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1 In Defense of Affirmative Action Leslie Pickering Francis After more than twenty-five years of affirmative action law in the United States, college and university faculties remain largely white and male. Nearly 90 percent of full-time faculty are white, 4 percent are Asian, 3 percent are African American, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 1 percent are Native American.l Just over 25 percent of faculty positions in higher education are held by women. Within these aggregate data are some significant variatiollS by type of institution and by field. There are lower percentages of Hispanics at public Ph.D.granting institutions, and lower percentages of Asian Americans at public junior colleges. Only 20 percent of the faculty at research universities are women, but nearly 40 percent of the faculty at public junior colleges are women. Fifteen percent of the faculty in engineering programs are Asian Americans, only 3 percent are women, and less than 1 percent are African Americans. Fifteen percent of the faculty in the natural sciences are women, \'vhereas nearly 40 percent of the faculty in education are women.2 Within these data, there are also sonne highly significant recent trends. The situation of women has improved markedly in some fields but much less so in others. In some of trle fields of most notable improvement , affirmative action has been taken very seriously; and it is thus likely that some of the improvement may be attributed to the success of the policy.3 For example, in lavv the percentage of full-time female faculty has grown from 10.6 percent in 1977 to 21.7 percent in 1987.4 The recent percentage of new la'w school appointments who are women has reached 40 percent.5 In political science, by the mid1980s over 25 percent of new appointments went to women; even more telling, both the placement success rate of women and the percent- 10 Leslie Pickering Francis age of women placed in Ph.D.-granting institutions began to equal or exceed that of men.6 Recent trends in some scientific fields stand in sharp contrast. In chemistry, the percentage of women faculty in Ph.D.-granting institutions grew only from 1.5 percent in 1970 to 4.9 percent in 1987; the percentage of women faculty in predominantly undergraduate institutions remained nearly constant at just over 10 percent. There was no significant growth in the number of female assistant professors of chemistry in the 1980s, which does not suggest optimism about whether women can gradually be expected to move up in the ranks. As late as 1986, 55 percent of undergraduate chemistry faculties had no women? These low percentages persisted despite notable growth in the percentages of women receiving Ph.D. degrees in chemistry (from 7.7 percent in 1970 to 21.3 percent in 1987)8 and postdoctorates in Ph.D.-granting institutions (17 percent in 1986).9 In mathematics, the recent academic placement rate for women has grown significantly, to around 20 percent, but the growth has been achieved nearly entirely in programs that do not grant Ph.D. degrees and continues to lag in top-ranked Ph.D. programs.lO The situation of African Americans, by contrast, has not shown overall improvement. There are important differences by sex: African American women have fared better than men in some disciplines. For example, in law schools the percentage of African American appointments remained steady between 1985 and 1990 at about 6 percent; over half of these appointments went to women.ll Surely at least part of the explanation for these trends lies in the availability of applicants. The numbers of African American males obtaining Ph.D. degrees fell by 54 percent between 1977 and 1987;12 the numbers of African American males attending college also fell over the same period, by about 30 percent.13 By contrast, the numbers of African American women receiving both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees increased slightly during the decade. These trends suggest the need to think differently about the issue of affirmative action for women and for African Americans. In most universities, affirmative action is a regularized part of the process of recruiting faculty. Recruitment typically begins when a department is alerted to the likelihood of an open position. Department faculty meet to discuss the nature of the position: the field, level, and other characteristics of desired applicants. With administrative approval, a description of the position is formalized. An advertisement is written and its contents cleared with affirmative...

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