Goals Approved

Dartmouth's Affirmative Action Plan was officially accepted by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare this fall term. According to Margaret Bonz, affirmative action officer, the plan is an "outline for action" for the College to comply with HEW regulations requiring institutions to develop and work toward goals to improve the employment opportunities for women and minorities. Educational and other institutions must do this in order to qualify for future federal contracts. Bonz noted that Dartmouth was ahead of other Ivy schools in progress toward these goals but cautioned that the College "will have to work hard to live up to the standards we have established."

The plan approved by HEW presumes that, in the next 10 years, 25 per cent of recruited faculty are to be women and 20 to 25 women are to be given tenure as associate professor or professor. In addition, ten per cent of the faculty and ten individuals promoted to tenure during that time should be members of a racial minority. One tenth of the women appointed to the faculty should also be from a minority and one fourth of minority appointments should be women.

In the College administration, 50 per cent of the officers appointed should be women and 15 per cent minorities. In the absence of a large local minority population, two per cent of the locally recruited staff and service employees ought to be hired from minority groups. Bonz stated that these figures were not quotas but goals, arrived at as a result of an availability analysis determining the size of the qualified applicant pool which the College could expect to recruit.

Government approval of a plan depends largely on the demonstrated success of an institution's efforts to define and attain its goals. From the base year of 1971-72 the number of female administrative officers has increased from 15 to 25 per cent of the total of 224. The number of minorities has increased from 2 to 5.8 per cent. In a total of 300 faculty positions the number of women has increased from four per cent to 14, and the number of minority professors has risen to 6.9 per cent. One advantageous effect of this increased diversity, says Bonz, "is that a lot of myths and stereotypes about women and minorities, so easily perpetuated in a homogeneous and isolated environment, are being broken down in the process of assimilation now under way at Dartmouth."