AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONsanitation force discriminatory, and because state
and local governments believe they will lose such
cases, many have entered into ‘‘consent decrees’’
in which they agree to hire and promote on the
basis of racial and sex criteria.
Affirmative action is also used in the granting
of government contracts on the basis of either
statutes (federal, state, or local) or administrative
procedures. It is in this area that the edifice of
affirmative action was first effectively attacked in
the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of the failure of
Republican administrations to take any action lim-
iting affirmative action. The first major crack came
in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of
Richmond v. Croson, in which the Court ruled against
a Richmond, Virginia, city program to set aside 30
percent of city contracts for minority-owned busi-
nesses. The Court ruled that such programs could
only stand, under the judicial ‘‘strict scrutiny’’
standard triggered by apparent government dis-
crimination, if it could be demonstrated there had
been discrimination against these groups by the
city in the past. The response of cities to this
judicial limitation on their minority ‘‘set-aside’’
programs was often to commission studies to dem-
onstrate they had indeed discriminated, in order
to save the set-aside programs (LaNoue 1993). In a
later decision, Adarand v. Pena (1995), the Court
ruled against a federal statute requiring that 10
percent of public works contracts be set aside for
minorities. While these programs still continue in
many jurisdictions, including the federal govern-
ment, they are all legally threatened.
One issue in minority contract set-asides has
been that of possible fraud, as various contractors
find it to their advantage to take on black partners
so as to present themselves as minority contractors
and thus to get whatever advantages in bidding
that status provides. In this area, as in other areas
where advantage might follow from minority sta-
tus, there have been debates over what groups may
be included as minorities. It was unclear, for exam-
ple, whether Asian Indians—immigrants and Ameri-
can citizens of Indian origin—were to be consid-
ered Asian. Asian Indian Americans were divided
among themselves on this question, but during the
Reagan administration they were reclassified as
Asian, presumably in part for the modest political
advantage this gave the Republican administration.
Affirmative action also governs the employ-
ment practices of colleges and universities, wheth-
er public or private, because they all make use of
federal grants and loans for their students, and
many have government research contracts. Col-
leges and universities therefore must also survey
their faculties and other staffs for underutilization,
and they develop elaborate affirmative action pro-
grams. Affirmative action applies to women as well
as to racial and ethnic minority groups. There has
been, perhaps in part because of affirmative action
programs, a substantial increase in female faculty.
But there has been little increase in black faculty
during the 1980s. The numbers of blacks taking
doctorates in arts and sciences has been small and
has not increased. The higher rewards of law,
business, and medicine have attracted into those
fields black students who could prepare them-
selves for an academic career. Many campuses
have been shaken by controversies over the small
number of black faculty, with administrators argu-
ing that few were available and protestors, often
black students, arguing that greater effort would
change the situation.In the 1990s, the most controversial area of
affirmative action became admissions to selective
colleges and universities and professional schools.
Affirmative action in admissions is not required by
government regulations, as in the case of employ-
ment, except in the special case of southern public
higher education institutions. There parallel and
separate black and white institutions existed, and
while all of these institutions have been open to
both white and black students since at least the
early 1970s, an extended lawsuit has charged that
they still preserve their identity as traditionally
black and traditionally white institutions. As a
result of this litigation, many of these institutions
must recruit a certain number of black students.
But the major pressure on many other institutions
to increase the number of black students has come
from goals voluntarily accepted by administrators
or as a result of black student demands. (In one
case, that of the University of California, the state
legislature has called on the institution to mirror
in its racial-ethnic composition the graduating
classes of California high schools.) Voluntary af-
firmative action programs for admission of stu-
dents, targeted on black, Hispanic, and Native
American students, became widespread in the late