[PEN-L:6816] affirmative action

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Keaney writes: >All of which is to say that my original point was
that recruitment policies focusing primarily or significantly on the race,
class or gender of applicants/candidates should also recognise the
intellectual individuality of these individuals. Otherwise we can be as
politically correct and as reflective of wider social composition as could
be possible while the very ideology we would all indict as at least
culpable in the legitimation and prolongation of our societal and
international woes would be further propagated at the expense of any
critical perspective. And then where would that leave us?<

when I was on an affirmative action committee, we treated issues like race
& gender as simply one extra factor along with issues of the quality of the
job candidate's research, their individuality, etc. (Somehow class was
forgotten, but then again, this is in the US, the classless society.) Race
and gender were never the sole criteria. (Nor should they be.)

BTW, I think that one of the problems of discussions of affirmative action
is that people talk about the subject in very abstract terms, often
referring to an individual case or two only to generalize them to apply to
_all_ cases. I don't think my case represents the universal, but I'd bet
that it was more common than the application of hard-core quotas.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!