[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 136 (Tuesday, September 5, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12629-S12630]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, ON THE MERIT SYSTEM

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the University of California has 
been the focus of above-average attention on the issue of affirmative 
action because of the presence of two national political figures, 
Governor Pete Wilson and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
  I wish we lived in a time in which affirmative action was not 
necessary but that is not the case. We have improved as a society--even 
though many people may not recognize that--since the days of my youth, 
but we still have a long way to go.
  Of particular interest to me was a New York Times op-ed piece by 
Professor Orlando Patterson about the California situation.
  I ask that the op-ed piece be printed in the Record, and I urge my 
colleagues to read his remarks, if they did not read them in the New 
York Times.
  The material follows:

                [From the New York Times, Aug. 7, 1995]

                Affirmative Action, on the Merit System

                         (By Orlando Patterson)

       Cambridge, MA.--For years Americans have complained about 
     government programs for the disadvantaged that do not work. 
     Now, however, we are on the verge of dismantling affirmative 
     action, the one policy that, for all its imperfections has 
     made a major difference in the lives of women and minority 
     groups and has helped us achieve the constitutional 
     commitment to the ideal of equality and fairness.
       In utilitarian terms, it is hard to find a program that has 
     brought so much gain to so many at so little cost. It has 
     been the single most important factor in the rise of a 
     significant, it still economically fragile, black middle 
     class.
       So it is hard to understand why it has become the most 
     contentious issue in the nation. One would have thought that 
     a policy that so many politicians denounced would have 
     adversely touched the lives of at least a substantial 
     proportion of those opposing it.
       The facts show just the opposite. A National Opinion 
     Research Center survey in 1990, still applicable today, found 
     that while more than 70 percent of white Americans asserted 
     that whites were being hurt by affirmative action for blacks, 
     only 7 percent claimed to have experienced any form of 
     reverse discrimination. Only 16 percent knew of someone close 
     who had. Fewer than one in four could even claim that it was 
     something they had witnessed or heard about at their 
     workplace.


  Standards rose at the University of California in the last 12 years

       So what was the source feeding all the outrage? The vast 
     majority of those interviewed claimed to have heard about the 
     problem either through the press or from other second-hand 
     sources, like their political leaders.
       Of course, such data would not matter were affirmative 
     action something inherently evil. But this could hardly be 
     the case, because for more than 15 years leaders of both 
     parties, including Senator Bob Dole and Gov. Pete Wilson of 
     California, both Republican Presidential candidates, 
     supported this initiative. Indeed, they lauded it, as both 
     morally defensible and the only effective means of remedying 
     the intolerable exclusion of disadvantaged minorities and 
     women from opportunities to train and apply for the better-
     paying working- and middle-class jobs.
       What happened? How did so manifestly worthy and effective a 
     program lose the support, including that of some people who 
     stood the most to gain from it?
       Blaming the media or the cynicism of our leaders will not 
     do, the transparent opportunism of Mr. Dole and Mr. Wilson 
     notwithstanding. Several factors account for the collapse of 
     support for affirmative action.
       The first is that the largely erroneous arguments of neo-
     conservative and other right-wing critics somehow carried the 
     day. Merit, we were repeatedly warned, was being undermined, 
     resulting in both individual inequities and, worse, severe 
     threats to our economy and the demands of a high-tech 
     society.
       Nonsense, both. Only a minuscule number of whites, we now 
     know, are affected by affirmative action, and of this small 
     fraction, a still smaller percentage are able to claim 
     genuine grievances.
       The claim that our economic efficiency is being threatened 
     is simply laughable. Oddly enough, the problem right now is 
     not a shortage of highly trained manpower but an oversupply, 
     demonstrated by a saturated market for scientists and 
     engineers. An alarming number of them are becoming lawyers 
     (the overdependence on which being perhaps our biggest waste 
     of manpower resources).
       White men still control more than 99.9 percent of all the 
     important top positions in private and public institutions, 
     as well as the vast majority of middle-level and high-paying 
     jobs. They will continue to do so unit well into the next 
     millennium.
       There is also the argument that affirmative action has done 
     nothing for the underclass and poor but favors people already 
     in the middle class. Although rhetorically it is extremely 
     effective, it is deliberately misleading. This point figured 
     prominently the recent broadsides against the University of 
     California's affirmative action policies from Governor Wilson 
     and an influential university regent, Ward Connerly.
       But affirmative action was never intended to help the 
     poorest and least able. It is, by nature, a top-down 
     strategy, meant to level the field for those who are capable 
     of taking advantage of opportunities denied them because of 
     their sex or race.
       For the underclass and the working poor, an entirely 
     different set of bottom-up strategies are called for, 
     although no one seems to know what these might be.
       The University of California's experience with affirmative 
     action demonstrates beyond doubt the shallowness of the 
     politicians' criticisms. Over the past 12 years, it has 
     achieved its goal of incorporating students from 
     disadvantaged minorities.
       But far from experiencing a decline in standards, the 
     university has not only fulfilled its mandate of selecting 
     students from the top one-eighth of the state's graduating 
     class, but has increased its eligibility requirements five 
     times during this period. It is now a far more selective 
     institution than before the introduction of affirmative 
     action, with improved graduation rates for both black and 
     non-black students.

[[Page S 12630]]

       Nothing could be more hypocritical and contradictory than 
     the spectacle of a Republic governor demanding that his 
     state's university system rely solely on the crude instrument 
     of test scores to select 70 percent of its incoming students.
       Republicans never tire of saying that what made America 
     great are the virtues of honesty, courage, initiative and 
     imagination, integrity, loyalty and fair play, all best 
     demonstrated by a person's track record and especially his or 
     her perseverance in the face of adversity. Why then are 
     conservatives vilifying universities for taking these values 
     seriously in selecting the next generation of leaders?
       Race, we are told, should have nothing to do with the 
     assessment of these virtues. Race, however, refers to several 
     aspects of a person. It refers to physical appearance, and 
     this, every African-American would agree with Senator Dole 
     and Governor Wilson, should be a matter of no importance.
       But for African-Americans, race also means surviving an 
     environment in which racism is still pervasive. It has to be 
     taken into account in assessing the content of any black 
     person's character, and to assert that this amounts to a 
     divisive glorification of race is as disingenuous and as 
     absurd as claiming that we are divisively glorifying poverty 
     and broken families when we take account of these factors in 
     assessing a white student's character.
       There is a third important meaning of race, and it is here 
     that we enter tricky ground.
       Blackness also connotes something positive: the subcultural 
     heritage of African-Americans that in spite of centuries of 
     discrimination has vastly enriched American civilization out 
     of all proportion to the numbers, and treatment, of the group 
     creating it. The University of California, like other great 
     institutions of learning, rightly has seen the exposure of 
     all its students to this important minority culture as part 
     of its educational mission.


           a policy that works only in an ecumenical america

       This is a noble goal, but it is fraught with dangers. What 
     brought me around to support affirmative action after some 
     strong initial reservations was not only its effectiveness as 
     a strategy for reducing inequality, but also its 
     possibilities for cross--pollinating our multi-ethnic 
     communities. In the process, it could promote that precious, 
     overarching national culture--the envy of the world--which I 
     call ecumenical America.
       But the promotion of diversity has done nothing of the 
     sort, as Governor Wilson and Mr. Connerly were able to argue 
     with devastating impact. To the contrary, both on an off our 
     campuses affirmative action seems to have been distorted by 
     its beneficiaries into the goal of balkanizing America both 
     intellectually and culturally. One has only to walk for a few 
     minutes on any large campus to witness the pervasiveness of 
     ethnic separatism, marked by periodic outbursts of other 
     chauvinisms and hostilities.
       No group of people now seem more committed to segregation 
     than black students and young professionals.
       Their motto seems to be: separate, yes, but make sure there 
     is equality, by affirmative action or any other means. To a 
     lesser extent, the tendency of the new black middle class to 
     segregate itself residentially and to scoff at the norms and 
     values of the ecumenical mainstream is the off-campus version 
     of this lamentable betrayal and abandonment of the once 
     cherished goal of integration.
       Ethnic separatism has also had deleterious academic 
     consequences. In an experiment conducted at the University of 
     Michigan by two psychologists, Claude Steele and Richard 
     Nisbett, a group of disadvantaged minority students who were 
     encouraged to be part of the campus mainstream, and made to 
     understand that the highest standards were expected of them, 
     consistently performed above the average for white students 
     and the student body as a whole. Members of a control group 
     who took the familiar route of ethnic solidarity and 
     consciousness-raising performed well below the average.
       At its best, affirmative action compensates for one of the 
     greatest disabilities of minority members: their lack of 
     access to vital networks and other social capital which white 
     men simply take for granted, whether it is the construction 
     worker who mobilizes his neighborhood ties to get on a high-
     paying work crew, or the upper-middle class manager who draws 
     on his grammar school and Ivy League contacts to land the 
     vice presidency of some budding company.
       Once in, however, too many minority workers and women felt 
     entitled to automatic promotion and were too quick to use the 
     accusation of racism or sexism when it was denied. Too many 
     supervisors practice a patronizing racism or sexism. The 
     cynical promotion of unqualified people, even if it happens 
     only occasionally, damages the legitimacy of affirmative 
     action since it takes only one such mistake to sour an entire 
     organization.
       Also damaging were clearly illegal practices like using 
     blacks and women as entrepreneurial fronts to gain access to 
     preferential contracts.
       These are all correctable errors. Universities and 
     businesses should return to the principle of integration, to 
     the notion that diversity is not something to be celebrated 
     and promoted in its own right, but an opportunity for mutual 
     understanding and the furtherance of an ecumenical national 
     culture.
       The President should remain firm in his principled resolve 
     to defend a corrected version of affirmative action. And if 
     we give it a time limit of 10 years, it might still be 
     possible to save this troubled but effective and badly needed 
     policy.

                          ____________________