16346: Quotas & Affirmative Action For The Privileged…?

 

This ain’t a new rant, but it’s always worth repeating.

 

Harvard Business Review published a report titled, “How to Effectively—and Legally—Use Racial Data for DEI,” which included the following two paragraphs:

 

To understand how to best act on this complex topic, it’s important to start with the legal foundations. According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it’s illegal to consider any single candidate’s or employee’s race—even with the intention of creating a more diverse, equitable, or inclusive workforce—in any employment decision. Employers can’t create de facto hiring quotas (e.g., “50% of the employees hired in this department must be women”), or “reserve seats” for employees from certain groups, even in the interest of diversity.

 

According to the law, even after the recent Supreme Court ruling, gender-conscious or race-conscious hiring practices are permitted, but only as part of limited, temporary, and highly structured voluntary affirmative action programs, undertaken only if employers find evidence of company-wide or industry-wide hiring discrimination, only to correct the initial imbalance, and only without “undue harm” on members of non-targeted groups (meaning that employers cannot lay off white workers to hire workers of color).

 

The paragraphs explain recent maneuvers in Adland—as well as underscore the systemic racism so prevalent in the field.

 

In 2016, Omnicom President-CEO-Pioneer of Diversity John Wren vowed to double the number of female creative leaders at BBDO within the calendar year. In 2018, Ogilvy publicly declared that 20 women would be hired into creative leadership roles by 2020. In short, White advertising agencies took advantage of legal loopholes to promote White women via voluntary affirmative action programs.

 

Yet despite generating heat shields and performative PR in response to George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, White ad agencies have not even suggested implementing quotas to increase Black representation. Affirmative action is deemed reverse discrimination. No one has openly pursued the processes proffered by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, executing cluster hires to correct the fully acknowledged imbalances.

 

In Adland, quotas and affirmative action are exclusively presented by the privileged—without question or hesitation—to the privileged. It’s systemic racism positioned as progress.

16311: Spotlighting The Hypocrisy Of Systemic Racism. Again. And Again.

The New York Times reported on the special backlash after the Supreme Court nixed race-conscious affirmative action in colleges and universities; specifically, activists complained that legacy admissions at schools like Harvard benefit rich and White students.

 

The hypocrisy is similar in Adland, where the ruling majority have historically bristled at affirmative action and quotas—yet see no problem with hiring based on cronyism, nepotism, and systemic racism. Other ignorant rants include the belief that diverse recruitment means lowering standards, a laughable stance when considering the mediocrity routinely accepted via the isms mentioned in the previous sentence.

 

It’s a phenomenon that has been spotlighted in the past—and will undoubtedly repeat in the present and future.

 

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

 

After the Supreme Court banned race-conscious affirmative action, activists filed a complaint, saying legacy admissions helped students who are overwhelmingly rich and white.

 

By Stephanie Saul

 

It’s been called affirmative action for the rich: Harvard’s special admissions treatment for students whose parents are alumni, or whose relatives donated money. And in a complaint filed on Monday, a legal activist group demanded that the federal government put an end to it, arguing that fairness was even more imperative after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious admissions.

 

Three Boston-area groups requested that the Education Department review the practice, saying the college’s admissions policies discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants, in favor of less qualified white candidates with alumni and donor connections.

 

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” asked Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is handling the case. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

 

The complaint from liberal groups comes days after a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, won its Supreme Court case. And it adds to accelerating pressure on Harvard and other selective colleges to eliminate special preferences for the children of alumni and donors.

 

The Office for Civil Rights of the Education Department, which would review the complaint, may already be gearing up to investigate. In a statement after the Supreme Court decision, President Biden said he would ask the department to examine “practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

 

A spokeswoman for Harvard, Nicole Rura, said the school would have no comment on the complaint, but reiterated a statement from last week: “As we said, in the weeks and months ahead, the university will determine how to preserve our essential values, consistent with the court’s new precedent.”

 

Colleges argue that the practice helps build community and encourages donations, which can be used for financial aid.

 

A poll released last year by the Pew Research Center found that an increasing share of the public — 75 percent — believed that legacy preferences should not be a factor in who was admitted to college.

 

And the call for eliminating legacy and donor preferences has grown recently across the political spectrum.

 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, tweeted that if the Supreme Court “was serious about their ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged.”

 

On “The Faulkner Focus,” a Fox News program, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and a presidential candidate, said, “One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs where they have preferential treatment for legacy kids.”

 

Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist who has analyzed Harvard data, found that a typical white legacy applicant’s chances of being admitted increase fivefold over a typical, white non-legacy applicant.

 

Even so, eliminating legacy preferences at Harvard, the study said, would not offset the loss in diversity if race-conscious admissions were also eliminated.

 

In its decision on race-conscious admissions, some Supreme Court justices criticized legacy admissions. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring with the court’s majority, took aim at preferences for the children of donors and alumni, saying: “They are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives. While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.”

 

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor referred to legacy admissions, arguing that continuing race-based preferences was only fair in light of the fact that most of the pieces in the admissions puzzle “disfavor underrepresented racial minorities.”

 

While Colorado adopted a law in 2021 banning legacy admissions in public universities, legislation in Congress and several other states has gained little traction.

 

A New York bill filed last year was opposed by the state’s private school association, the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which includes highly selective colleges such as Columbia, Cornell and Colgate.

 

In Connecticut, where lawmakers held a hearing on the issue last year, Yale was among the private schools that came out in opposition. In written testimony, Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, called the proposed ban a government intrusion into university affairs.

 

Selective private universities, in particular, have been slow to eliminate legacies, with M.I.T., Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College among a few elite schools that do not use them.

 

In a news release last month describing its fall class, the first since the college eliminated legacy preferences, Amherst announced that the number of first-generation students in the school’s fall class would be higher than ever — 19 percent — while the number of students who were legacies had declined to 6 percent. Previously, legacies had made up 11 percent of the class.

 

The complaint to the Education Department was filed by three groups — Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England and Greater Boston Latino Network.

16310: How SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling Might Affect Adland.

Digiday Media’s WorkLife published a report listing four ways that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling for colleges and universities might affect employers in the business world.

 

Not sure if the four business world predictions directly apply to Adland, but here are some thoughts:

 

1. Employers could lose pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders. This one is probably irrelevant, as Adland’s pipeline—which is a pipe dream—essentially involves embryo recruitment and patronizing partnerships with HBCUs. However, White women will still benefit from being categorized as diversity hires and diversity suppliers.

 

2. More pressure on DE&I goals. Also irrelevant, given the typical White advertising agency doesn’t even have DE&I goals. Expect a steady—and likely declining—flow of heat shields and performative PR backed by crumby diversity budgets.

 

3. Future of ERGs put in question. In Adland, the present of ERGs is already questionable.

 

4. To speak out or not. Will Adland speak out on the issue? Definitely not.

 

In summation, it’s a safe bet that Adland will continue to promote affirmative inaction.

 

Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling — what it means for employers

 

By Cloey Callahan

 

On Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities must stop considering race in admissions, putting an end to affirmative action in higher education.

 

The court’s conservative majority overturned precedents reaching back 45 years by ruling against admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges.

 

The decision will have many ripple effects, especially for businesses. Making hiring decisions based on race is already illegal in the U.S., so the decision won’t change anything on that front, but it will have other implications. Employers have long been caught in the crosshairs of decisions like these, leaving them to navigate how government decisions will impact business, when to speak up about issues and, in this case especially, what effect it will have on diversity, equity and inclusion strategies.

 

At the same time, Kara Govro, Mineral’s chief HR legal expert, doesn’t want employers to panic, either. “I don’t think employers need to panic that there’s going to be a massive wave of litigation just because affirmative action has been shot down at colleges,” said Govro. “On the whole, attorneys aren’t going to take these cases.”

 

Here’s what you need to know about the impact the Supreme Court decision has on employers.

 

1. Employers could lose pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders

 

Almost 70 employers, including General Electric, Google and JetBlue Airways, warned in a brief to the court that without affirmative action they’ll lose access to “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders” and will struggle to meet diversity hiring goals.

 

Without affirmative action, colleges can no longer consider race in their admissions decisions. That might mean that we see fewer people of color in higher education and graduating with degrees, heading into the workplace.

 

Employers have already begun moving to degree-free hiring, but the Supreme Court’s decision will underline that as an important strategy for those wanting to maintain their workforce diversity. Giants like Delta, Google and IBM have already moved in this direction. Last week, Kellogg’s UK joined the fray, stating that employees no longer need a degree to apply for a job at the company, citing efforts to widen its talent pool and promote inclusion.

 

Melanie Naranjo, vp of people at compliance training company Ethena, said that skills-based hiring will become even more important now that affirmative action has been gutted.

 

2. More pressure on DE&I goals

 

“The idea behind affirmative action is to level the playing field so that everyone has opportunities and equal access to higher education and then that feeds into the employment sector,” said Naranjo. “When you start to remove this affirmative action, now the playing field is even less level than it was before. Employers now have to compensate for that lack in order to then continue to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion.”

 

She said employers will have to learn, more than ever before, the systemic biases that are at play.

 

“Employers have been able to rely somewhat on other efforts,” said Naranjo. “Now they’re going to have to look at the whole picture and really understand what is holding people back so that they can try and help mitigate that.”

 

3. Future of ERGs put in question

 

Naranjo said she worries the ruling could spell the end of employee resource groups (ERGs). Companies have put their DE&I strategies in high gear since the summer of 2020 after the Black Lives Matter movement prompted by the murder of George Floyd. The social justice movement gave rise to ERGs that are centered around discriminatory areas like race or sexuality so that workers can share their experiences.

 

“We don’t know what could be on the chopping block next,” said Naranjo. “ERGs could be seen as discriminatory if people say ‘this is for one specific group and it shouldn’t be because it’s for everyone.’”

 

She said the Supreme Court decision will be a blow to a range of DE&I strategies, with ERGs as just one example. While it’s illegal in the U.S. to make hiring decisions based on race, some companies have diversity goals requiring that their workforces comprise a certain percentage of people of color. Naranjo said she worries that might also be compromised as a result of the ruling.

 

“If things like this start to get shut down, we are going to have to be prepared to rethink and restructure how we approach inclusivity,” said Naranjo. “Rather than having a race-based ERG, we would then call it an inclusivity group, and it would have the exact same goals.”

 

Govro said she is even more concerned around affirmative action for federal contractors. “They are encouraged to match the actual population to their talent pool,” said Govro. “They’re not supposed to use race in the end, but they’re supposed to make efforts to have their body of employees look like the population. That includes acknowledging population numbers. If you’re in a 10% Asian community, is your talent pool 10% Asian?”

 

“This is probably what’s next on the chopping block,” she continued. “I could see that coming down. It will be easier to go after than private employment.”

 

4. To speak out or not

 

Employers need to think about the messaging that they send to their employees following this decision.

 

“It’s important that every company is thoughtful in their communication to their employees, but I do think they should be proactive,” said Naranjo. “Silence is very loud and your employees really hear that. It’s better to say something rather than nothing.”

 

That could look like anything from dropping a note in a DE&I Slack channel saying, “We’re aware of this, please reach out if you need,” to asking managers to make room in their one-on-ones if they see fit and without any pressure. From there, companies can also monitor if people are suffering at work and are unable to focus after the decision. “Be thoughtful, proactive and have an open door policy,” said Naranjo.

 

Almost exactly a year ago, the Supreme Court made another landmark decision. Roe v. Wade was overturned, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. During that decision, employers had to consider quickly if they were going to make a statement, either internally or externally, or not.

 

Just how much an employer should get involved is a question that comes up time and again in politics. While some firmly believe a company’s corporate social responsibility dictates it mustn’t stand silent, others argue it’s better that the employer stays well out of political matters, particularly polarizing ones.

 

For Naranjo, employers must look to the needs of their employees. “Many employees are going to be impacted by this, whether it’s from a mental health perspective or their children applying to colleges or just the general state of the United States and how they feel about these decisions,” said Naranjo.

16303: Overreaction Of The Week.

 

When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, White holding companies and White advertising agencies immediately issued responses, offering special healthcare benefits, posting angry divertorials, and more—mostly to show support for White women in Adland.

 

When the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions programs at elite schools—effectively dealing a serious blow to affirmative action—how did Adland react? Crickets. The exclusive majority of mythical Madison Avenue continued performative Pride promotions, enjoyed post-Cannes highs, and settled in for an extended holiday weekend.

 

For those who missed it, here’s a report from The New York Times…

 

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

 

In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.

 

By Adam Liptak

 

The decision is likely to reshape college admissions at elite schools. Here’s what to know.

 

Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative majority on a contentious issue of American life.

 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.

 

However, he added, universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life. Students, he wrote, “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”

 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she said, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”

 

The decision could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.

 

Here’s what to know:

 

• The opinions in the case — including concurring opinions from Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh and another dissenting opinion from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — total 237 pages. (Justice Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she had been on the university’s board of overseers.)

 

• The two cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal activist who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court.

 

• In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The case against Harvard has an additional element, accusing the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions. The universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard’s favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.

 

• The 6-3 decision on Thursday reflects the country’s division over affirmative action, which breaks along racial and political lines.

 

• In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld an admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin, holding that officials there could continue to consider race as a factor in ensuring a diverse student body.

13424: Galloping Gibberish.

Advertising Age reported on the latest crazy talk from diverted diversity diva Cindy Gallop, who urged White women to start their own advertising agencies. Speaking at a recent soiree organized by The 3% Conference, Gallop suggested White women could “totally halve your cost of living” while launching a start-up shop. Wonder if Gallop would consider lowering her cost of living in these shaky economic times. Regardless, taking a “If you can’t join them, beat them with your own agency” approach seems extreme—and even defeatist. The numbers show White women are accelerating their success in the field, well exceeding the 3% figure that probably never existed in this century. Just as White women are the group that most benefited from Affirmative Action, they are now the group most benefiting from “diversity” in adland, second only to White men. It should be far easier for a White woman to advance in a White advertising agency than erect an enterprise from scratch. “When [W]hite guys are talking to each other, what comes out is Batman versus Superman,” said Gallop, adding that when a diverse clan talks to each other, “You get ‘Hamilton.’” However, when White guys and White gals talk to each other, you get the current Madison Avenue—which feels more like the original Hamilton. That is, there is acknowledgement and even concern about true discrimination, racism and inequality; but ultimately, there is no sense of urgency to create change.

Cindy Gallop Tells 3% Conference Attendees: Start Your Own Agency

By Laurel Wentz

Cindy Gallop told attendees at the 3% Conference, dedicated to supporting more female leadership in ad agencies, to go out and start their own agencies. She said Friday that she was frustrated by the lack of change after her past four annual keynote speeches at the five-year old conference, and now “I want you to be the future of advertising and I want you to start your own ‘agency’.”

The quote marks around “agency” suggests some flexibility in the actual quitting/launching process, but Ms. Gallop did give the homework assignment of figuring out over the weekend how to live on less for a while (“You can totally halve your cost of living”) and then coming up with a company name and registering it, including the URL, Twitter handle, related blog and more.

“Start talking about it,” said Ms. Gallop, a former agency exec turned coach and consultant, as well as founder of Make Love Not Porn. “This is something men are very good at: bullshitting.”

She talked about asking yourself what you really want to do, designing your business to be the way you want to work and the way you want to make money.

“I’ve been campaigning for years for more female-founded agencies,” she said. “The good news is that in the last few years, that’s changing.”

She cited three agencies recently started and owned by women: Lisa Clunie and Jaime Robinson’s six-month-old Joan Creative; Heidi Hackener’s New York-based brand strategy shop Wolf & Wilhemine; and a three-year-old Sao Paulo shop started by former journalist Barbara Soalheiro called Mesa e Cadeira (Portuguese for “Table and Chair”) -- a reference to the company’s process of gathering people for a maximum of six days around a table to develop prototypes for projects in areas like technology, branding, design and marketing.

“When white guys are talking to each other, what comes out is Batman versus Superman,” Ms. Gallop said. When it’s a diverse group by gender and ethnicity: “You get ‘Hamilton.’”

She also suggested three possible sources of funding for a startup. You & Mr Jones, started by former Havas CEO David Jones, funds companies building brands through technology. (Annette Stover, a former Havas exec and search consultant, joined You & Mr Jones as a partner in January). Brava Investments, started this year by investor Nathalie Molina Niño, bankrolls startups that benefit women. And brand-new iFundWomen.com is a crowdfunding platform for female entrepreneurs that includes free crowdfunding advice, she said.

In an earlier research-oriented panel at the New York conference, 4A’s President and CEO Nancy Hill said that 4A’s research found that more than 50% of female ad agency execs surveyed said they had experienced sexual harassment at least once, but that the problem was significantly worse in the creative department, where 58% of female creatives said they had been sexually harassed often. In other 4A’s findings, 42% of respondents said that they were not included in decision-making, 41% believed they were dismissed or disregarded in meetings, and 40% believed they were passed over for promotion.

Researcher Michele Madansky, head of Michele Madansky Consulting, replicated an earlier study called “The Elephant in the Valley” about gender bias in Silicon Valley in the ad industry. Her “Elephant on Madison Avenue” survey, with more than 600 respondents, found what she called a “Goldilocks effect,” with 70% of respondents saying they had been told they were too aggressive, while 62% had been called too emotional. And 60% said they were paid less than male peers. In an open-ended question, 54% of women cited other issues like race, LGBT, ageism, sizeism and generally not looking “like the perfect girl,” she said.

Ms. Hill said that the industry suffers from a lack of benchmarking, and that the 4A’s will field a full benchmarketing study before the end of the year on gender and ethnicity in the ad industry, with results out early next year.

For the 3% Conference, panel moderator Erin Carpenter said the group plans to look more deeply into two under-researched areas in the ad industry, motherhood and women of color.

Separately, the 3% Conference partnered with the One Club to choose the Next Creative Leaders, recognizing 10 young female creatives currently working at ad agencies as copywriters, art directors, associate creative directors and creative directors.

11165: ADC’s 50/50 Is Half-Assed.

AgencySpy posted an inane video from the Art Directors Club calling for the industry to embrace gender equality with its 50/50 initiative. First of all, if any art directors were involved in the production of the video, they should have their club memberships immediately revoked. An organization that routinely displays sexism, exclusivity and racism should not be lecturing culturally clueless co-conspirators on the virtues of affirmative action. BTW, does the ADC even realize that the group which most benefitted from affirmative action is White women? ADC Executive Director Ignacio Oreamuno admitted the 92-year-old club’s creators were discriminating White men who refused to open the doors to women until 1942 (although the ADC website states it happened in 1943). Of course, Oreamuno failed to mention that the first Black member—Georg Olden—wasn’t allowed in until 1952. The organization’s current Board of Directors comes close to reaching the 50/50 goal; however, the numbers aren’t nearly so rosy when held up against the screen of diversity. Maybe Oreamuno can host another soiree featuring Neil French. Hell, advertising women like Karen Mallia seem to corroborate the old man’s perspectives. In the end, the ADC’s 50/50 is 100 percent bullshit.

10918: Hall Of Fame Quotas.

From The Chicago Tribune…

From the Hall of Fame to affirmative action

By Saul Levmore

Many baseball fans are uneasy about the recent disinclination of baseball writers to muster the necessary 75 percent vote in favor of any Hall of Fame candidate. Barry Bonds, perhaps the greatest hitter in the history of the game, is widely understood to have been passed over because of his association with steroids. Drugs, whether banned by baseball or by the law, improve performance in many sports, and the players who are most closely connected to these drugs, including Bonds and Roger Clemens, will probably never become Hall of Famers under the current voting rules.

The problem is that drug use was so widespread that we are unsure whom to taint. Lance Armstrong is finally admitting to doping, but fans of cycling are also unsure whether any top cyclist was drug-free. In baseball the taint is attached to any player whose muscles appeared to fructify with age. If we had some way of knowing who used and who did not, it would be defensible to exclude from competition and from post-career recognition those who did. But in the absence of such knowledge, the best players of the generation will be excluded even though some of their remarkable performances predated their presumed drug use.

What if we were to change the terms of admission to the Hall of Fame by deploying a modest quota? If we want to identify the best players, one way to remove disagreement, bias or incomparability (as the rules of the game and its ballparks change over time) is to agree on a minimum number of players to be elected in each era. Historically, 10 to 20 players have been elected per decade. A new rule should begin in 2014 and provide that in 2018, and every five years thereafter, the five players with the most votes in that year or any of the preceding four years will automatically be elected. This will promise at least 10 players per decade. The message will be that the Hall should include the best players of each era, and perhaps the voters will mark their ballots accordingly.

The same argument for a kind of quota can be associated with affirmative action. An employer who finds that hiring decisions on the basis of credentials and interviews always produce white males might consider the possibility of conscious or subconscious biases in favor of this group or against others. It makes sense for the employer to combat this risk. And we are familiar with laws that encourage diversity or even insist that employers change their hiring patterns.

Those who hire should try to identify the very best candidates from previously underrepresented groups. It seems quite unlikely that the best employees are all of one race and gender, and one way to overcome flaws in credentialing or interviewing is to deploy a quota, or minimum. For legal and public relations reasons, no one identifies these tools as quotas, but it makes sense for the introspective interviewer to think as follows: “Given that minorities constitute 20 percent of the applicant pool, I should be sure that at least 10 percent of my recommended candidates come from this group. I might find 15 percent or even 30 percent in a given year, and that would be fine, but given my history I should impose a modest quota in order not to miss the very best minority applicants who are, after all, likely to be among the best applicants overall.” Whether this common-sense approach is encouraged or is inconsistent with recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings is a separate subject. There are many important differences between hiring and Baseball Hall of Fame cases, but they share the goal of seeking the best candidates in a pool.

Quotas require common sense. I might decide on a quota of charitable giving equal to 5 percent of my income, because I know that otherwise I might be too critical of all charities and give too little. But it would be absurd to think that I must vote for a fringe political party “x percent” of the time. The exclusion of Barry Bonds and other tainted stars is one obvious case for modest quotas. So let’s identify the five or 10 best players of the steroid period, and that decade will be punished enough by not having many more of its number in the Hall of Fame. More important, we should look at our own decisions, and then correct for possible biases with self-imposed quotas.

Saul Levmore is a University of Chicago Law School professor and former dean of the school.

10626: Affirmative Action Arguments.

From The New York Times…

Rethinking Affirmative Action

By David Leonhardt

THE founding principle of affirmative action was fairness. After years of oppression, it seemed folly to judge blacks by the same measures as whites.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in a 1965 speech that laid the groundwork for affirmative action, “and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Given this history, it was striking to watch the 80 minutes of Supreme Court oral arguments about affirmative action on Wednesday. With the courtroom overflowing, filled with people who have spent their careers fighting for or against affirmative action, only one side talked about fairness. And it was not the side defending affirmative action.

The lawyer for Abigail Fisher, a young white woman rejected by the University of Texas, argued that she had been denied equal treatment. The conservative justices, sympathetic to Ms. Fisher’s case, expressed particular concern that affluent black students were receiving preferential treatment.

Nobody on the other side — not the university’s lawyer, not the Obama administration’s, not the liberal justices — responded by talking about the obstacles that black and Latino students must overcome. The defenders of affirmative action spoke instead about the value of diversity. Without diverse college classes, they argued, students will learn less and society will lack for future leaders.

The decision to emphasize diversity over fairness is one that affirmative-action proponents made long before Wednesday, and it is a big reason they find themselves in such a vulnerable position today.

Americans value diversity. But they value fairness more. Most people oppose a college’s or employer’s rejecting an applicant who appears qualified for the sake of creating a group that demographically resembles the country.

With affirmative action boiled down to a diversity program, it finds itself in retreat. Five of the six states that have held referendums on racial preferences have banned them, including California and Florida. The Supreme Court limited the legal forms of preferences in 2003 and suggested that they had only 25 years left. Based on last week’s oral arguments, and the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy has never voted to uphold preferences, the court may restrict them further or forbid them.

Yet supporters of affirmative action do not necessarily need to despair. They still have a path open to them, one that remains legal and popular. It involves resurrecting Johnson’s vision of an affirmative action program based on fairness, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also favored.

The crucial choice that affirmative-action proponents made long ago was to focus the program on race rather than more broadly on disadvantage.

There were some obvious reasons to do so. Americans have never been comfortable talking about class. It reeks of the social order the country rejected at its founding (Britain’s) and of the economic system the country spent decades fighting (communism). But race was an undeniably American problem, from slavery to civil rights to the discrimination that, according to voluminous social-science research, lingers.

Read the full story here.

8896: The Dearth Of Dames…?

Advertising Age published a perspective from CP+B Co-Executive Creative Director Tiffany Rolfe on the dearth of diversity female creatives. Sadly, there’s not much new here, as others have covered the topic before—including Neil French. No surprise either that Rolfe’s “solution” involves mentoring. It’s a wonder she didn’t suggest reaching out to girls in low-income communities too. Let’s also recognize the group that has most benefited from affirmative action is White women. If females are poorly represented on Madison Avenue, it only underscores the abysmal lack of minorities. Why, simply consider AMC series Mad Men. Despite the occasional sexist slights, Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway are key agency members. The sole colored person with professional prominence was Hollis the elevator attendant.

What We Can Do About the Dearth of Female Creatives?

Here’s One Solution: If Women in Management Roles Can Mentor Five Other Women, Our Ranks Would Swell

By Tiffany Rolfe

It never fails.

Time and again, during a speech at a college or at an industry gathering, I’m asked the same question: Why aren’t there more female creative directors in advertising?

Stats report that a shamefully small number, 3% of us, are women. I know the question is coming and I try to prepare, but I always flub it. Because there is no good answer.

Is the world sexist? Maybe. Do women want to have families, which can be hard to juggle with work? Sure. Are women’s sensibilities and humor just different than those of men? Often they are, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

What’s most ironic about the woeful number of women in top creative roles is that the advertising field is all about solving problems creatively. It’s our job to change perceptions and culture, yet we haven’t been able to change this one.

I’m optimistic this is a problem we can solve, as long as we stop simply observing the problem and focus more on solving it.

And that requires a practical appreciation on behalf of all agencies—and marketers—to appreciate what’s valuable about the female creative mind and ensure young women starting in this business don’t feel they are set up for failure.

When I started out in advertising, I was naive. I didn’t know the percentages or realize the hurdles. There was no posturing, no observing of how to play with the boys, no brushing up on the latest football stats. I was just a chick working my ass off, like every other creative out there trying to get promoted.

Recently, I read Tina Fey’s hilarious and insightful “Bossypants,” which pokes fun at gender stereotypes but also revels in the fact that women can be women and achieve great success. As Tina puts it, the best course of action is to “do your thing” and pray that people will notice how great you are. Luckily, in my case people noticed. But clearly all that praying isn’t working for everyone.

For the past couple of years I’ve been running the Old Navy account, and the creative team just happens to be mostly women. It’s made me a huge fan of the female creative sensibility. They have all the gender-neutral characteristics that a good creative should have—smart, confident, and funny. But there are some other incredible things I’ve seen from my team that keep me hiring and promoting more women (aside from the fact, per a recent Forbes article, that women make 80% of all purchase decisions).

I made one of my senior creatives an associate creative director just a couple of months after she had her first kid. Becoming a mom actually made her a better creative. When she’s at work now, she’s highly focused and doesn’t waste time; her ideas come more quickly and, importantly, her leadership skills are more fine-tuned. It turns out that her “mom gene” kicked in and is working for her job, as well as her new baby. Being a mom isn’t a liability. It is an asset.

Recently a female creative director and mom rushed to work after a diaper had exploded on her—she didn’t want to miss an early meeting. I went to give her a hug hello and she stopped me, warning not to touch her—she thought she had poop all over her. I couldn’t help but think how well that would prepare her for a particularly tough upcoming client presentation. That’s the kind of training all of us in advertising, men and women, could use.

Women are hardwired to kick ass and nurture at the same time. But unfortunately the advertising business isn’t known for nurturing. It’s competitive, it’s fast and it’s filled with insecurities. We don’t want to be replaced by the newer, younger, better model.

But maybe if we were better mentors for young people, they’d see a reason to keep us around when we were past our prime. If there is one type of person who could both juggle their own life/work balance, as well as nurture new creatives, it’s women. Think about it—if every female creative in a management role could mentor and promote just five other women, each of those can help five more, and onward, and before long we’ll be in the hundreds. Call it a pay-it-forward meritocracy.

This starts to change how we think of our accomplishments. We start basing our personal success on how successful other women are as well. Women at my creative level, including myself, get caught up in feeling that part of our success is based on the fact that we made it in an industry where we shouldn’t have—that maybe we got there because we have a guy’s sense of humor or because we’re tougher. Or maybe because we don’t have kids.

That’s wrong. We made it because we are great creatives and great leaders. And having a fulfilled life can only help our work.

So it’s women who can change this industry for other women. And even for men, too. We live in a world now where moms and dads are reversing and integrating roles, so it’s not as simple as separating it into men vs. women. Men and women both deserve successful careers and families.

If our field is about understanding what motivates people and marketing products that make life better, we should take advantage of the perspective offered by our own real lives.

That’s great creative leadership.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tiffany Rolfe is co-executive creative director of CP&B.

8284: Affirmative Action On Campus.

From AOL News…

Does Affirmative Action Help College Students?

By Gail Periot

All across the country, high school seniors are gearing up to apply to college. Many of them assume that the best thing they can do to ensure a bright future is to attend the most prestigious school that has accepted them—even if their race, athletic prowess or rich uncle helped them get in.

But according to a December report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, that may be a mistaken strategy—at least for students hoping for a degree in science or engineering.

The extensive research compiled in that report concludes that accepting an affirmative action leg-up probably hurts a student’s chances of becoming a doctor, scientist or engineer. A better strategy is to attend a school at which one’s entering academic credentials roughly match the median student’s.

Contrary to some people’s expectations, college-bound African-Americans express a desire to major in science and engineering as often as whites and maybe a little more often. But something happens during college, and they disproportionately abandon that ambition, taking up softer majors instead. By graduation, African-Americans are markedly underrepresented in science and engineering bachelor’s degrees—a gateway credential for many well-paying, prestigious careers.

For decades, some blamed the attrition problem wholly on African-Americans’ science-related standardized test scores, which remain on average lower than those of whites or Asians. It should surprise no one to learn that students with lower standardized test scores are indeed less likely to stick with science and engineering than students with higher scores, no matter where they attend school.
But that’s not the whole story.

As three independent scholarly studies show, part of the problem appears to be relative. A student who attends a college at which his entering credentials put him near the bottom of the class—which is where a student who needed an affirmative action preference will be—is less likely to persevere in science or engineering than an otherwise identical student attending a school at which those same credentials put him in the middle of the class or higher.

The reasons for this comparative effect are doubtless complex. But they are based on a common everyday observation: A good student can get in over his head and end up learning little or nothing if he is placed in a classroom with students whose level of academic preparation is much higher than his own, even though he is fully capable of mastering the material when presented at a more moderate pace. Discouraged, he may even give up—even though he would have persevered and ultimately succeeded in a somewhat less competitive environment.

The effect does not appear to be slight. In a 2004 article, University of Virginia psychology professor Frederick Smyth and University of Southern California psychology professor John McArdle predicted that 45 percent more minority women and 35 percent more minority men in their sample would have persisted in science and engineering if they had attended schools where their academic credentials matched their peers.

Further proof of the inadvertent harm being caused by affirmative action can be found in the remarkable success of historically black colleges and universities, where half of African-American students naturally have entering credentials in the top half of the class.

HBCUs graduate more than their proportionate share of African-American students with science and engineering degrees and send more than their share on to get Ph.D.s at mainstream institutions. A few years back, for example, the National Science Foundation reported that with only 20 percent of total African-American enrollment, HBCUs produce 40 percent of the African-Americans graduating with a bachelor’s degree in the natural sciences. This is impressive.

All of this is something high school seniors deserve to know. The commission challenges colleges and universities to tell them.

Gail Heriot is a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

6961: The New Elite.

From The New York Times…

Meet the New Elite, Not Like the Old

By Helene Cooper

WASHINGTON — They are the children of 1969 — the year that America’s most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses.

No longer would Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia be the domain of the privileged. Instead, in response to the national soul-searching prompted by the civil rights movement, America’s premier colleges would try to become more representative of the population as a whole.

Forty years later, America is being led, to a striking extent, by a new elite, a cohort of the best and the brightest whose advancement was formed, at least in part, by affirmative action policies. From Barack and Michelle Obama (Columbia, Princeton, Harvard) to Eric Holder (Columbia) to Sonia Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale) to Valerie Jarrett (Michigan, Stanford), the country is now seeing, in full flower, the fruition of this wooing of minorities to institutions that for much of the nation’s history have groomed America’s leaders.

And yet the consequences of that change remain unresolved, as became clear on Friday, when Mr. Obama grappled a second time with the arrest of the Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home.

The incident, the president said, offered the potential to soothe longstanding distrust between minorities and police officers. But it also laid bare another reality, that the children of 1969, even those who now occupy niches at the top of society, regard their status as complicated, ambiguous and vulnerable.

“Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive — as opposed to negative — understandings about the issue, is part of my portfolio,” Mr. Obama said.

It was a reminder that Mr. Obama, in addition to being the most powerful American, is also the fulfillment of the ideals embraced by Ivy League minority recruiters in 1969. Mr. Gates entered Yale that year, as one of 96 black freshmen. Today that number seems small. But there had been only six black students just three years before.

Mr. Gates belonged to the first affirmative action wave at top universities — a wave that continued into the 1970s and the 1980s. I was one of its beneficiaries. A black 17-year-old from Monrovia, Liberia, I was one of some 200 black freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983.

My first roommate was a white student from Seagrove, N.C., whose SAT scores and grade-point average were higher than mine. Privately, I consoled myself that I had qualifications that she didn’t: I could name the capital of every country in Africa; countries she had never heard of. I knew where the Zambezi River emptied into the Indian Ocean. None of that had been on the SAT.

But every now and then I feared I was faking it, that my white classmates had something I didn’t. There were things they seemed to know instinctively, that I had to look up. I remember getting laughed at during a game of Pictionary when I couldn’t come up with the word for a giant bird landing on a lawn with a baby in its mouth.

My feelings of inadequacy were not unusual, said David L. Evans, the Saturn/Apollo electrical engineer hired by Harvard in 1969 to help lead its affirmative action program. When Mr. Evans visited public high schools in Arkansas in search of promising black students, he was met with skepticism. “Even people who didn’t have any mean-spiritedness would say to the students, ‘You going to be up there with the Kennedys?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘How do you think you can make it there?’ ”

There was anxiety, too, among the originators of race-based affirmative action programs. “The idealistic version of why these universities embraced racial affirmative action is that they said, ‘Hey, we’re in the business of training elites, it would be better for America if there were a diverse elite,’ ” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of “The Big Test,” a history of the SAT and the rise of America’s meritocracy. To its architects, the minority recruitment was the next phase for universities that for years had paved the way for whites, particularly the offspring of upper-class alumni, Mr. Lemann said.

“The cynical version of why they did this is they said, ‘We can’t control this country, it’s becoming too diverse, we need to socialize the brighter minorities and make them more like us.’ ”

In many ways, being molded into people “more like us” gave the children of 1969 an advantage denied most of their white counterparts. They learned to navigate within a second world. They also absorbed some of its ideas and values. And they paved the way for the next generation.

“We had to go through this phase of larger integration for Barack Obama to be possible,” Mr. Gates said in an interview a few days after his arrest. “It would have been impossible for Barack Obama to go from a historic black school to become president, at this time. The whole point is that a broad swath of America had to be able to identify with him.”

It also enabled Mr. Obama to run “the most race-blind campaign” of any black presidential candidate, said Gwen Ifill, the PBS news reporter whose book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” examines the rise of African-Americans in politics.

Perhaps. But the children of 1969 dwell in a complex world. They retain an ethnic identity that includes its own complement of cultural, historical and psychological issues and considerations. This emerged at Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. And it emerged again last week, when Mr. Obama joked in the White House East Room that if he ran afoul of the police, “I’d get shot.” In saying this, he seemed to draw on the fears of black men across the United States, including those within the new power elite.

What Mr. Obama seemed to be demonstrating was what Mr. Lemann of Columbia calls a “double consciousness” that allows the children of 1969 to flow more easily between the world which their skin color bequeathed them and the world which their college degree opened up for them.

It’s the same double consciousness I acquired at U.N.C., though I didn’t think about it that way as a student. Sure, my white friends were learning a little more about black (and African) culture from me. But I was absorbing much more from them, since they surrounded me in such great number. At the time it seemed I had the advantage; I would leave college having gotten much more from my interactions with my white friends than they could possibly have gotten from me. And the principal thing I learned was how to make them feel at ease around me.

Except, of course, on those occasions when one can’t. Life outside the university doesn’t duplicate the conditions of university life.

“I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere I go,” Professor Gates said. “We — all of us in the crossover generation — have multiple identities, and being black trumps all of those other identities.”

On Friday Mr. Obama said he hoped Mr. Gates’s incident might become a “teachable moment.” It is a daunting task for the children of 1969: finding out whether the double consciousness they honed in the Ivy League can actually get this country to listen — and react — to race in a different way.

Helene Cooper, a White House correspondent for The Times, is the author of “The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood.”