Quarrel Over Quotas

ISSUES '72

The campaign had hardly begun when the Republicans were berating the Democrats about a curious issue, one rarely if ever raised in a presidential election. "Dividing Americans into quotas is totally alien to the American tradition," declared President Nixon. "The way to end discrimination against some is not to begin discrimination against others." Contended Vice President Spiro Agnew: "A quota system, regardless of its avowed intent, has no place in a free society." It would, he said, "Push America backward, back into the failures of a bygone era of narrow-minded prejudices and internecine conflicts."

Quotas? The word does indeed have a sinister, anti-egalitarian ring. Republicans clearly were sounding it to counter the claims of Democrats that their party reforms, inspired largely by Nominee George McGovern, had led to one of the most open and representative national political conventions in U.S. history. The new rules had "encouraged" state delegations to include members of minority groups, young people and women "in reasonable relationship to the group's presence in the population of the state." The Republicans, as well as a good many longtime Democrats excluded in the reform process, considered that political representation by quota. In a Labor Day address Nixon broadened the attack, assailing any attempt to use quotas as a means of correcting job discrimination. "Quotas are intended to be a short cut to equal opportunity," he conceded, "but in reality they are a dangerous detour away from the traditional value of measuring a person on the basis of ability."

Once again, as has happened so often in this disappointing campaign, a complex issue was being oversimplified. "Quota" was being used as a code word implying vast sins against democratic ideals, an arbitrary advancement of the have-nots at the expense of those who have worked for their place in society. McGovern declared flatly that he too was against quotas: "I reject the quota system as detrimental to American society. It is both necessary and possible to open the doors that have long been shut to minority-group members without violating the basic principles of non-discrimination and without abandoning the merit system."

In the present argument everyone is using the word quota in a pejorative sense: the assignment of a proportion of a group in the population to desirable jobs, offices or political-party positions on the sole basis of some common accident of birth. Used in this fashion, quotas become synonymous with socialization of achievement: awarding jobs, status or other roles without regard to talent or effort.

Thus defined, a rigid quota is a distorted result of the civil rights drive of the 1960s. Then the main motive was to equalize opportunities for blacks, and the movement used as one indicator of progress the proportion of blacks in the previously all-white schools of the South. The movement also led to President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Executive Order 11246, requiring that no employer holding Government contracts may practice racial or ethnic discrimination in his hiring practices. Two years later, that order was amended to rule out sex discrimination as well.

Conflict. The aim is unassailable. If some group in society has long been denied opportunity, the situation should be remedied and opportunity equalized. The simplest and handiest standard for measuring that equality is the ratio by which the deprived minority is represented in society at large. Thus if blacks constitute 11% of the national population, a quota system would assert that their opportunity would be objectively equalized if they held 11% of, say, all Government jobs. Such a notion is simplistic and, of course, unworkable, but it is a demand that some minority spokesmen have voiced. It would result in what Columbia Sociology Professor Amitai Etzioni calls "an extremely severe conflict between the quota system and civil liberties."

The Republican attack on the Democrats is a familiar tactic--mounting a defense by taking to the offense. But the Nixon Administration is vulnerable to the charge of flirting with arbitrary quotas while enforcing Executive Order 11246. The nation's major universities, which depend heavily upon federal research contracts, were required by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to open their academic, administrative and clerical staffs to more women, blacks and other selected minorities. No specific percentage of such groups was demanded, but universities were expected to propose their own hiring goals. In the Administralion's Philadelphia Plan, a precise number of man-hours worked by blacks on federal construction contracts was decreed as desirable evidence of progress.

The campus controversy clearly illustrates some of the philosophical and practical quandaries in the debate over quotas. Officials of HEW hotly deny that they are employing quotas at all. They use such terms as "goals" and "timetables" when they insist that the universities develop "affirmative action programs" to alter the sex, racial or ethnic mix of their staffs. HEW says that it only expects a show of "good faith" in working toward such "goals." This, the department argues with semantic and legal plausibility, is not a rigid, imposed "quota." Yet over the past year HEW withheld some $23 million in vital federal contract funds from some of the nation's most distinguished universities for lack of cooperation. Forced to clarify their "voluntarily" suggested hiring goals, the institutions found the distinction between a benign goal and an imposed quota slightly Jesuitical.

The attempt to place more blacks and women in better positions raises fundamental questions about how groups that have been discriminated against can be helped without doing injustice to those who can hardly be blamed for past unfairness. The fact that a disproportionate number of scholars at major universities are Jews who had to overcome longstanding quotas restricting their opportunities shows the complexities of the problem. Setting new quotas today--for blacks or any group--suggests a return to past discrimination even as it promises new democracy. Understandably, the outcry from Jewish intellectuals has been loud, for some of them worry about a future in which jobs are taken away and given to others under a quota system. This plaint is applicable to more than Jews, for tomorrow may always bring new demands. Already blacks feel threatened in their competition for favored job treatment by the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement.

Not entirely facetiously, Berkeley Political Science Professor Paul Seabury points out in a Commentary article that there is "blatant inequity" in the fact that only two of the 38 faculty members in his department are Republicans. His observation is not an argument for the imposition of political quotas on a faculty; it is really an illustration of the difficulty of organizing any complex group by the application of quotas.

In its attempt to achieve greater racial equality in the construction industry, the Government has come even closer to the kind of quotas that both Nixon and McGovern seem to deplore. The Labor Department has been insisting that six trade unions in Philadelphia each push the percentage of man-hours worked by blacks up from a previous level of about 4% to 26% by next year. Now, in view of Nixon's new anti-quota stance, department officials announced that the plan was under review. N.A.A.C.P. Labor Director Herbert Hill contends that "for all practical purposes, the day-to-day enforcement of the Philadelphia Plan has come to an end." Still, a Philadelphia plumbing contractor, Russell Associates, was barred from federal work last week for failure to conform to minority hiring agreements.

Both on campus and in construction unions, there is disingenuousness--or worse--in the glib claim that hiring and promotion are most often based on merit and must not be influenced by government. In the selection of new personnel, subjective considerations--nepotism, mutual acquaintances and outright prejudice--often play decisive roles. Moreover, the history of civil rights gains in the U.S. demonstrates that progress often depends upon a requirement of specific indications of progress. Often, the only such indications are numerical. The long battle against the dual school systems in the South would not have been advanced without court-enforced accounting, whether it was called "guidelines" or racial "quotas." Clearly, some push toward proportionality cannot be ruled out in every effort to redress social injustice.

The application of quotas to political representation is not a part of the American experience. While heavily biased toward landed interests, the framers of the Constitution rejected as both impossible and unnecessary the idea that all classes of citizens should have their own representatives in Congress. They opted instead for elected representatives, who were subject to the ire or approval of a variety of individual voters. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist: "It is said to be necessary, that all classes of citizens should have some of their own number in the representative body, in order that their feelings and interests may be the better understood and attended to. But we have seen that this will never happen under any arrangement that leaves the votes of the people free." That freedom of choice was deemed quintessential, as was the idea that an elected representative look to the general interest of the nation. A decade earlier Edmund Burke wrote: "Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation--where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good."

Allotment. All this does not necessarily mean that the Democrats were wrong to open up their party to the long under-represented voices of such broad groups as women, the young, and blacks. But it might have been done in better ways. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's 59 delegates who were excluded at Miami Beach were, after all, elected. Those Democratic voters who chose them were disenfranchised, however the McGovernites might feel about Daley. In opening some doors, the Democrats slammed some shut unfairly, and posed anew the question of the function of parties in the U.S. and who is entitled to determine who shall become Presidents.

The problem of quotas is one of application: numerical goals or targets can all too easily escalate into quotas, and competition among groups for quota allotment could reach dangerously divisive--or absurd--levels. During the debate over the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, it was Senator Roman Hruska who suggested that since there are so many mediocre Americans, mediocrity deserves representation on the highest bench. That doubtless is the reductlo ad absurdum of the quota argument.

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