September-October 2000

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From the General Secretary: Affirmative Action: A Testimonial

By Mary Burgan

I got my first job as a professor through affirmative action, even before the federal laws were passed. The chair of the department opened our initial interview with the kind of statement that would now be actionable: "Well, you have one thing going for you," he said, "you're a woman."

By today's standards, I should have found this declaration demeaning. Instead, in 1964, I was, simply, relieved. Someone actually wanted me because there weren't enough of my kind around. I was also relieved because I had just been told that another department chair had decided not to interview me because of my gender. "She sounds good," this chair had confided to a friend of mine, "but I think we'll interview the man." Those were cruel days. Few women academics of my generation had doors held open for them and so took lesser positions or left academia.

Perhaps I remain too simpleminded from my own experience, but some of the current reservations about affirmative action strike me as out of touch with the realities of ordinary aspirations. For example, the fear that some form of liberal condescension is involved in trying to remedy past injustices seems a misplaced nicety to me. So does the proposition that the addition of affirmative action to hiring devalues real achievement. Remembering my days on the job market, I have no recollection of such devastating effects on male colleagues who got most of the good jobs. They took their jobs as happily as I did.

Once having those jobs, though, many began to recognize the existence of unmerited privileges. The history of diversity in higher education has been, I think, the progress from a very faint tinge of guilt about exclusion of "minorities" into formal efforts to be inclusive. But the progress had to be gradual-a raising of consciousness. Knowing the bitterness of being rejected for no good reason, I didn't spend much time picking out the negatives in my good fortune at having a job early on. It was only later that I could see that all the women hired on the faculty tended to be white.

Despite all such reservations about affirmative action, then, I believe that the women who managed to get hired in my generation should now testify to the forgotten fact that without affirmative action, most of us would never have had a chance. And so I believe that when we speak of the benefits of diversity in our colleges and universities, we ought to speak some oral history. Our colleagues and students need more reminders of the way things were before affirmative action.

I started out in a time when women faculty were in a distinct minority, especially in elite universities. Then, also, Jews were rare on many campuses. And so were Catholics. They could all go to their own schools and be comfortable in the majority there. But when they went to selective colleges and universities, they were tempted to conceal their cultural differences among their colleagues, in the classroom, or in their scholarship.

It was only when a group reached a critical mass that such matters could become topics of discussion and study. I well remember the first time, in the mid-1970s, when colleagues at a committee meeting realized, with astonishment, that we were all women! We had never formed a majority before, and so we planned a lecture series on women in literature-the first ever at our school.

As I look back over my career in such a light, I think about the losses to my classes if I had not had the opportunity to use the viewpoints and contributions of "former" minorities in my teaching. How insular an American literature without the novels of Saul Bellow or Toni Morrison. And that's why I believe that we haven't had enough affirmative action yet.

It's not enough to be a minority of barely a few. I have taught many classes that enroll only one or two African American or Hispanic students, and I have noted how isolating such minority status can be in a group. Each minority has to serve as the "test case" in discussions of difference. An individual's grades will be taken as characteristic, so that he or she cannot afford to be "average." What they say will have to combat stereotype, or feed into it. This is a heavy burden. Those of us who have borne its weight are grateful for our freedom. Now we must explain why it is still so heavy for others.