Affirmative action in higher education has sought to increase the number of women and minority students and faculty in most educational fields, levels, and ranks. Voluntary measures to recruit black students and faculty began in the 1960s, before the government, in the early 1970s, imposed elaborate requirements to promote the employment of women and minority faculty. Women's groups pressing to change admission and employment practices they judged discriminatory have made far greater gains than blacks. In the last decade, Asians have also done surprisingly well as graduate students, faculty, and research staff in the sciences and engineering. The higher-educational status of blacks remains troublesome. In small part, this reflects many black students' preference for the professions over graduate school and academic life; in larger part, the consequences of slum life and schools.
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References
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1. Adams was initiated in October 1972, when the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit charging Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson with failure to compel 10 states, which he had found to maintain segregated colleges, to desegregate their colleges or lose their federal funds. Federal District Court Judge John H. Pratt ordered successive Health, Education, and Welfare Secretaries to comply. See Jean Preer, Lawyers v. Educators (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
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2. Freshman Admissions at Berkeley (Berkeley: University of California, Academic Senate, Berkeley Division, Committee on Admissions and Enrollment, May 1989), p. 13.
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3. Nathan Glazer, “Are Academic Standards Obsolete?” in Inside Academe (New Rochelle, NY: Change, 1972), p. 160.
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4. Sucheng Chan and Ling-chi Wang, “Racism and the Model Minority: Asian-Americans in Higher Education,” in The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education, ed. Philip G. Altbach and Kofi Lomotey (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), p. 54.
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5. Amherst Student, 3 Apr. 1991, pp. 1-2. Of the 973 students admitted 103, or 10.6 percent, were black; 102, or 10.5 percent, Hispanic; 146, or 15 percent, Asian; and 622, or 64 percent, white or unidentified.
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6. As Ernest Koeningsburg, professor of business, who has served on Berkeley admission committees, is quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, “Illiberal Education,”Atlantic, Mar. 1991, p. 54.
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7. Quoted by Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, “Race,”Atlantic, May 1991, p. 73.
9. Mary Crystal Cage, “Government Officials Urged to Create Incentives for Colleges to Increase Minority Enrollment,”Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Dec. 1990, p. A17.
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10. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Subcommittee on Education and Training, Overpayments and Enforcement of Standards in the Veterans' Education Program, 94th Cong., 2d sess., 1976, pp. 1965-1966.
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11. See Harold Orlans, “Changing Conditions, Minority Education at Oakes College,”Thought and Action, 6(1):21-34 (Spring 1990).
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12. Quality Education for Minorities Project, Education That Works (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), p. 4.
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ibid., 15 Feb. 1978.
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14. New Yorker cartoon in John Valley, Increasing the Options (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1972), p. 4.
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15. Letter to President Ronald Reagan, 18 Sept. 1985.
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16. U.S., Department of Education, National Advisory Committee on Accreditation and Institutional Eligibility, Transcript, 22 Nov. 1991.
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17. Richard Lester, Reasoning about Discrimination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 165.
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18. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Education and Labor, Special Subcommittee on Education, Hearings, Federal Higher Education Programs, Institutional Eligibility, Civil Rights Obligations, 93d Cong., 2d sess., 19 Sept. 1974, p. 282.
19.
19. Ibid., p. 280.
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20. Joyce Gelb and Marian Palley, Women and Public Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 112.
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21. Estelle Fishbein, General Counsel, Johns Hopkins University, U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Hearings, 97th Cong., 1st sess., 29 and 30 July and 29 Oct. 1982, pt. 1, pp. 260-262.
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22. See John B. Williams, “Affirmative Action at Harvard,” this issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, tab. 5.
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23. John Williams describes two programs that Harvard instituted to recruit minority faculty and administrators; other universities have tried similar programs. See Williams, “Affirmative Action at Harvard.”
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24. Mariam K. Chamberlain, ed., Women in Academe (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 178.
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25. Consultations on the Affirmative Action Statement of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Commission on Civil Rights, 1981), 2:63.
