The Affirmative Action Debate

Steven M. Cahn, Steven M. Cahn, Steven M. Cahn, Steven M. Cahn, Steven M. Cahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415938679
• eBook ISBN: 9781317827771
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is an essential guide to the full range of arguments surrounding affirmative action. Following the debate, as no other collection does, from all the early foundational articles to up-to-date selections, the book presents the strongest contributions from both sides of this highly charged issue. For students and general readers seeking to understand the controversy, this book offers a unique guide to the main lines of argument in the discussion.

The contributors include most of the major contributors to the debate: Anita L. Allen, Robert Amdur, Michael D;. Bayles, Tom L. Beauchamp, Barbara R. Bergmann, Derek Bok, William G. Bowen, Carl Cohen, J. L. Cowan, Ronald Dworkin, Robert K. Fullinwider, Alan H. Goldman, Sidney Hook, James W. Nickel, William A. Nunn III, George Sher, Robert Simon, Paul W. Taylor, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephen Thernstrom, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Celia Wolf-Devine, and Paul Woodruff.

Diversity

In Defense of Affirmative Action

Barbara R. Bergmann

When Bill Clinton was campaigning for the presidency in 1992 as the candidate of the Democratic Party, he promised to appoint a cabinet that “looks like America.” At the time Clinton made his rather poetic promise, nobody, including his political enemies, spoke out against it. Nobody said that attempting to fulfill that promise would be a bad idea.

A cabinet that really looks like the American labor force would have six of its fourteen seats filled by white and minority women and two of its seats filled by minority men. As Clinton’s cabinet selection process was approaching its end in early 1993, only two of the appointments had gone to women. Feminist organizations, concerned that women would again be restricted to the marginal role they had played in all previous administration, urged publicly that more women be appointed. Women reporters at Clinton’s news conferences kept asking him about it.

This pressure provoked an angry outburst from Clinton. He said that those pressing him to appoint more women were “playing quota games” with the selection process, implying in his response that he himself disapproved of quotas. The truth, however, was that Clinton did want to appoint more women than his predecessors had, and he had apparently decided that three was the number he wanted. Many reasonable people would call that “setting up a quota,” since Clinton was trying to appoint women to a predetermined number of slots. At that point, with few vacancies left, the simplest and most practical way to ensure the appointment of a third woman was to earmark one of the remaining slots for a woman. That Clinton had done so became nakedly obvious when his first female candidate for the office of attorney general ran into trouble. He then put forward a second woman for the job and discarded her in turn when a problem arose. His third woman candidate was appointed and confirmed. She, like the other two, was obviously capable, qualified, and experienced. But by that time it was clear that Clinton had not been looking for the “best person” for the post of attorney general without regard to sex or race—he had been looking for the “best woman.”

The Clinton cabinet episode raises questions that always arise when attempts are made to increase the gender and racial diversity in any group of employees. One fundamental question is whether diversity of sex or race or ethnicity in the cabinet was a worthy and important goal. How much harm would have been done if Clinton had appointed a cabinet consisting entirely or almost entirely of white males? He might simply have explained that each cabinet officer he appointed was, in his honest opinion, the best he could select from the wide range of candidates of both sexes and all ethnic and racial groups that he had considered. Would real harm have been done to the country’s interests?

In thinking about that, we can note that presidents have always taken care to see that all geographic regions are well represented in the cabinet. Seeking that kind of diversity is not considered wrong; it is thought of as just being fair to all sections of the country. People in the West would be surprised and suspicious and hurt if the cabinet turned out to contain only people from east of the Mississippi. Clinton’s selection of a cabinet that was markedly short of women and minorities would have done something far worse—it would have dealt a major setback to the pride and status of people in those groups. It would have strengthened the hand of those who think women, blacks, and other minorities do best in the jobs they have traditionally held and should stay there.

A second question is whether Clinton could have succeeded in assembling a reasonably diverse cabinet without setting up numerical goals by race and sex. Could he have avoided a cabinet that was completely or almost completely composed of white males without paying attention to the race and sex of the candidates as he made his appointments? There are good reasons to think that the answer is no. Dozens of superbly qualified and well-connected white males were available and competing for each cabinet position. A white male president can be expected to be most comfortable with advisers who are white males. Unless he disciplines himself by using a system of hiring goals for women and minorities, he may do the most comfortable thing and appoint only white males. President Clinton showed his leanings in this regard when he appointed his key White House staffers. They were chosen without publicity, and apparently without any effort at affirmative action. They all turned out to be white males, with one exception—a woman who was later replaced by a white male.¹

Suppose, in appointing the cabinet, Clinton had chosen, one at a time, the person who appeared to him to be the best for each post, taking no special measures to find and include women and minorities and not worrying about appointing “too many” white males. How likely is it that there would have been much if any diversity by sex or race in his cabinet? Clinton really did have to mark out a seat for a woman if he was to shoehorn that third woman into the cabinet. The need to resort to such a potentially embarrassing method testifies to the low chance of achieving the degree of diversity he wanted without it.…

Diversity has positive value in many situations, but in some its value is crucial. To give an obvious example, a racially diverse community needs a racially diverse police force if the police are to gain the trust of all parts of the community and if one part of the community is not to feel dominated by the other part. While education and physical fitness are certainly aspects of “merit” in police officers, and while an appropriate floor on merit needs to be set and adhered to, efforts to get a corps of officers who are as educated and fit as possible should not be allowed to produce a police force that fails to include significant parts of its community. In such cases, it is legitimate to take account of what a candidate contributes to diversity.…

I have already noted the benefits of diversity in the president’s cabinet and in police forces that serve racially diverse populations. Diversity prevents power from being concentrated in any one group and promises sympathetic and fair treatment to all sections of the public. Besides government officials and police officers, other examples of occupations in which diversity is especially important include journalists and others working in media, physicians, social workers, models in mail-order catalogs, judges (and therefore lawyers), managers and other people in authority, and politicians and other government employees. One of the major benefits of diversity is that it makes visible an organization’s adherence to the principle that no type of person is excluded from performing any function, including responsible, important, and prestigious ones.

Another benefit of diversity is the differing points of view, insights, values, and knowledge of the world that members of various groups bring to their roles. Examples of the harmfulness of lack of diversity are easy to find. In the United States, medical researchers have repeatedly studied large groups of subjects consisting entirely of males and done no corresponding studies on groups of female subjects. The result has been that we know a lot more about men’s health than about women’s. Women in Congress and women medical researchers, newly increased in numbers and power, have lately challenged that practice. In decades of research on poverty, the economics profession, dominated by white males, ignored the concentration of poverty among female single parents and the problems they faced with sex discrimination in the labor market, with child care costs, and with child support enforcement. Researchers also largely ignored racial discrimination as a leading cause of poverty.

Diversity is especially important in some situations, but it might be argued that in a racially diverse society there is some positive value to having diversity in any sizable work group, regardless of its function. Leading a segregated life on the job makes workers less fit for life in a community where respect for all groups is supposed to be the rule. All-male crews sometimes aggravate the misogyny of those who serve in them, and all-white crews sometimes aggravate racism. In all-male and all-white groups, disparaging remarks about those not represented are likely to be uncontradicted, and attitudes harden.

Perhaps the most important reason for valuing the introduction of diversity into workplaces is that it helps dismantle two caste systems—one based on race and another based on gender—that have been responsible for a great deal of misery. A caste system dictates that your social status forever be that which you were born into, limits your choice of occupations, regardless of your talents and taste, and visits automatic disrespect on those at the bottom of the caste pecking order. The fate of many of those at the bottom of the race caste system is poverty. The fate of many of those at the bottom of the sex caste system is a choice between poverty and dependency. Our caste systems based on race and sex were in full flower until quite recently, and the remnants of them are still very much with us….

The major justification for affirmative action in the workplace is its use as a systematic method of breaking down the current discrimination against African Americans and women. The desirability of diversity provides the strongest justification for affirmative action in college admissions. At a university, young people are trained for leadership roles in the professions and in public life. If we are to erase the deep racial cleavages that currently trouble us anytime soon, we cannot have campuses where black and Hispanic young people are rare or nonexistent. We cannot have white leaders who spent their college years in segregated institutions and never interacted with African Americans or heard their point of view.

Our campuses are in many ways the best parts of our country. For all their faults, they are places where people of intelligence gather to interact, to enjoy our literary and artistic inheritance, to enlarge their vision, to hone their critical sense, and to understand their place in life and their own potentialities. It would be tragic if on some campuses, and in some programs on our campuses, those African Americans who could perform there creditably were to be absent. A scientist who teaches at Brown says this about the talents and efforts of such students:

In twenty years of teaching at the university level, I have taught, advised and mentored a good many affirmative action admission students and not one of them could by any stretch of the imagination have been called an “underachiever.” Most, in fact, were clearly overachievers who had made great strides despite the many obstacles that society and chance had placed in their paths. No, affirmative action doesn’t allow anyone to get by on the color of his/her skin—we don’t give affirmative action grades (except to athletes) no matter how the student got in. Affirmative action partly redresses a history of wrongs. We won’t need it anymore once we have eliminated those wrongs.²

Campuses are also, of course, the places where the training and certification for the most prestigious, conspicuous, interesting, and lucrative careers take place. There is an obvious connection between the desegregation of higher education and the desegregation of the workplace: certain occupations cannot be entered without a credential from a college or university. Furthermore, there are important niches in certain occupations that anyone who has not passed through an elite university finds much more difficult to occupy. So the elite institutions, along with all of the others, cannot remain segregated if we are to fully desegregate the country’s jobs and to get black and female faces into all professional ranks, up to the highest.

It might be argued that achieving integration through affirmative action is appropriate in those parts of the labor market where outright discrimination still occurs but not in higher education, where discrimination in student admissions is no longer a problem. If affirmative action succeeds in the workplace, perhaps in the future a greater proportion of the sons and daughters (or grandsons and granddaughters) of the currently disadvantaged groups will have attended better elementary and high schools, grown up in better neighborhoods, and developed the hopes and sense of self-worth that will enable them to apply themselves in school and achieve admission to colleges and universities in greater numbers on a “fair” basis—on the same basis as whites and Asians.

In a sense, affirmative action programs on campus are a way to jump-start or accelerate the process of reducing racial disparities—by getting more members of the current generation of minority young people into higher education and not waiting for the better academic and psychological preparation of future generations that may follow when blacks gain a better position in the job market. Affirmative action in higher education admissions speeds the arrival of the day when racial disparities in status and economic success will have been greatly reduced. It makes allowances for something that admittedly is not the fault of black teenagers: the relatively poor preparation of many of them for higher education.

The major argument against affirmative action in higher education admissions is that it is unfair to those candidates with better test scores who are displaced to make room for the African American and Hispanic students. For those who urge this point of view in university admissions, the nation’s need to erase the effects of a shameful caste system count for nothing.

In fact, colleges and universities allow many considerations besides academic promise to affect admissions. Across the country, selective colleges and universities, which turn away many highly qualified students, admit several hundred athletes of low or nonexistent academic promise each year. These athletes, some black and some white, displace applicants—including black applicants—who have better test scores and better grades. Besides football and basketball players, schools give preference to runners, soccer players, baseball players, swimmers, and lacrosse players; the school must have them in order for their football and men’s basketball teams to be allowed to compete in events sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It is sometimes said that one benefit of sports is to increase the number of blacks on campuses, that athletics constitutes a kind of affirmative action program that everyone can get behind—a two-for-one bargain. But many athletes have no interest in their studies, and no time or energy for them, and take the places of more academically motivated white and black students.

Many schools allow for regional diversity in their admissions process, giving preference to students from regions in which applicants are scarce. At Princeton or Yale, an applicant from Nebraska may be put ahead of an applicant from the East Coast with higher grades and test scores. Other applicants who are given special treatment in selective institutions are children of alumni. In 1988, 280 of 1,602 Harvard freshmen had fathers who had attended Harvard.³ Of alumni children who apply, about 40 percent are admitted each year, while only 14 percent of non-alumni children are admitted. It is estimated that 240 more alumni offspring are admitted each year than would be the case if the parents’ alumni status were not taken into consideration. Again, these 240 alumni children displace applicants with better grades and test scores. The Harvard Medical School announces in its application material that it gives preference to applicants who are the children of its graduates.

Applicants who are connected to influential or wealthy people—movie stars, other celebrities, multimillionaires—are also routinely given special preference. In addition, a university’s administrative officers are known to ask for and to get special consideration for children of personal friends. The medical school dean’s friends’ children displace people with superior academic qualifications.⁴

Of course, two wrongs do not make a right. Preferential admissions of athletes, Nebraskans, offspring of alumni, and offspring of friends of the dean, if they are harmful, do not justify whatever harm affirmative action does. In fact, all such admissions do the same kind of harm—they displace candidates with better cognitive credentials, those whose talents run to academic pursuits rather than cross-country running or basketball. But just as affirmative action programs have benefits, these other special admissions practices have benefits too.

We can look at the benefits of each of these kinds of s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Individuals, Groups, and Discrimination
• II. Justice and Compensation
• III. The Bakke Case
• IV. Diversity
• V. Preference or Impartiality?
• Epilogue Three Puzzles Concerning Affirmative Action
• About the Authors
• Bibliographical Note