Word: lester
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...been worth the effort? In public, college administrators and faculty members ritually endorse affirmative action. But in private, they tell a different story. So says Richard A. Lester, a Princeton economist who visited 20 leading universities in preparing a study on the federal antibias program for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Lester's report, to be published this week by McGraw-Hill, concludes that the drive for equal opportunity in faculties has been a worthwhile effort in theory, and in practice a "painful experience" that has accomplished little for minority groups while doing violence to a long tradition...
...Lester, 66, a New Frontier liberal who was vice chairman of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, does not quarrel with the argument that minorities and (especially) women are vastly underrepresented in higher education. After all, women hold less than 38% of the instructorships and just 5% of the full professorships in U.S. universities. But he does insist that federal efforts to deal with the situation are clumsy and misguided...
...Good Faith." On philosophical grounds, Lester complains that the equal-opportunity program, which is policed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and several other agencies, represents a serious Government intrusion into the traditional freedom and independence of American campuses. Beyond that, he complains that Washington administrators are tinkering insensitively with the "highly individualistic and selective" process by which faculties award full professorships and the 30-to 35-year tenures that go with them. Universities that want to keep their federal funds are required to come up with "good faith" hiring targets; Columbia University's plan...
...Lester points out that at the top universities only one in four associate professors may be offered tenure. By forcing considerations of sex and race into the selection process, he argues, the Government could conceivably reduce faculty quality. One effect of equal rights legislation: some women and minority instructors tend to fight back with complaints to federal agencies and discrimination suits even when they are passed over for tenure for such reasons as lack of drive or scholarship. In a number of fields, qualified scholars from minority groups are so scarce that the available talent shuttles from one faculty...
...Lester does not believe that "it is time to abandon affirmative action." He wants the emphasis changed. Instead of shoehorning more women and minorities into professorships, more should be lured into Ph.D. programs to begin with...