immediate: An important study at the University of Michigan shows that students in diverse educational settings think more creatively than students in homogeneous groups. Some of the benefits are longterm. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored a study of more than 80,000 students from 28 elite colleges and universities in 1951, 1976, and 1989, and contrasted the fates of ethnic minority students who were "special admits" with other students. The "special admits" differed in only one salient regard: Decades after graduation, they are more likely than their white counterparts to be active civic leaders. William Bowen and Derek Bok, authors of the study, note that universities, especially public universities, exist for the public good and conclude that race-sensitive admission policies are fairer to the nation than the supposed race-neutral policies advocated by the foes of affirmative action. Affirmative action is still needed in America. Statistics demonstrate that women still earn less than comparable men and that people of color earn less than their pale-skinned counterparts. No one favors discrimination or special privilege. In a truly great democracy, education and accurate information should play a greater role in political decisions than do polemics. Faye J. Crosby, professor of psychology, is coeditor of the new book Sex, Race, & Merit: Debating Affirmative Action in Education and Employment (University of Michigan Press, 2000).