Affirmative Action and the University: A Philosophical Inquiry

3. Affirmative Action and Faculty Apppointments

3 Affirmative Action and Faculty Appointmt~nts Lawrence c. BeckE~r This essay may be more the product of exasperation than of conviction. At any rate, it is based on a set of assumptions that reflect how little hope I have of being able to say anything both useful and philosophically interesting about affirmative action. My assumptions are these: (1) The philosophical debate about affirmative action is essentially stalled. Over the last fifteen years or so the content, range, clarity, rigor, and soundness of the arguments have remained virtually unchanged. (2) Intellectuals are deadlocked about the justifiability of result-oriented affirmative action programls-especially those involving preferential treatment. (3) Existing emF)irical evidence and theories of justice are not capable of breaking that deadlock. The affirmative action and abortion debates are alike in tJl1at regard: All the relevant material is known to people of good will on both sides; continued discussion of it has very little practical effect beyond educating successive generations of adversaries. (4) The probability of finding new evidence or a new theory or principle ttlat will break the deadlock is remote. (5) That means one's options in writing an essay like this come down to undertaking Quixotic theoretical expeditions in search of decisive new arguments, making incrernental improvements in the existing materials, or doing something else. I have opted for doing something else. Specifically, I have decided to explore the possibility of a political compromise. Here is my reasoning. REPETITION We have now had more than thirty years of debate and twenty years of experience with affirmative actioll. It is disheartening to find 94 Lawrence C. Becker so much ambiguity in the empirical record, so much repetition in the continuing political debates, so little evidence of progress toward consensus and political closure. It is even more disheartening to read the normative literature on this subject and to find the same old arguments about equal opportunity, social utility, compensatory justice, quotas, preferential hiring, stigmatization, tokenism, reverse discrimination, burdensome regulation, and so forth repeated nearly verbatim year by year. Of course, if one pursues a normative argument about affirmative action merely as a means to developing or testing a general theory of justice, then it would be naive to expect closure. As long as the adequacy of the general theory remains in question, so too will its account of the test cases. Similarly, if one pursues the topic of affirmative action as part of a revolutionary or reactionary political project, then again it will be naive to expect closure-at least where (as in Western liberal democracies) there is persistent and quite general resistance to such things. Some of the repetitive quality of arguments about affirmative action may be due to the fact that they are being used as set pieces in larger projects. In what follows, I propose to hold revolutionary, reactionary, and purely theoretical projects in abeyance and to consider affirmative action in faculty appointments purely as a practical problem. As mentioned at the outset, I assume that knowledgeable people of good will, imagined as a deliberative body, are deadlocked on one crucial issue: preferential treatment. Moreover, I assume there is general agreement (1) that in the past the academy has discriminated against certain groups and that it must be active and vigilant in eliminating such discrimination; (2) that double standards for appointment criteria are demeaning to the people included by them, unjust to the people excluded by them, and damaging to the mission of the academy; (3) that faculties should continue to have the responsibility for establishing criteria and assessing candidates for faculty appointments; (4) that current , legally mandated affirmative action procedures are burdensome; (5) that quota systems are either counterproductive, unjust, or subject to abuse; and (6) that merely removing formal barriers to the appointment of target group members is not likely to have a substantial effect on the composition of faculties.1 The disagreements are equally familiar. There is disagreement about whether current affirmative action practices have had any significant Affirmative Action and Faculty Appointments 95 good effects, about the rationale for them, and about the best means of enforcing them. The perpetual sticking point, however}. concerns appointment criteria : Is mere membership in a disadvantaged class a qualification for appointment, to be considered along witll the usual competence criteria in determining who is the best candidate for a position? If so, how much weight should it have in comparison to other...