The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the White Male Workplace / Edition 2

by Frederick R. Lynch

Overview

"Diversity" has become the turn-of-the-century buzzword. Republican and Democratic leaders ritually chant "diversity is our strength" and corporate CEOs talk about the need to create a "workforce that looks like America." Most corporate mission statements now contain a clause on "valuing differences" and millions of employees have completed-or soon will undergo-some sort of "diversity training." Where did all this come from -and why? Who created diversity programs? How do they differ? How effective are these policies? Can they do more harm than good in organizations and in the wider society?

During the past decade, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch studied the rise of a social policy movement that has successfully moved multiculturalism from universities and foundations into the courts, mass media, and the American workplace. The new diversity policies are future-oriented and market-driven, eclipsing "old" affirmative action debates about overcoming past discrimination against blacks.Based on more than six years of field research and hundreds of interviews, Lynch tracks the development and impact of different forms of diversity policies at dozens of consultant gatherings, in the business and professional literature and through in-depth case studies such as the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He profiles the major consultants who have powered the diversity machine, analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of various approaches to workplace diversity and provides numerous "you-are-there" samples of workshops, seminars, and conferences.

The book is written for the general reader interested in public-policy issues, social scientists, and others interested in the origins and consequences of workplace diversity policies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765807311
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	09/30/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	467
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.04(d)

About the Author

Frederick R. Lynch is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action and dozens of articles in professional journals as well as the Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, and Commentary. He has been profiled in Forbes Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and on national newscasts and television programs.

Frederick R. Lynch is associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action and dozens of articles in professional journals as well as the Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, and Commentary. He has been profiled in Forbes Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and on national newscasts and television programs.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 From "American Dilemma" to Affirmative Action and the Diversity Pioneers

The diversity machine is the latest in a series of social movements designed to transform American ethnic relations. As is the case today prior efforts have always coupled moral suasion with more practical arguments and strategies-for example, business and store boycotts, political lobbying, bloc voting, civil disobedience, and carefully chosen court contests. Moral and practical impulses to change the nation's race relations have deep historical roots.

The moral tension underlying American race relations was bluntly identified by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in his 1944 classic, An American Dilemma: the gap between egalitarian ideals versus blatantly unequal treatment of African Americans. Myrdal declared that black-white relations constituted the central moral dilemma in the United States:

The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American....The "American Dilemma," referred to in the title of this book, is the ever-ranging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane which we shall call the "American Creed," where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations on specific planes of individual and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook.

The purely sociological urgency of managing U.S. ethnic relations was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier in Democracy in America. The French observer warned that conflict among the "three races" in the United States (blacks, whites, and Native Americans) might be the young nation's ultimate undoing. His grim managerial prophecy was that blacks would have to be kept rigidly subordinated or be made entirely equal to whites. As for the Indians, he wrote, "I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish...The Indians have only the alternative of war or civilization. They must either destroy the Europeans or become their equals."

Tocqueville did not foresee another factor that would complicate American ethnic relations: the subsequent arrival of large numbers of immigrants who were ethnically or religiously different from the dominant Protestant, Western Europeans. The arrival of large numbers of Irish on the East Coast and Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast generated massive popular hostility. By the turn of the century, third wave of immigration was at high tide, with an annual peak of more than one and a quarter million persons in 1907. This time, a majority of the newcomers were from Eastern and Southern Europe and Russia, and their arrival was complicated by massive economic, demographic, and sociological changes accompanying the emergence of the United States as an industrial world superpower.

Then, as today, a new policy movement arose to tame America's changing ethnic landscape. Before dealing with the more obvious precursors of workforce diversity -- civil rights regulations and affirmative action -- it is worth noting how today's diversity machine resembles another movement of educated, moralistic, middle-class reformers: the early twentieth-century Progressives.

Progressivism: The First Drive to Manage Immigration and Social Change

Modern diversity management's uneasy mixture of social science, social engineering, and moralism first came together in turn-of-the-century progressivism. The largely urban, middle-class reformers were the first to promote rational management of problems wrought by immigration and economic polarization, primary goals in today's diversity industry. Admittedly progressivism was much more broadly conceived and did not focus on black-white relations, and early-twentieth-century reformers emphasized assimilation rather than modern diversity's militant pluralism. But both the Progressives and contemporary diversity consultants have been vigorous believers in government regulation of workplace practices, and leaders of both movements had faith that training, education, and manipulation of organizational environments could produce major attitudinal and behavioral changes.

Although most Progressives were white, they otherwise resembled diversity consultants in being middle class and well educated; many were women. Social activists and professional groups were actively involved in progressivism and the modern diversity machine. In The Searcher Order, historian Robert Wiebe noted that the Progressives' ambition was to fashion a new social order and stability for an industrializing, dynamic, changing America. The impulse toward managerialism, futurism, social engineering, and social control was strong. So it is today in diversity management.

Many diversity experts also warn of instability inherent in an emerging two-tiered class structure and polarized ethnic relations. Progressives too were alarmed by growing concentrations of great wealth and immigration-generated poverty. As Richard Hofstadter observed in The Age of Reform, "On one side, they feared the power of the plutocracy, on the other the poverty and restlessness of the masses." Progressive reformers lobbied strongly for expanded and improved public services, especially in education, criminal justice, and workplace safety regulation. In attempts to forestall open class warfare, President Theodore Roosevelt (later the presidential candidate of the Progressive party) moved to institutionalize union-management bargaining.

Maintaining social control and societal stability have been underlying themes of both progressivism and the diversity machine, though through sharply differing approaches. The Progressives were adamant that immigrants assimilate and learn American culture. Progressives like Jane Addams founded settlement houses and other private charities to teach the new arrivals the American way of life. There was a nativist streak in some forms of progressivism, and nearly all the reformers loathed the corrupt, urban-ethnic political machines. (The establishment of the city manager form of government was an attempt to circumvent and rein in the machines. And as Anthony Platt observed in The Child Savers, control over unruly immigrant children was a primary source of Progressives' interest in establishing a juvenile justice system.)

Contemporary diversity proponents, on the other hand, have stood assimilation on its head. Employers are admonished to adjust to immigrant and minority cultures, "celebrate differences," and permit women and minorities to "be themselves." Diversity change masters scorn calls for assimilation as a ruse for white male dominance. Massive immigration has become the engine for transforming Eurocentrism and generating a multicultural "beautiful mosaic."

The most intriguing parallel between progressivism and today's diversity machine is that both movements were propelled by a volatile mixture of righteous moralism and pragmatic social engineering. Progressivism was laced with militant Protestant moralism that eventually subverted the entire movement. Hofstadter argued that Progressives attempted to impose small-town, middle-class, Protestant values of individual responsibility, self-restraint, and civic duty on a new social order centered on large organizations and the impersonality of big city life. For example, the Progressive party's standard bearer, Theodore Roosevelt, waxed morally righteous on many issues, especially when railing against the evils of the corporate trusts as the "malefactors of great wealth." He concluded his fiery presidential nomination speech at the Progressive party convention with a memorable evangelical flourish: "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!"

Progressivism's strident moralism eventually consumed more rational efforts for more limited, secular engineering. The movement's energies veered into grandiose, ill-fated moral reforms such as establishing the ill-fated prohibition and into pompous plans to establish world peace after World War I.

Whether business-savvy architects of today's diversity machine will be more successful in reining in shrill civil rights moralists will be tested during the coming months and years as legislative battles to repeal ethnic and gender preferences reach a climax. There is also the deeper question -- and far greater doubt -- as to whether the diversity machine can break free of collectivist ideological roots in race and gender identity politics and the "justice" of proportional representation.

World War II and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

World War I may have extinguished the Progressive impulse for rational management of change, but World War II rekindled the flame of racial, ethnic, and gender reform. The war's patriotic rhetoric highlighted the gap between attitudes and treatment of African Americans as noted in Myrdal's postwar American Dilemma. Meanwhile, domestic sociological changes unleashed by the war opened up new occupational vistas for blacks and women.

During World War II Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, directing the federal government and defense contractors to be nondiscriminatory employers. Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. Returning black veterans were less content to endure southern segregation, as were black civilians who experienced wartime employment in the industrial North. The war effort also moved thousands of women from home life into high-wage factory jobs. Although most returned to domesticity, the imagery of Rosie the Riveter would forever shatter the stereotype that women were unsuited for "masculine" blue-collar jobs. Indeed, in the 1960s, Rosie the Riveter's daughters surged into expanded higher education systems and then into the labor force, pursuing career objectives similar to those of men.

But it was the gathering civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and transformation of affirmative action theory and practice that paved the way for today's diversity machine. The dramatic, televised confrontations between nonviolent black demonstrators and southern officials enforcing segregation statutes have been etched into America's collective consciousness. "We shall overcome" dominated the nation's moral life well into the 1990s.

The civil rights movement culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or religion. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established to investigate charges of such discrimination and solve such disputes through administrative action or through filing charges in federal court. In 1970, the agency won a $50 million consent decree against giant American Telephone and Telegraph for alleged gender and racial discrimination and imposed a strict court-imposed system of hiring and promotion quotas on the company. The lesson was not lost on other private and public employers.

The Transformation of Affirmative Action

By the late 1960s, the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) began to elaborate enforcement rules for Title VII and President Johnson's 1965 executive order 11246, which directed federal contractors to undertake "affirmative action" to overcome the effects of past discrimination. The question for OFCCP officials was how to prove that employers were engaging in nondiscriminatory hiring and the vaguely defined affirmative action. The solution was the requirement that recipients of federal contracts establish affirmative action plans demonstrating that they were taking steps to remedy proportional imbalances between the composition of their workforce versus that of labor pools (or sometimes general population data was used). This resulted in goals-and-timetables formulas (sometimes criticized as quotas) to ensure that an increasing number of groups were not "underutilized": blacks, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Pacific Islanders.

The possibility of warding off negative regulatory or court judgments with affirmative action plans encouraged other employers to begin adopting preemptive voluntary affirmative action to achieve more proportional ethnic and gender workforce balances. The programs were understood by government agencies not to constitute admission of previous discrimination. Voluntary affirmative action programs that excluded white males were upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of Weber v. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation and United Steelworkers of America (1979). Also by the late 1970s, the EEOC shielded employers taking voluntary affirmative action measures from reverse discrimination complaints.

In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power that general employment aptitude tests yielding racially disproportionate results are discriminatory unless such tests are directly related to job performance. This decision led many companies to abandon testing temporarily or adapt the secret practice of ensuring ethnically proportionate test results using a statistical format termed race norming. More technically termed "within-group scoring," race norming is a process whereby individual test scores are compared only with others of the same ethnicity: Hispanics with Hispanics, blacks with blacks, and so forth. Each individual score is compared to the appropriate ethnic group mean and then officially reported to employers as a percentile score based on that comparison. Thus, a Hispanic and an Asian with identical numerical employment test scores, say 300, would be reported with very different percentile scores if the Asian group mean were 275 and the Hispanic group mean were 175. The Hispanic individual would be reported as scoring significantly higher in percentile terms. But many employers and nearly all test applicants were never told about such statistical manipulations; the percentile scores were presented as if they were based on all of those taking the test.

For more than a decade, the federal government administered racenormed civil service exams, as did many state and private testing services, adversely affecting up to 12 million people. Following exposure in the press, the practice was outlawed in the 1991 Civil Rights Act. (Banding of test results whereby individuals are grouped within broad test score ranges and then chosen by ethnic and gender criteria -- continues but is being legally challenged.)

By the end of the 1970s, affirmative action theory and practice had undergone a major transformation. Originally designed to ensure equal opportunity for individuals through expanding the diversity of applicant pools (through outreach, advertising, and reasonable reexamination of employment criteria), affirmative action became entrenched as a system of ethnic and gender proportional preferences. This top-down transformation, powered in part by the civil rights movement, was made possible by a changing intellectual climate.

Blaming the System: Institutional Racism and Sexism

The transformation of affirmative action from equality of opportunity into equality of results was accompanied by what Charles Murray first termed a shift in "elite wisdom" and what Christopher Lasch later characterized as a "revolt of the elites." This shift in thinking began in the ! 960s among intellectuals, then spread to key leaders in government and corporations. The change represented the triumph of a sociological worldview that emphasized the operation of social systems and structural factors rather than the actions of individuals. To some extent this was a revival of the Progressives' faith in rational reform and the power of social engineering.

Middle-class Americans continued to adhere to conventional wisdom based around middle-class values of individual responsibility, the work ethic, the necessity to mold behavior through rewards and punishments, and a social justice in terms of"a hand, not a handout." But the elite wisdom took up the view that the system is to blame for social ills such as poverty, crime, and inequality. Top-down social engineering and redistribution, it was increasingly thought, would reduce, maybe even cure, many societal ills. The title of psychologist William Ryan's influential book stated a new taboo. Blaming the Victim was no longer acceptable, especially if the individual victim were black or female.

The 1960s witnessed a surge of interest in the field of sociology that crested in the early 1970s. Sociology's emphasis on the importance of group forces in molding human behavior reinforced the drift in 1960s social policy thinking toward two key concepts: cultural relativism and institutional racism and sexism.

Cultural relativism simply means that values, customs, and norms vary by group, time, and place. (For example, during the 1920s, consumption of alcohol was prohibited throughout the United States; today it is not. Before 1973, the age of adulthood in most of the United States was twenty-one; today it is eighteen.) Ethnocentrism is the sin of the sociologist who presumes specific cultures to be "better" or "worse," or "right" or "wrong." But such cool scientific detachment has been transmuted politically into sustained verbal and legal attacks on universalistic, impersonal, objective standards. This has been most apparent in the challenges to standardized testing -- ergo, the popular diversity dictum: "Differences do not mean deficiencies." The cultures and behaviors of women and minorities may differ from those of many white males, but they are not inferior.

That the cultural preferences and behaviors of many women and minorities are nonetheless judged deficient or unqualified is held by diversity consultants and many sociologists to be the result of institutional racism and sexism, or institutional discrimination. According to the sixth edition of Richard T. Schaefer's sociology text, Racial and Ethnic Groups, "institutional discrimination refers to the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operation of a society." Indeed, states Schaefer, "a consensus is growing today that this institutional discrimination is more significant than that committed by prejudiced individuals."

It is axiomatic in the theory of institutional racism or discrimination that American society reflects the cultural biases and interests of European white males who have long occupied the highest positions of authority. The "Eurocentrism" inherent in traditional or established customs, laws, and routine practices such as standardized IQ and aptitude tests, criteria for mortgage applications and credit risks, and educational curricula penalizes groups and individuals who do not conform or who have not been socialized into Eurocentric culture. Theory veers into ideology and actual social policy with the corollary assumption that ethnic groups and women would be proportionally distributed throughout all levels of major social institutions but for widespread institutional racism and sexism.

Indeed, it is precisely this sort of thinking that has been incorporated in enforcing diversity management's parent policy, affirmative action. Patterns and practices of selection that result in disproportionate impact ("disparate impact") on minorities and women are likely to be viewed by regulators and many judges as evidence of institutional discrimination, however unintentional (hence the rush by employers and universities to establish goals and timetables, to demonstrate good-faith efforts in expunging purported institutional racism and sexism).

Institutional racism and sexism easily slide into race and gender determinism, which produced "identity politics" -- the doctrine that an individual's thought patterns can be deduced from his or her membership in ethnic or gender categories. In fact, the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in human destinies is quite complex and difficult to determine. Among the host of known and unknown variables cutting across ethnic and gender boundaries are age, educational level, occupation, family size, generational cohort, and immigration cohort. Indeed, scholars who study social mobility (usually comparing the earnings and occupational attainments of fathers and sons) find they can predict only one-third to one-half of the results; the factors behind most intergenerational movement up and down career or income ladders remain "unexplained."

This new sociologically based "system-is-to-blame" viewpoint found dramatic public expression in the 1968 National Commission on Civil Disorders report on the urban disorders of the mid-1960s (the so-called Kerner Report, named after the Illinois ex-governor who was the commission chair). The commission laid the blame for black rioting at the door of institutional white racism: societal-wide, often unintentional, social practices that excluded blacks. "What white Americans have never fully understood -- but what the Negro can never forget -- is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." Though initially shocking -- the Johnson White House was largely silent when the report was issued -- the report's "white racism" conclusion nonetheless became part of the moral shield of the civil rights movement and a rationale for the increasing sweep and aggressiveness of affirmative action.

The urban disorders of the mid-1960s and the emergence of more militant and revolutionary black protest movements, such as the Black Panthers, lent added urgency to accelerated implementation of affirmative action for a quick and peaceful inclusion of minorities into the American mainstream.

Affirmative Action's Silent Revolution

Affirmative action and workforce diversity thus became part of American life because the nation's economic and political elites actively or passively accepted such programs as a means to forestall racial conflict and polarization.13 And as Shelby Steele observed, the civil rights movement produced thirty years of guilt and shame regarding black-white relations. Compassion and compensatory treatment for blacks were difficult to dispute publicly:

Social policymaking over the last 30 years was made by people and institutions lacking in moral authority to make principled decisions. Policy was made defensively to protect institutions from shame and the threat of legal action....Racial quotas came in during the Nixon administration, not because Republicans believed in them, but because they lacked the moral authority to resist them.

Sheer ignorance and indifference also played a significant role in the silent expansion of affirmative action. Throughout the 1980s, aside from fleeting, popular attention to occasional court cases, most CEOs, Republicans, conservatives, and popular business writers knew little and cared less about affirmative action and the movement toward a broader, more militant multiculturalism. They had little inkling of the coming diversity crusades. Many simply did not want to know what was happening. Affirmative action was not a priority issue for Beltway Republicans.

The Reagan -- Bush Years

The white-male-dominated Republican party, in control of the White House for twelve years, might have been expected to end ethnic and gender proportionalism quickly. Given the huge public opinion majorities opposed to ethnic and gender preferences, the Republicans might have even used quotas as a political hammer, and antiquota language indeed was contained in Republican platforms. Yet all but a handful of Beltway conservatives and Republicans thought affirmative action policies were a minor matter, not worthy of debate.

Constitutional scholars Herman Belz, Robert Detlefsen, and Richard Epstein have provided a legal and administrative overview of various behindthe-scenes battles over affirmative action during the Reagan years. Notes Belz, "Instead of consistently opposing race-conscious affirmative action throughout the government the administration tried to limit its excesses and make it more politically and administratively palatable." A split within the policymaking establishment evolved. While the Reagan (and Bush) Justice Departments opposed quotas, the Department of Labor and its Office of Federal Contract Compliance enforcement arm merely routinized them. Some reforms were accomplished by informal policy processes. The EEOC finally took an antiquota position, though midlevel bureaucrats continued encouraging corporations to race-norm employment exams.

In 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese set in motion an attempt to rewrite executive order 11241, the source of affirmative action programs, and make goals and timetables voluntary, but Meese met strong resistance from Labor Secretary William Brock and others in the administration. (The ability of Meese and his allies to overcome opposition within the administration was undercut by negative responses from the business community, where affirmative action goals and timetables had become a way of life. In considering a revision of the executive order, the Reagan administration surveyed 127 chief executives of large corporations. Ninety-five percent responded yes to the question, "Do you plan to continue to use numerical objectives to track the progress of women and minorities in your corporation, regardless of government requirements?") Supreme Court decisions upholding some forms of quotas in 1986 and 1987 ended the matter in favor of the Labor Department's position.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Bradford Reynolds, U.S. Civil Rights Commission staff head Linda Chavez, and Bush White House counsel C. Boyden Gray bitterly noted lack of support. Few high-level conservatives or Republicans cared about affirmative action. "There was a strategic decision by conservatives not to oppose quotas," said current Heritage Foundation vice-president Adam Meyerson. "We felt we just couldn't win. Swing voters in the suburbs were too sensitive to the 'racist' label." Said Kenneth Cribb, an assistant counselor under Attorney General Meese, "People didn't want to use their political capital on this." In spite of Ronald Reagan's personal opposition to quotas, his administration maintained the machinery for goals and timetables and also expanded the Small Business Administration's system of minority set-aside loans. (Some Republican minority businessmen were so dependent on the loans that they were known as "8A Republicans," so-named for the section of the Small Business Administration code through which they obtained federal funds.)

George Bush triggered the first popular outburst of anger against affirmative action when he signed the 1991 Civil Rights Act in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings. He also refused to sign a document crafted by White House counsel Boyden Gray ending preferential treatment in the federal government. Indeed, George Bush wanted to appoint more women and minorities to his administration than had any other president. To this end, the administration ran its own highly effective computerized diversity screening system. Race and gender criteria became a "prime consideration" in determining who got jobs in the Bush administration. Said Katja Bullock, in charge of the computerized system, "Bush was just very, very concerned about it. We had statistics coming out of our ears. In the end, his numbers surpassed any other administration.

Writer Michael Crichton was stupefied to find that none of the corporate executives he interviewed for his best-selling novel on sexual harassment, Disclosure, knew anything about modern feminism. None had heard of Catherine MacKinnon, the University of Michigan's feminist law professor, and scoffed when they discovered she was a mere academic. (Yet MacKinnon's successful efforts at redefining federal sexual harassment law as behavior "creating a hostile environment" will likely cost business billions in lawsuits and settlements.)

Gray finally stumbled on what he quickly realized was the "most significant silent policy revolution in American history" when he tried to oppose a coalition of corporate and government lawyers fashioning what became the 1991 Civil Rights Act. Few high-level colleagues would join him in opposing the bipartisan coalitions efforts to overturn limits on affirmative action recently imposed by the Supreme Court and further cement ethnic and gender preferences into law.

Many conservatives and Republicans now profess stunned surprise at how they could have so misread the affirmative action revolution. By 1994, the conservative Claremont Institute's director, Larry Arnn, joined Gray in admitting affirmative action's revolutionary nature. "Affirmative action blindsided us. We just didn't see it coming. It's a major social revolution.TM

Like many other Americans, they had assumed that affirmative action programs still served the early ideals of color-blind nondiscrimination and equality of opportunity for individuals. But they found that two decades of social engineering and legal subterfuge had subverted these principles. Increasingly the goal was outright ethnic and gender proportionalism at all organizational levels to produce President Clinton's "workplace that looks like America." How did this happen? And at whose expense?

Six Factors Behind the Affirmative Action Revolution

Six interrelated factors explain affirmative action's silent revolution and the subsequent foundation for subsequent workforce diversity initiatives.24

First, affirmative action was a redistributionist policy implemented by white corporate and government elites against younger, working- and middleclass white males. Judges, corporate human resources officers, and government bureaucrats unilaterally formulated the policies in a behind-the-scenes fashion. As we have just seen, remarkably few Republicans or businessmen wished to dissent from a growing, quiet consensus at the top of American society to do something about urban unrest. Sociologist John Skrentny has observed that affirmative action "had to happen incrementally, unintentionally, in behind-the-scenes meetings of White House officials and meetings of administrators, and in pragmatic, nickel-and-dime court decisions. It needed special circumstances, such as the crisis perceived in the cities, a Cold War moral struggle based on a global model of human rights, and a conservative President Nixon needing to confound a liberal establishment used to having its way. (In 1972, the Nixon Justice Department had forced the first quota plan aimed at solidly Democratic trade unions in Philadelphia.)

Second, affirmative action has had a fluid, informal, oral character. Specific directives to hire by ethnicity or gender have usually been issued orally behind the cover of more general and vaguely phrased equal opportunity guidelines. Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield aptly characterized affirmative action: "Word comes down, but does not go out."

A third factor reinforced the informal, ad hoc nature of affirmative action: the legality of the many forms of affirmative action remained largely unclear. The U.S. Supreme Court was indecisive and ambivalent, intimidated by the moral force wielded by proponents of affirmative action. Court action badly lagged policy practice, and legal decisions, when they came, were often deeply divided and narrowly construed. Justice Lewis Powell's controlling opinion in the landmark 1978 case of Alan Bakke v. Regents of the University of California permitted the use of race as a criterion in selecting university applicants so long as there were no "hard quotas." Justice William Brennan's majority opinion in the 1979 Weber v. Kaiser Aluminum case opened the door to private employers' use of "voluntary" affirmative action quotas to balance workforces, though "voluntary" might be one step ahead of regulatory sanction or a consent decree. Brennan opened the door even wider in Johnson v. Santa Clara County Transportation Agency (1987) by permitting a public agency to grant preferential treatment to correct statistical workforce imbalances so long as there was no "unnecessary trammeling" of the rights of white males. (After Johnson, however, a series of reverses in 1988 and 1989 made it harder for plaintiffs in discrimination cases to use "disparate impact" statistics to prove discrimination. In the 1989 case, Richmond v. Croson, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor authored a majority opinion limiting the use of voluntary minority contract set-asides by state and local governments. O'Connor found that state or local governments must be guilty of intentional discrimination before implementing any preferential or set-aside procedures. More ominously for champions of affirmative action, she wrote that in the future the Court would apply the same "strict scrutiny" to laws that favored blacks over whites as it did those that favored whites over blacks. O'Connor sharply signaled her suspicion of "benign" racial classifications: "Classifications based on race carry a danger of stigmatic harm. Unless they are strictly reserved for remedial settings, they may in fact promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility.")

The fourth factor propelling affirmative action was a peculiar, powerful spiral of silence that suppressed public discussion of affirmative action, much less any politics of racial hostility. Public opinion polls had long found 75 to 80 percent of Americans opposed to ethnic or gender preferences, especially when contrasted with "merit alone. Yet the poll results remained largely unknown and unarticulated as misperception, fear, and silence fed one another in an escalating spiral. Affirmative action advocates appeared to be in the majority. They were more vocal and won considerable sympathy in the major news and entertainment media, wielded the collective guilt created by the civil rights movement, and brandished the hammer of the most lethal label of the past twenty years: "racist." In turn, guilt and fear of labeling fed rising "politically correct" censorship and suppressed embarrassing questions or data concerning racial realities or racial reforms: busing, affirmative action, the rising number of single-parent families, and increasing violence by urban youth gangs. Worse, as Timur Kuran has brilliantly demonstrated in his study of "preference falsification," under affirmative action, people felt compelled to justify programs in public that they deeply doubted in private.

Fifth, the spiral of silence and political correctness quashed any form of class consciousness or organized complaint by the primary victims of affirmative action: young working- and middle-class white men seeking their first jobs or promotions. The public's reluctance to discuss the issue, coupled with lack of coverage by the mass media, made reverse discrimination accounts somewhat unbelievable. In addition, affirmative action did not affect whites equally. In a classic case of pluralistic ignorance, many groups of white males were unaware of what was happening because of educational, occupational, age, and geographical barriers. White males in engineering and other fields demanding a high level of mathematical or hard-science training were relatively unscathed by affirmative action quotas because of the lack of women and minorities with credentials in those fields. They had relatively little contact with those hit hard by affirmative action: younger white males in the public sector, in service or people-oriented professions, and in "progressive," multiethnic states, such as California and New York. When the subject did arise, white males untouched by affirmative action were likely to dismiss or jeer others' reverse discrimination complaints. In part, this was due to the manly code of silence. In silent John Wayne style, white men were expected to hurdle obstacles without whining or excuses. With the partial exception of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, most civil liberties organizations -- notably the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) -- turned a deaf ear to white males. Rarely or never did they file friend-of-the court briefs in favor of white men; many times, they filed briefs in fa vor of preferences. Civil rights enforcement agencies largely ignored white males' discrimination complaints. And it bears repeating that white males found little relief from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which shielded employers taking voluntary affirmative action from reverse discrimination complaints.

The sixth and final factor sustaining a quiet affirmative action revolution was that the liberal news and entertainment establishments simply could not cope with the topic. Critical coverage of affirmative action was politically incorrect. Civil rights moralism ruled without question, and polling of journalists indicated much stronger support for affirmative action than in the general public. Because of the policy's backstage nature and the complicity of white male victims, it was hard to track. Supreme Court cases, especially Bakke, occasionally produced a brief spike of media interest. Otherwise, there were few paper trails and little organized protest. Since the media authenticate and prioritize social issues, as well as validate what opinions may be expressed about them, the relative absence of major media coverage until the mid-1990s made discussion in ordinary day-to-day settings difficult. (The social sciences, especially sociology, were similarly paralyzed. Concerning one of the most massive social engineering schemes of the twentieth century, few sociologists had anything to say publicly.)

Without media or social science scrutiny, affirmative action was transformed into proportional representation. By 1990, Bush White House counsel C. Boyden Gray was appalled to find that affirmative action's forced proportionalism was permeating the workplace in many hidden ways. The powerful Business Roundtable winked at manipulating employment tests through race norming. (Indeed, so quietly was race norming implemented that the Reagan-appointed chair and vice-chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission first learned in the newspapers that their own agency staff were pressuring employers to use race norming.) Although the 1991 Civil Rights Act reversed several Supreme Court curbs on affirmative action, Gray claims to this day that his hard-fought battles produced a bill that did not further encourage employers' use of quotas to prevent lawsuits by women and minorities. Nearly no one else agreed. Most of the public and conservative press were outraged when Bush signed what he had earlier termed a "quota bill." And smaller and midsized businesses were groaning under the costs of regulatory paperwork and lawsuits. Horror stories became increasingly common as writer James Bovard gathered a partial list of court cases filed during the 1980s and early 1990s:

* The Internal Revenue Service was sued for discrimination after it fired a black secretary who refused to answer the telephone.
* Mobil Oil Corporation was sued for racial discrimination after it fired a black employee who had misappropriated company property, violated conflict-of-interest policies, and falsified expense reports.
* Kemper Life Insurance was sued for racial discrimination after it discharged a black employee who committed expense-account fraud and missed scheduled appointments with clients.
* An ex-employee sued Buckeye Cellulose Corporation of Georgia, claiming that the company's policy of terminating employees for "absence and tardiness" was racially biased because it had a disparate impact on blacks.
* The U.S. Postal Service was sued in 1990 by a job applicant whose driver's license had been suspended four times and who claimed that the agency's policy of not hiring individuals as mail carriers whose licenses had been suspected unfairly discriminated against blacks -- even though carriers must drive government vehicles to deliver the mail.

By 1992, Forbes reporters Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer estimated that affirmative action quotas constituted a 4 percent tax on the national gross national product. Yet their measurements could not quantify the greatest of all tolls: worker demoralization, tension, cynicism, and duplicity.

The Crisis of Affirmative Action

Although corporate chieftains and high-level Republicans paid little heed to the increasing costs and unpopularity of affirmative action, the policy's chief proponents were well aware of rumbles of revolt, especially among long-silent white male workers. The first national outburst against quotas occurred in what was otherwise a triumph for affirmative action forces with the passage of the 1991 Civil Rights Act. Opposition to affirmative action was already emerging as a potent weapon in some local political contests. Louisiana voters hungry for any sort of referendum on affirmative action gave ex-Klans-man David Duke more than 40 percent of the vote in a contest for a U.S. Senate seat. Two years later, North Carolina senator Jesse Helms won reelection with a television advertisement portraying a white factory worker crumpLing a rejection letter, informing him that the company to which he had applied had "had to give the job to a minority."

Talk radio, especially the success of Rush Limbaugh, proved decisive in breaking the spiral of silence on affirmative action and other politically incorrect topics. Caught by surprise, mainstream liberal news organizations reacted quickly to neutralize or scorn both talk radio and white males' complaints against affirmative action. After the 1993 movie Falling Down portrayed an unemployed white male lashing out at minorities, Newsweek countered with the cover story "White Male Paranoia," and Business Week shortly followed with its cover story, "White, Male, Worried."

On the other hand, the mainstream media were fragmenting on the question of egalitarian censorship in the name of political correctness. The simmering topic burst on the popular scene with a remarkable December 24, 1990, Newsweek cover story, "Thought Police -- Watch What You Say." The debate on political correctness often spilled over into arguments about multiculturalism and affirmative action. "PC" became a popular topic for scorn and derision, despite frantic attempts to quash the term altogether. Ridicule of PC was another strong signal that affirmative action would need to be reformulated for the 1990s.

Paradoxically, the opening up of discussion on affirmative action brought to the surface complaints about the policies from women and minorities. Their achievements risked being stigmatized as the public became aware of widespread statistical race norming of employment exams, as well as growing use of set-aside contracts and positions. Women and minorities tried to resist being seen as an "affirmative action hires" -- that is, as unqualified or less qualified than their peers. Furthermore, whatever the gains wrought by affirmative action hiring, there was rising dissatisfaction with the lack of minority or female employee retention and promotion through glass ceilings.

Although the promise of new federal rules was welcomed, worried affirmative action proponents knew that the coercive, legally mandated nature of the policy had been a potent source of its growing unpopularity. New multicultural policies could not be government imposed; they would have to be motivated by self-interest. The new programs would adhere to affirmative action's ironclad presumption that American society's inherent racism and sexism were the primary causes of occupational and educational inequalities. But mere assertion of politically correct dogma would not be as persuasive in business circles as it had been in universities, foundations, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Winning hearts and minds in the crusade for workplace diversity would require a less moralistic and more bottom-line rationale. Ethnic and gender diversity would have to be portrayed as demographically inevitable and therefore an asset to be valued, managed, and championed. Efforts to establish a new policy machine to supplant and supplement affirmative action were already under way.

Diversity Pioneers

Racial awareness seminars and other group dialogue devices accompanied the civil rights movement and other campaigns for ethnic and gender liberation during the 1960s. The basic idea behind these forums was to open up intergroup dialogue and to exchange varying viewpoints. The mere sharing of perspectives, it was assumed, would lead to greater interracial harmony and understanding.

Serious or superficial attempts to promote interracial peace became a concern in corporate America following the urban racial disorders of the mid- and late 1960s. For example, Connecticut General Life Insurance, under the leadership of Henry Roberts, identified itself as a progressive corporation during the late 1960s with the slogan, "We do things a little differently." Roberts initiated T-groups led by social psychologist Carl Rogers during the late 1960s and then introduced the first black-white workshop in 1972, "Intergroup Cooperation and Understanding." Also driving these changes was Frederick Miller, who would later become president of Kaleel Jamieson Consulting Group, which garnered a substantial share of the diversity business during the 1990s. According to consultant-historian Clare Swanger, the black-white seminar had a profound impact on whites:

After the sessions, the participants formed problem-solving groups to address issues, such as performance appraisals, mentoring, and recruiting policies and to plan reunions and newsletters....Many other interventions revolved around urban issues. One of the consultants in this field was Robert Terry, a white man who was involved with groups responding to the Detroit riots of 1967. He worked with Doug Fitch, an African American who pushed Terry to focus on what it meant to be white. Terry recalled, "I realized that I didn't have to think about what it means to be white, which is a paradox, because once I realized this, I could think about it." Terry wrote the book For Whites Only, a pioneering examination of whites' attitudes toward racism and the privilege and power whites enjoy because they are white.

American Telephone and Telegraph became the locus of ethnic and gender engineering for a host of consultants in the wake of settling its class action lawsuit in 1972. One group of associates worked under Marilyn Loden, who would become a major diversity consultant and author during the 1990s, writing Workforce America! in 1991 with Judith Rosener and Implementing Diversity in 1995. Loden found that AT&T's female employees already possessed managerial skills, but their limited self-perceptions hindered their access to new opportunities for advancement:

Initially, we looked at the impact of bringing more women managers into the executive suite and at male attitudes toward this change. We ran programs for both men and women addressing competition, collusion, and gender bias and took a deeper look at socialization. Within two or three years after the programs began, women's progress accelerated in the company. Many realized they could be more successful if they joined with other women as allies, resources, networks, and support systems. In the awareness training, we asked participants to talk about their feelings regarding men and women working together as peers. Interestingly, we found it was harder for the men, many of whom focused on their loss of influence, whereas the women focused on the upside potential.

Elsie Cross, who would become one of the most highly paid diversity consultants of the 1990s, also got a piece of the action at AT&T. Cross inaugurated a workshop on men and women in the work environment at Bell Laboratories but was frustrated when Bell officials refused to go beyond individual attitude change and confront what Cross felt was systemic racism.

Cross's initial encounters with the business world were not pleasant. She had earned a bachelor's degree in business from Temple University in 1951 but claimed no corporation would hire her. Her interests in diversity were stimulated when she began teaching in inner-city schools in the 1960s. In 1968, she was appointed a "change agent" in the Philadelphia school system to increase community involvement; in 1970, she attended a summer internship program at the National Training Laboratory for Applied Behavioral Science, where she learned experiential learning techniques and the impact from gaining personal insights. After using these small group and organizational development techniques in the Pennsylvania State College system, Cross began a six-year "intervention" at Exxon's Linden, New Jersey, refinery with a program titled "Managing and Working in a Diverse Workplace Environment." Unlike her experience with Bell Labs, Cross was pleased when Exxon's focus moved beyond changing individual attitudes to the study and reform of routine policies, practices, and organizational structures.

University of Massachusetts graduate student activist Judith Katz also believed that the system was to blame for institutional racism and sexism. She began a twenty-year mission to educate whites about their complicity in such practices in the mid-1970s when she became a human resources coordinator for fourteen predominantly white residence halls. In 1978, she authored White Awareness: A Handbook for Anti-Racism Training (a paperback version is still in print). By the late 1980s, Katz had joined Kaleel Jamieson Consulting Group, a major force in the 1990s diversity movement.

A University of Michigan sociologist since the 1960s, Mark Chesler became interested in diversity engineering through his specialty: race relations. In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation funded a series of organizational interventions to mitigate interracial and intergenerational conflicts in eight high schools. He became convinced that mere desegregation was not enough; the entire pedagogy and system had to be changed. (Chesler eventually authored several papers on diversity and was active in campus diversity efforts at Michigan during the 1990s.)

Loden, Cross, Katz, Chesler, and Tom Kochman, Lillian Roybal Rose, and psychiatrist Price Cobbs (coauthor of Black Rage and active in the diversity efforts at Digital Equipment, Hughes Aircraft, and other major corporations) acquired their fashionably liberal, blame-the-system perspectives through a combination of direct or indirect experiences in higher education, race relations, and the civil rights movement. Cross, Chesler, and Los Angeles consultant-authors Anita Rowe and Lee Gardenswartz specifically gained training in secondary school efforts to mitigate racial tensions. Others, such as "Valuing Diversity" videotape producers Lennie Copeland and Lewis Griggs, as well as consultant-authors David Jamieson and Julie O'Mara (Managing Workforce 2000), arrived at diversity consulting through adjoining consulting interests in cross-cultural communications or organizational development.

By the 1980s, then, there was a slow and growing institutional migration of consultants carrying blame-the-system liberalism from academe and a powerful civil rights establishment into business. Several of these consultants were establishing themselves on the corporate circuit during the financially flush days of the 1980s, before the massive lean-and-mean downsizings of the early 1990s. There, these consultants linked up with change advocates within business corporations -- often with "progressive" CEOs responding to racially tinged crises. Several major businesses were making affirmative action and new "valuing differences" programs part of their corporate philosophies. These organizations served as the laboratories for the thesis statements and policy machine that began to take shape in the early 1990s.

The Diversity Machine's Corporate Incubators

Xerox Corporation

According to organizational psychologist Valerie I. Sessa, the commitment of Xerox Corporation to affirmative action and managing diversity reflected in part the personal philosophy of its founder, Joseph C. Wilson. He was committed to fairness, social responsibility, and, during the 1960s, affirmative action. This all-important commitment from the top remained strong into the early 1990s. (Indeed, Xerox's CEO during the late 1980s and 1990s, David Kearns, was celebrated as a "champion of diversity" in Lewis Griggs and Lennie Copeland's landmark video training series, "Valuing Diversity.")

Xerox's initial interest in affirmative action and diversity arose out of a series of crises. There were race riots in Rochester in 1964 and again in 1967. Government pressures on hiring began to build with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 White House executive order on affirmative action. Black caucus groups formed -- against resistance from the company -- and a class action discrimination suit resulted in 1971. The suit was settled out of court after David Kearns revised allegedly discriminatory policy practices and promoted three blacks into managerial positions.

Following the settlement, affirmative action was deemed an official business priority, and sensitivity seminars were instituted for management. In 1973, women's issues became an affirmative action concern, and in 1974 senior management formally recognized black caucus groups. In 1975 a series of management seminars that including listening and communication skills were instituted. That same year, managers' bonuses were linked to their affirmative action records (a practice that was later abandoned). Hispanic and women's caucus groups proliferated. "In making layoffs," writes Valerie Sessa, "senior management decided to maintain the representation it had built over the past ten years and possibly risk a reverse discrimination suit." This increased "feelings" among white males that they were being neglected and hurt and that women and minorities who were promoted were less qualified.

In 1984 Xerox shifted to a Balanced Workforce Plan (BWF) to achieve "equitable representation" of all employee groups at all levels in the organization. U.S. Census data and internal Xerox head counts were used to calculate goals for each job category and grade. Resistance to the plan was dealt with sternly: "Xerox senior management used an interesting approach. It did not attempt to change attitudes; it changed behavior by saying, 'You will have a certain number of women managers by next year.' Managers who were unable to comply were held accountable."

By the 1990s, Xerox's workforce was more diverse than that of the general population, and the corporation won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1989. But Xerox's diversity and affirmative action manager, Theodore Payne, was growing concerned that more general workforce diversity efforts might displace affirmative action gains made by women and minorities, an argument that would prove troublesome in trying to organize a united policy movement.

XYZ Corporation

Although he disguised the name of the corporation, the account of a ten-year diversity change program by consultant-professor Clayton P. Alderfer is noteworthy in several respects. First, XYZ's efforts to change race relations date from 1976 -- relatively early. Second, there was a top-down-driven attempt to both educate and change the ethnic and gender composition of management. Third, if Alderfer's article reflects the spirit of the programs, there was a strong political and moral tone to this fifteen-year effort. Alderfer's intergroup theoretical framework assumed that group membership structures emotions, cognitions, and behavior. At times, his interpretations veered close to more politicized identity politics: "When the project began, corporate personnel committees were overwhelmingly populated by white men. No wonder, then...that it was difficult to find qualified black managers." Alderfer also repeatedly and openly criticized the changing political climate, especially the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations: "Some white male middle managers in the corporation used the ideology and practices of the Reagan administration to criticize corporate policy....I think it is unlikely, for example, that Edwin Meese or William Bradford Reynolds would have approved of the XYZ race relations improvement program, if they had known about it." Fourth, the experience of XYZ corporation provides a preview of what would happen in other organizations and in the effort to build a diversity policy machine in the 1990s: high initial expectations were difficult to sustain as XYZ ran into downsizing, new leadership, and changes in corporate mission.

Alderfer became the fourth member of a gender-balanced consulting team in 1976 that worked with a corporate-staffed race relations advisory group. A combination of factors -- similar to those arising at other organizations that would launch diversity drives -- led to the change effort. First, civil rights protest and polarization came into the corporation with the formation of the Black Managers Association (without opposition from management -- in contrast to the situation at Xerox). Second, a white male CEO was dedicated to establishing "progressive race relations." Third, and most important, race relations were being soured by the operation of a vigorous affirmative action program that bred resentment and dissatisfaction among both white and black employees. (As we shall see in many other organizational settings, allegedly broader diversity programs are designed to rationalize affirmative action and are often evaluated in the same head-counting formats.)

After an initial study found that race and gender heavily influenced perceptions of organizational problems, Alderfer and his associates launched a series of three-day educational race relations competence workshops in 1982 and an "upward mobility intervention" program, open to both blacks and whites.

The workshops bore results: "A significant proportion of managers who worked to improve upward mobility decisions participated in the race relations competence workshop." A major function of the workshops evidently was to justify affirmative action and squelch white males' complaints: "White men were able to acknowledge that they often found it easier to tell other white men that 'quotas' took a recommendation for promotion out of their hands than to say that they found a black person to be more qualified than a white person." And Alderfer was pleased that workshoppers discovered that "a significant proportion of the variance in any upward mobility decision is highly subjective." Subsequent evaluations of the workshops were largely positive or neutral, with blacks being more enthusiastic than whites, especially white males.

The mobility interventions were designed to pierce the invisible glass ceilings of institutional racism and sexism. The percentage of black managers in middle and upper management rose from 0 percent in 1973 to 7 percent in 1986; the percentage of white women jumped from 2.2 percent to 15.2 percent. The percentage of blacks and women in lower management remained constant.

Other social forces were at work, however, and Alderfer admitted that XYZ Corporation likely eliminated the race relations task force in 1986 to reduce overall stress resulting from downsizing, corporate mission, and the changing composition of top leadership. And, not unlike many other diversity consultants, Alderfer could not resist closing his analysis with some political parting shots at the Reagan and Bush administrations: "I have noted...that the kinds of changes attempted and achieved at XYZ were decidedly not in accord with the Reagan administration polices and practices....Serious work to effect progressive race relations is not easy. Although the current national political leadership is not as regressive as its predecessors, it is not as progressive either. Perhaps the fairest characterization is that they are less regressive."

Digital Equipment Corporation

"Valuing differences" was a concept first coined by Digital's Barbara Walker, who became the first vice president for diversity in the 1980s. Digital's philosophy was to cultivate and capitalize on a range of individual differences, not just race and gender. According to Walker and Vice President William Hanson:

Digital's Valuing Differences philosophy focuses employees on their differences. Employees are encouraged to pay attention to their differences as unique individuals and as members of groups, to raise their level of comfort with differences and to capitalize on differences as a major asset to the company's productivity.

The philosophy is anchored in the conviction that the broader the spectrum of differences in the workplace, the richer the synergy among the employees and the more excellent the organization's performance. It is a belief in the constructive potential of all people. It assumes that each person's differences bring unique and special gifts to the organization....It goes beyond traditional protected-class issues of equal employment opportunity (EEO) and addresses issues created by all kinds of differences among people in the workplace.

The valuing differences philosophy arose in the mid-1970s to counter negative perceptions of affirmative action. Specifically, the learning experience that led to valuing differences came out of Hanson's experience in managing production plants in Puerto Rico and a heavily minority-staffed plant in Springfie ld, Massachusetts. Previous managers had resisted affirmative action as detrimental to productivity and quality, but Hanson and others were determined to "do the right thing" on affirmative action and sought to identify obstacles that blocked senior managers from working effectively with black and Hispanic employees.

In 1977, Hanson employed consultant-psychologist Price Cobbs to conduct two-day workshops for small groups of top-level management: "These sessions became intense and deeply meaningful....These dialogues helped senior managers get in touch with a fundamental obstacle to their ability to provide the necessary leadership in AA/EEO. They had regarded open and candid conversation about race and gender issues as taboo." Walker and Hanson believed efforts to see one another as individuals had overlooked (and undervalued) group-based differences.

Core groups arose throughout Digital to discuss differences. The groups, which met on company time, were led by employees trained at Digital's two-day training seminar known as the Affirmative Action University. Core groups were designed to strip away stereotypes, probe for differences in others' assumptions, build relationships, raise levels of personal empowerment, and identify and explore group differences. The publication of Workforce 2000 shifted diversity outlooks to the future, and diversity came to represent three separate kinds of work: affirmative action, multiculturalism (usually geographically specific cultures, such as those of foreign nations), and values and empowerment work emphasizing "differences in lifestyles and learning." The initial work was slow, and some managers complained that the sessions were "forced guilt trips" designed to help only women and minorities.

By 1984, valuing differences became official company policy. Walker and Hanson argued that the policies had made Digital a better place to work, empowered managers and employees, promoted innovation, and encouraged higher productivity. Digital's valuing differences themes -- and some of its personnel -- were featured in Lewis Griggs and Lennie Copeland's seminal "Valuing Diversity" video series, which provided one of several emerging program statements for a far more organized policy movement.

Higher Education and the Diversity Machine

A major theme of this book is that the underlying ideas for business and government diversity programs originated in the transformation of elite wisdom in university and intellectual circles, in conjunction with the growing crisis in affirmative action. However, I shall spend little time here recounting PC and multicultural battles on campuses, amply dealt with within a growing number of books and a torrent of articles analyzing the curriculum battles, free speech, affirmative action, and other aspects of ethnic and gender politics on campus. Education-oriented journals and newsletters, especially the PC-titled Chronicle of Higher Education, report on these events frequently.

Universities and colleges moved more quickly on such issues as curricular change and in alternately fomenting and mitigating radical feminism and racial separatism. Affirmative action preferences may have been applied more swiftly and zealously in academic settings, especially in the liberal arts and schools of education.

In the actual implementation of diversity management, however -- permanently changing the organization's structure and general cultural climate -- it becomes difficult to separate rhetoric from reality. Like business and government, colleges and universities may be having trouble moving beyond rhetoric and proportional personnel appointments because they have encountered many of the same problems: the recession, downsizing, and demands for "quality" and "accountability." (Indeed, just as the academy's politically correct and multicultural vocabulary has penetrated business, so now does the business vocabulary of efficiency and customer service penetrate the halls of ivy.) I shall focus in detail on the evolution of diversity management in two very different academic organizations later in the book: the California Community Colleges System and the University of Michigan.

By way of instructive preview and contrast, however, one California liberal arts college moved somewhat ahead of others in launching an aggressive multicultural makeover. According to English professor Eric Newhall, a self-described "tactician for institutional change," Occidental's drive toward multiculturalism began in earnest in 1983 when Dean of Faculty Jim England packed several key selection committees in order to obtain a more diversified faculty. A forty-page document supplied four reasons for doing so: (1) minority students were isolated, (2) women and minority faculty were isolated, (3) diversity was morally and socially just, and (4) the demographics of the city, state, and nation were rapidly shifting.

Occidental's president was friendly but relatively indifferent. "We had to be willing to rough up administrators," said Newhall. In 1984, the faculty overwhelming voted to speed recruitment of minority faculty by revising the college's equal opportunity statement to make minority status "one of various factors to be considered in determining which candidate was best qualified." Searches that did not produce an adequate number of minority candidates would be disqualified. And rank and salary were to be more flexible to compete better for minority talent.

Newhall and other faculty also lobbied the college trustees in selecting a new president: African American John Slaughter, former president of the University of Maryland. Slaughter immediately declared Occidental a school dedicated to "excellence and diversity," and minority student enrollment doubled by 1995; the minority faculty percentage rose from 13 to 22 percent.

As many other organizations have discovered, changing the numbers of minorities and women does not automatically produce peaceful multiculturalism. A December 2, 1992, Wall Street Journal front-page story and a later 1995 documentary by Los Angeles's Public Broadcasting Service affiliate found an unsettled campus. Although some minority students and faculty thought the campus climate had improved, other minorities and whites testified to a climate of stereotypes, ethnic separatism, and censorship. In the documentary, a Chicana student who joined a sorority was called a sellout by liberal Hispanics. PC was so strong, she said, that people kept their true opinions to others like themselves -- if they disclosed them at all. Members of a ten-member conservative coalition claimed that prejudice against conservatives at Occidental was very strong. A black student felt that he and other blacks were stigmatized as less-than-qualified by affirmative action. But Slaughter and others defended the college's new direction and insisted that excellence was fully compatible with "equity, justice, and fairness." Ethnic separateness, some argued, was a natural development as students from oppressed backgrounds came together in a multicultural setting.

Eric Newhall continued to claim that "a fully inclusive, democratic system can work," but it was "naive" to think that students coming from a variety of separate backgrounds would mix without tension. "No pain, no gain," he said. But in 1995 the pain became financial when Occidental ran a $3 million budget deficit. Some alumni groused that the source of the deficit in part was the large number of scholarships awarded to increase minority enrollment. Nor was the proclaimed mission of unifying "excellence and diversity" effectively demonstrated when, in 1994, Occidental fell out of the first-tier institutions to forty-first place in the widely watched annual survey of colleges by U.S. News and World Report.

The architects of the diversity machine were prepared for such disappointments. The linking of excellence, productivity, and diversity was so strongly etched in the policy movement's founding manifestos that evidence for the link was not yet required.

Copyright © 1997 by Frederick R. Lynch

Table of Contents

Introduction Beyond Affirmative Action; 1: From “American Dilemma’ to Affirmative Action and the Diversity Pioneers; 2: The Evangelist and the Business Professor; Cross-Ctdtural Consultant Profile I: Lillian Roy bal Rose; 3: Demography Is Destiny; Cross-Cultural Consultant Profile II: Sondra Thiederman; 4: Recession, Rebellion, Riot; Cross-Cultural Consultant Profile III: Tom Kochman and Associates; 5: Frustration and Stall; 6: Strong New Allies, Weak Policy Proof; 7: Defensive Diversity Training; 8: From Diversity Dreams to Budget Nightmares; 9: Multicultural Vision Meets Multiversity Realities; 10: The Diversity Machine; Methodological Appendix

Editorial Reviews

"Lynch shows that the diversity machine-with its underlying ideology of ethnic-gender proportionalism, cultural relativism, and identity politics-can only foment social acrimony." —Brad Stetson, First Things "Frederick Lynch has opened up the curtain and shown how large organizations-not only universities but major corporations-have used "affirmative action" programs to create a new form of racial and gender discrimination." —Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report

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