Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Discriminations

Legal Commentary

: Discriminations

Academic Unions, Red Herrings, And The ?Affirmative Action Syndrome?

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are elevating the issue of faculty ?diversity? to one of their primary ?bread and butter? issues.

I was struck by the discussion of one professor?s research.

?Diversity is inevitable. It?s going to happen,? said Henry Lee Allen, a sociology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois who spoke on a panel that examined the views of unionized faculty members of color on the issues of workload and productivity on their campuses. ?The question is how it?s going to happen and who?s going to lead it,? he said. ?Are we going to be proactive or reactive??

One could respond that if diversity is inevitable, is going to happen no matter what, why do the unions or anybody else have to spend valuable time and resources promoting it?

Prof. Allen?s references to the plight of minority faculty members also raises questions about why anyone would want to be one. Along the way he manages to catch and display a ubiquitous red herring of affirmative action debates, although he himself seems to believe it?s a prize fish.

Mr. Allen, who has studied various education issues for the National Education Association over the years, said his research shows that ?unions matter, but they could matter more? in the lives of ethnic-minority faculty members who say they are trying to cope with a variety of job-related issues, among them post-affirmative-action backlash, the tenure process, and the syndrome of believing that jobs are being handed out to ?unqualified minorities.?

?Post-affirmative action backlash?? Would that be anger at minority faculty because affirmative action has been or is being abolished? That doesn?t make much sense, but it seems unlikely that Prof. Allen could mean the anger of minority faculty that their preferential treatment is being eliminated.

Now, here?s the red herring, although it takes a faculty member to refer to a red herring as a ?syndrome?: ?the syndrome of believing that jobs are handed out to ?unqualified minorities.??

Although I?m sure that some critics of affirmative action do sometimes say that it awards positions to unqualified applicants, careful (and even sloppy) readers will note that I?ve never said that here. My belief, and I believe the belief of most serious critics of race preferences, is that lowering standards that are applied to everyone else for minority students results in the admission, hiring, etc., of applicants who are less qualified than those they displace. If that weren?t true, there would be no need for the preferences.

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

syndrome: a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, or behavior

Maybe we should propose to the psychiatrists who decide these things a new affirmative action syndrome: the belief that minority candidates who are as qualified as all other applicants need to be treated preferentially in order to be be treated equally because without preferential treatment the employers and admissions officers who are now overwhelmingly dedicated to discriminating in favor of those candidates would immediately begin to discriminate against them.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).