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12 Remarks on Affirmative Action Andrew Oldenquist A premise with which I and most supporters of affirmative action almost certainly agree is that groups that previously have been mistreated and excluded ought to be well represented on a university's faculty. They ought to be re:presented in such numbers and proportions that reasonable members of these groups do not complain . It is easy, especially if one thinks t]:lat active discrimination in university hiring is largely a thing of the past, not to appreciate the importance, to women and African Americans, of just seeing black or women professors, or just knowing they are there, and of having them voting at meetings and otherwise participating in university business. Individuals who belong to and identify vvith groups that have been treated poorly in the past are extremely sensitive to how members of the group are treated today. Even the least militant are inclined to count faces, be indignant at what appear to be slights, and feel proud or vindicated when a woman or African American receives an honor or overcomes some obstacle. Thes~~ group loyalties and rejection anxieties are deeper than many people realize and they ought to be respected, for almost everyone would feel the same way in similar circumstances. The goal of reasonable representation vvould seem to call for some form of affirmative action, unless we think the problem is rapidly correcting itself. While I believe the problem is correcting itself for women, it is not for African Americans, and there is not much that can be done about it on the level of faculty recruitment. One kind of measure thought to be effective is preferential hiring, by which I mean hiring a member of a target group when another applicant, who is not a member of the group, better satisfies, overall, the standards and 190 Andrew Oldenquist acknowledged qualifications for the position in question. I shall argue that preferential hiring of African Americans will not produce reasonable representation and preferential hiring of women is unnecessary. Affirmative action without preferential hiring, in the form of imaginative and conscientious searching and recruitment, can hardly be faulted, but it is not easy to find significant and effective measures short of preferential hiring. There are some things we can do, of course, such as, in the spirit of Leslie Francis's remarks in this volume, giving a woman, on request, an extra year to earn tenure if she has a child during that period. Another measure is defining an open position so that it includes new, needed, and academically legitimate fields or courses that make the position more attractive to women and black candidates. Measures such as these, if adopted by one university and not by another, may help that university recruit at the expense of the other. If they are generally adopted, they will not affect the competition among universities for target group members, nor will they increase the number of target group members in the profession, except to the extent, if any, that such measures influence the decisions of women and African Americans to enter the profession. When part of a general practice, these measures probably should not be thought of as part of affirmative action but merely as common sense and decency. We should not talk about "minorities" but about African Americans . No one needs to worry that Jews or Chinese Americans are underrepresented on university faculties, and while Hispanics are indeed underrepresented, a large proportion of Hispanics are also black, and those better represented in universities tend to be more nearly European. The problem of minorities is about African Americans (and in some parts of the country about Native Americans too). African Americans are the primary focus of our racial history, our racial guilt, our concern with racial justice, and in the universities our fear of doing anything that might leave us open to being called racist. I want to suggest that preferential hiring for academic positions is ineffective and in the long run likely to be harmful to those hired by that means. Also, preferential hiring does seem to be unfair to white males, and this remains as an argument against it even if a case could be made that it does more good than harm. As Robert Simon argues in his essay, rejected white males are not being treated "as equals" in the relevant sense, that is, as equals in respect of rights and fair treatment, if all "as equals" means is that white males are...

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