University proffessors don't KNOW what affirmative action is

Christian Party

Why were so many California college faculty members in favor of affirmative action in 1995?

Only ONE THIRD of them (37% to be exact) even knew what aa was!

And these are Americans going to colleges and universities. Imagine what the rest of the population knew about it? Nothing?

Do you wonder why we scored DEAD LAST in TIMSS? A MAJOR law was destroying our economy and our culture and two thirds of college students were oblivious to it.

First, affirmative action means granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups. Second, affirmative action means promoting equal opportunities for all individuals without regard to their race, sex, or ethnicity.

Which statement, the first or the second, comes closest to your own definition of affirmative action?"

First statement 37%

Second statement 43%

Both 2%

Neither 14%

DK
4%

THE ROPER CENTER SURVEY
OF FACULTY OPINION ABOUT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Sponsored by the California Association of Scholars
Conducted December 7-19, 1995

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FACULTY SURVEY VINDICATES THE ABOLITION
OF RACIAL AND GENDER PREFERENCES
BY THE U.C. BOARD OF REGENTS

Berkeley, California, January 15, 1996 A telephone survey of 1,000 faculty members chosen at random at the nine campuses of the University of California which was conducted last month by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut vindicates the abolition of racial and gender preferences by the U.C. Board of Regents. The survey, the first of its kind in higher education, was sponsored by the California Association of Scholars, an organization of faculty members, administrators, trustees, and advanced graduate students at private and public colleges throughout the state with its headquarters in Berkeley, California.

The December, 1995 Roper Center survey found that a wide plurality of faculty at the University of California favors a policy of providing equal opportunity without resorting to racial and gender preferences. Voting members of the academic senates at U.C. were asked whether they favored granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups, or whether they favored promoting equal opportunities in these areas without regard to an individual's race, sex, or ethnicity. Forty eight percent favored the latter policy; only 31 percent favored the granting of racial and gender preferences.

The preferred policy is virtually identical with that recently adopted by the U.C. Board of Regents. On July 20, 1995, the Regents of the University of California voted on two resolutions. Section 2 of the first resolution (SP-1) said, "Effective January 1, 1997, the University of California shall not use race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as criteria for admission to the University of California or to any program of study." Section 9 of SP-1 said, "Believing California's diversity to be an asset, we adopt this statement:

BECAUSE INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF ALL OF CALIFORNIA'S DIVERSE RACES HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE AND CAPACITY TO SUCCEED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, THIS POLICY WILL ACHIEVE A UC POPULATION THAT REFLECTS THIS STATE'S DIVERSITY THROUGH THE PREPARATION AND EMPOWERMENT OF ALL STUDENTS IN THIS STATE TO SUCCEED RATHER THAN THROUGH A SYSTEM OF ARTIFICIAL PREFERENCES." THIS RESOLUTION PASSED BY A 14-10 VOTE.

Section 1 of the second resolution (SP-2) said, "Effective January 1, 1996, the University of California shall not use race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion in its employment and contracting practices." This resolution passed by a 15-10 vote.

SP-2, which governs employment and contracting practices at the University of California, went into effect on January 1 of this year. SP-1 will take effect on January 1, 1997. The University is currently exploring ways to foster equal opportunity and access to the university without resorting to racial and ethnic preferences. Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien of U.C. Berkeley, in a widely applauded move, has pledged $1 million of U.C. Berkeley's funds to outreach efforts which will identify promising secondary school students throughout the state and prepare them for admission to the University. Educationally and economically disadvantaged students will be eligible for this program regardless of their race, sex, or ethnicity.

ROPER POLL CONFIRMS EARLIER, BUT LESS RIGOROUS, SURVEYS OF FACULTY OPINION ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The Roper/CAS-sponsored poll is the first in higher education to apply state-of-the-art sampling methodology to the study of faculty opinion. To the best of our knowledge, all earlier studies of faculty opinion on this and other matters have relied on responses by faculty to mailed questionnaires with lower response rates. Nevertheless, the findings of earlier studies are consistent with those of the recently completed Roper study.

An important nation-wide survey of faculty opinion was conducted in 1975 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. This study showed strong opposition to preferential policies in faculty hiring and promotions and in student admissions. When respondents in this study were asked how their University should respond to underrepresentation by women and minorities on the faculty and among their graduate and professional students, roughly 80% favored either 1) making special efforts to find more women and minority candidates, but giving no preference in appointment, or 2) making appointments without any regard to race or sex.

Unfortunately, more recent surveys by the Carnegie Foundation have included fewer items addressing affirmative action and diversity issues than in the 1975 survey. However, these more recent studies provide some inferential evidence that faculty opposition to preferential policies has changed very little in the intervening years, because the two items from the 1975 survey which were repeated in the more recent 1989 survey of faculty opinion by the Carnegie Foundation produced very similar results.

A 1991 study by Alexander Astin, Jesus G. Trevino and Tamara L. Wingard of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (The UCLA campus climate for diversity: findings from a campus wide survey conducted for the Chancellor's Council on Diversity) found broad support for the idea of promoting diversity, but it also found that a significant percentage of the campus community had misgivings about many aspects of the university's diversity program. Nearly half of the campus respondents, on average, felt that the campus climate would be improved if the university abandoned preferential admissions policies. This and similar findings led the authors of this study (each of whom is a strong advocate of preferential policies in higher education) to caution the university against the aggressive pursuit of preferential policies, particularly in the area of undergraduate admissions. As the authors said:

UNDERGRADUATE ADMISSIONS IS ONE ISSUE WHICH CLEARLY DIVIDES PRACTICALLY ALL SEGMENTS OF THE UCLA COMMUNITY. THERE ARE SHARP DIVISIONS, FOR EXAMPLE, WITHIN STAFF, STUDENT, AND FACULTY RESPONDENT GROUPS AS TO THE DESIRABILITY OF AN ADMISSIONS POLICY WHICH TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE STUDENT'S RACE OR ETHNICITY. VERY FEW RESPONDENTS ARE NEUTRAL ON THIS ISSUE...CONSIDERING HOW DEEP THE DIVISION IS ON THE ADMISSIONS ISSUE WITHIN THE UCLA COMMUNITY, WE ARE NOT OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE PROSPECTS FOR A QUICK SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM...CONSIDERING THE WIDESPREAD CONSENSUS THAT WAS REACHED ON SO MANY OTHER CRITICAL ISSUES AND PROPOSALS WE FEEL THAT IT WOULD BE A MAJOR MISTAKE TO FOCUS A DISPROPORTIONATE SHARE OF OUR CAMPUS ENERGIES ON THE ADMISSIONS ISSUE, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE SAME ENERGIES CAN BE CHANNELLED INTO CONSTRUCTIVE AND POSITIVE ACTION PROGRAMS MORE OR LESS IMMEDIATELY. (THE UCLA CAMPUS CLIMATE FOR DIVERSITY, P. 180.)

The UCLA study found evidence of a strong commitment by faculty, students, and administrators to diversity in the abstract. Over 90 percent of the campus community, on the average, agreed that "Diversity is good for UCLA and should be actively promoted by students, staff, faculty, and administrators." The study also found significant support for policies designed to promote diversity where there are no clear winners and losers. There was, for example, considerable support for the following kinds of programs: (1) having more events on campus that bring together different racial and ethnic groups; (2) involving more UCLA students in tutoring Los Angeles inner-city children; (3) having more art exhibits or music festivals featuring different racial/ethnic groups; (4) including more issues of diversity in student orientations; (5) conducting "teach-ins" on diversity issues etc. Such programs appear to be regarded by the campus community as non-zero-sum game proposals for fostering diversity. However, the UCLA study, like the December, 1995 Roper survey, found a significant drop-off in support for affirmative action plans that involves preferences-i.e., wherever there are clear winners and losers.

"USING RACE AND SEX AS A CRITERION" VERSUS OPPOSITION TO RACIAL AND GENDER PREFERENCES

The December, 1995 Roper Center telephone survey found that the faculty at the University of California favors non-race and non-gender based policies, but only if these are conjoined with a commitment to promoting diversity and equal opportunity by other means.

The first two items of the survey asked for respondents' views about the policy embodied in Regents' resolutions SP-1 and SP-2 prohibiting the use of race, sex, or ethnicity as criteria in university admissions, employment, and contracting, but without mentioning any commitment by the university to promoting equal opportunity by other means i.e., without any reference to Section 9 of SP-1, which reaffirmed the university's long-standing commitment to promoting diversity.

The first item asked, "Do you favor or oppose using race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for admission to the University of California?" A bare majority (52%) favored using these as criteria when the option of pursuing equal opportunity and diversity by other means was not presented as an option. Even so, there was significant opposition even to this way of phrasing the question. About one-third (34%) flatly rejected the use of these factors in admissions. This 18 percentage point margin dropped to 8 points (47 percent favor and 39 percent oppose) when faculty were polled about the use of these criteria for employment and contracting practices at the University of California.

Since the Regent's decision on July 20, 1995 has attracted considerable national and even international attention, the Roper Center made the decision to use the exact language of SP-1 and SP-2 in the first two items of its questionnaire. Nevertheless, the language of SP-1 and SP-2 is not typical of most polling on this question, which usually phrases the question in terms of support or opposition to the granting of racial and gender preferences. (No direct reference to preferences is found in SP-1 and SP-2, though such a reference is found in Section 9 of SP-1, which commits the university to promoting racial and ethnic diversity without resorting to "a system of artificial preferences.")

It is likely that the responses to the first two items of the survey would have been significantly different if they had been phrased in terms of the granting of preferences. The latter is the terminology that is typically found in the law and in most polling on this issue. Extensive polling since the late 1960s has shown widespread opposition to the granting of preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity in the general population, even when the granting of such preferences is framed in a positive light in the question itself (e.g., even when preferential treatment is presented to respondents as an effort to compensate for past discrimination against certain groups). Typically, approximately 70% of respondents say that they are opposed to preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity for any reason.

The Roper poll has shown that the great majority of faculty at U.C. believes that racial and gender diversity should be a goal of university policy. This makes it likely that a clear majority of faculty will reject any failure or refusal by the university to "take race and sex into consideration as a criterion" in any way. However, it may not be immediately apparent to respondents that the use of race, sex, or ethnicity as a criterion for decision making in particular instances necessarily involves racial discrimination, and that the policy that they actually favor is that of pursuing diversity without actually preferring or discriminating on this basis.

The dangers of using phraseology in public opinion research that does not clearly force a decision about preferences (and therefore about discrimination) was highlighted recently by a national survey of 240,000 freshmen which was conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. The study, which was released on January 8, 1996, found that, although 70 percent of students surveyed support giving "special consideration" to race in college admissions, 50 percent said that they believe affirmative action should be abolished. And although 70.6 percent of the students surveyed support special consideration for blacks, only slightly fewer69.3 percents aid whites deserve the same break.

This finding demonstrates with particular clarity the dangers of survey research that uses the more equivocal language of "taking into consideration" and "using as a criterion." As a matter of simple logic, one cannot give "special consideration" to every individual of a given set. This rather obvious logical point apparently eluded even this year's entering freshmen at America's colleges and universities. It is, however, even harder to miss the point that one cannot prefer someone on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity without discriminating against someone else on that basis. That is why the language of preferences is the preferred terminology for public opinion research on this issue. As the responses to item 3 show, faculty at U.C., like most Americans, balk at the granting of preferential treatment to individuals on the basis of their race, sex, or ethnicity and it is the granting of racial and gender preferences which is at the heart of the controversy about affirmative action within the university and elsewhere.

HOW DOES THE FACULTY USE THE TERM 'AFFIRMATIVE ACTION', AND WHAT KIND OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DOES IT FAVOR?

The Roper survey shows that it is unwise to use the term "affirmative action" in polling on this issue. Roper found that this term means very different things to different faculty members. The divergences are so marked that the term appears to have no standard or common meaning in faculty discourse.

In the Roper survey, faculty were asked to express how they use the term "affirmative action" by choosing which one of the following statements best summarizes their own definition of the term: "Affirmative action means granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups," or "Affirmative action means promoting equal opportunity for all individuals without regard to their race, sex, or ethnicity." The study found marked divergences in the way faculty use this term. Forty-three percent (43%) of the faculty said that promoting equal opportunity for all individuals rather than granting preferences comes closer to their definition of the term. Thirty seven percent (37%) said that granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups comes closer to their definition of the term.

ROPER'S FINDINGS RAISE TROUBLING QUESTIONS ABOUT GOVERNANCE BY U.C. ADMINISTRATION AND HIGHER EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS GENERALLY

The Roper Center survey demolishes the claim that the faculty at U.C. wants preferential policies. Faculty members at the university clearly don't want the university to be indifferent to diversity concerns, but they also prefer affirmative action in the original sense: promoting and ensuring equal opportunity in admissions, employment, and contracting without regard to an individual's race, sex, or ethnicity. This favored alternative is identical with the policy which the U.C. Board of Regents adopted on July 20 of last year. That policy abolishes racial and gender preferences at the University of California in admissions, employment, and contracting, while affirming the university's commitment to the pursuit of diversity through means other than the use of "artificial preferences."

It is startling to compare these survey findings with recent official policy statements on affirmative action by the university and by virtually every representative body within the university. The divergences, which are very stark, raise very troubling questions about the extent to which internal governance mechanisms within the university have failed rather dramatically to accurately reflect faculty opinion on one of the most important public policy issues of our time.

To judge by the official position of the University before the Regent's vote, and by statements and policy positions by virtually every official body within the university both before and after the vote, no impartial observer would even suspect that any significant portion of the faculty actually favors the abolition of racial and gender preferences. When the policy change was first proposed by some members of the Board of Regents, the University could have seized the occasion to engage in a searching and thoughtful debate on the issue one that was long overdue. Instead, the well-entrenched advocates of the challenged policy chose to circle the wagons.

The appearance of unanimous opposition to the Regent's policy by all bodies claiming to represent the University and faculty opinion within it has been virtually complete. In an unprecedented move, the outgoing President of the University, Jack Peltason, together with all nine chancellors, publicly rejected the Regents' policy initiative, essentially challenging the Regents' authority to bring the university in line with public sentiment and the direction of developing law on this issue, and in response to questioning by the Regents about existing policies, the University stonewalled and prevaricated. Two months before the Regents' vote, the university released a study of the probable impact of the proposed policy change that was so flawed it elicited a scathing column from normally restrained (and liberal) writer Peter Schrag of the McClatchy Papers. "The 'analysis' University of California officials submitted to the regents last week regarding affirmative action in UC admissions piles confusion on misdirection," Schrag said. "Rather than the impartial report it's represented to be, it's a clumsy defense of existing race preferences. It combines straw-man comparisons with statements so internally contradictory they make your head spin" (Orange County Register, May 26, 1995).

The University took the official line that it used race as only one of many factors in admissions decisions. Anyone who was familiar with U.C.'s admissions procedures knew that on some campuses and in some professional schools this was widely at variance with the facts, and critics of the policies quickly provided data demonstrating that the claim was false. Information that was publicly available to the critics through the university itself showed, for example, that individuals of one particular ethnicity were admitted at one of U.C.'s medical schools at 19 times the rate of applicants of another ethnicity, even though the former were significantly less qualified on the basis of academic criteria. (Investors Business Daily, March 21, 1995, "Making California color-blind.")

Advocates of preferential policies, who typically claim to speak on behalf of the entire faculty, continue to work tirelessly to overturn the Regents' decision. Jerome Karabel, professor of sociology at U.C. Berkeley, has spear headed two faculty drives, the first in defense of the preferential policies the Regent's decision rescinded, the second protesting the decision on procedural grounds. A committee of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), whose genesis is somewhat murky, but which nevertheless claims to speak on behalf of all of the organization's 44,000 members, was recently formed to investigate the Regents' decision in the light of the AAUP's "long standing commitment to affirmative action," and to take a "hard look at the way in which political pressures are intruding into traditional institutional governance practices." This seven-member committee includes committee chair Joan Wallach Scott, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Robert Atwell, outgoing President of the American Council on Education. The committee has said that it will issue a report on the matter sometime before May, 1996.

To our knowledge, none of these official bodies or self-appointed spokespersons for the professorate has ever shown any interest in ascertaining in a scientific manner the actual views of the members or organizations for which they claim to speak. Nor is this just a matter of a demonstrated lack of interest in finding new evidence: it extends to ignorance about, or indifference to, the research evidence that has been available for some time. It is true that past studies have not utilized random sampling techniques, and are methodologically weak for that reason. At the very least, however, the previous findings should have suggested caution. If advocates of preferential policies who claim to speak on behalf of others know of research evidence which is at variance with the findings of the December, 1995 Roper survey, they should make this information widely available.

It is likely that the disparity between faculty opinion and official statements simply confirms what is commonplace for students of organizational behavior that any organization can be controlled by ten percent of its members, provided they are sufficiently determined and well-organized. For twenty years or more, no one has been appointed to any administrative position of importance in the university who has not been prepared to publicly endorse race- and gender-based preferential policies, or at least to remain silent about any reservations or doubts he or she may have had about them. As a result of this history, there is presently in the University a large "affirmative action" bureaucracy with an enormous amount of power.

While faculty senates pass resolutions which purport to represent the views of the entire faculty, the meetings of the senates are usually sparsely attended, and often only by those whose strong interests in the outcomes make them rather unrepresentative of the university community as a whole. This has been true of the university for many years. The same phenomenon was noted twenty-five years ago by Professor John Searle of U.C. Berkeley in his book on the campus wars of the 1960s:

THE STRIKING THING [ABOUT FACULTY MEETINGS AROUND CONTENTIOUS ISSUES] IS THE EXTENT TO WHICH A SMALL GROUP OF REALLY DETERMINED LEFT-WING FACULTY WHO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT AND ARE PREPARED TO SEIZE THE RHETORICAL INITIATIVE AND FIGHT FOR WHAT THEY WANT, CAN EXERT AN INFLUENCE WILDLY DISPROPORTIONATE EITHER TO THEIR OWN NUMBERS OR THE SIZE OF THEIR CONSTITUENCY IN THE FACULTY. (THE CAMPUS WAR, NEW YORK: THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY, 1971, PP. 147-148.)

What Searle observed about the university twenty years ago prefigured what has come to be known in more recent times as "political correctness." Today, after their long march through the institutions, important bastions of power within the university have been captured by those who proclaim that everything, including the personal, is political; ironically, these faculty members now accuse anyone who dares to challenge them of politicizing the university. There has been an abject failure on the part of the university to accurately reflect faculty opinion in today's political climate, which makes many faculty clearly reluctant to speak out. The faculty needs fewer change agents dedicated to telling their colleagues what they ought to think on controversial matters of public policy, and more who simply wish to accurately reflect, articulate, and represent their views.

SCIENTIFIC POLLING AND ITS POTENTIAL IMPACT ON SOME DEEPLY CONTESTED ISSUES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The CAS believes that the Roper Center survey which it has sponsored has introduced a powerful tool with potentially wide applications in higher education. Such studies should be within the financial reach of many faculty and alumni organizations at other large colleges and universities, both public and private, who may share the CAS' interest in determining faculty opinion at their institutions in a scientifically rigorous way. The survey research method may be of particular interest to organizations like the recently formed National Alumni Forum in Washington, D.C. (phone 202.467.6787), one of whose chief purposes is to persuade alumni and university governing boards to support academic programs and institutions that it believes are worthy of support.

The Roper survey has demonstrated that modern polling can be used to determine faculty opinion accurately and relatively cheaply. For too long, the academy has had as its most publicly visible spokespersons those whose claim to represent faculty opinion fairly and accurately has always been questionable. These days may soon be over.

EXACT WORDING OF ROPER CENTER QUESTIONNAIRE ITEMS; RESPONSES

For further details contact The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, (203) 486-4634 Sample size: n=1,001; cooperation rate 80+ percent; margin of error=3.5%

1. "Do you favor or oppose using race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for admission to the University of California?"

Favor 52%

Oppose 34%

No opinion 7%

DK 7%

2. "Do you favor or oppose using race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion in employment and contracting practices at the University of California?"

Favor 47%

Oppose 39%

No opinion 7%

DK 7%

3. "I'd like to read two statements. Please tell me which one best describes the policy you believe the University of California should pursue.

First, the University should grant preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups in admissions, hiring and promotions.
Second, the University should promote equal opportunities in these areas without regard to an individual's race, sex, or ethnicity.

Which statement, the first or the second, describes the policy you think the University should pursue?"

First statement 31%

Second statement 48%

Both 3%

Neither 12%

DK 6%

4. "The term 'affirmative action' has different meanings to different people. I'm going to read two definitions of the term 'affirmative action.' Please tell me which one best describes what you mean by the term.

First, affirmative action means granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups.
Second, affirmative action means promoting equal opportunities for all individuals without regard to their race, sex, or ethnicity.

Which statement, the first or the second, comes closest to your own definition of affirmative action?"