Executive Order

Dartmouth's Affirmative Action Plan for a recruitment and hiring program which will insure the equal availability of faculty, administrative, and staff positions to all applicants, without discrimination on the base of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin - approved last spring by the Trustees — passed a "desk audit" by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the fall and has received tentative approval.

Final, formal acceptance is expected to follow the submission of certain requested data and a written report of a team of HEW officials that spent several days on campus in November conducting an "on-site compliance review."

Affirmative Action Officer Errol Hill, who also is Professor of Drama, has emphasized that the plan submitted by the College sets forth "goals" for the employment of women and minority group members, as distinguished from "quotas."

The impression that the federal government is requiring specific quotas of colleges and universities which receive any form of government aid has led to considerable nation-wide controversy and charges of reverse discrimination against white males. It has also elicited from HEW a detailed memorandum to college and university presidents clarifying the distinction between "goals" and "quotas" and declaring unequivocally that, under the pertinent Executive Order, "colleges and universities are entitled to select the most qualified candidate, without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity, for any position" and that "the college or university, not the federal government, is to say what constitutes qualification for any particular position."

While "a major purpose of the affirmative action provision of the Executive Order is to broaden the pool of applicants," the presidents were advised that the process must not operate to restrict consideration to minorities and women only." Though the institution must "make an explicit statement of its commitment to equal opportunity" in all recruiting announcements and advertisements, for instance, it is prohibited from stating that "women and minorities are preferred."

Among a series of examples, the memorandum points out that a recruitment period to fill a position may be extended "if an institution has failed to follow its affirmative action recruitment procedure or if its recruitment efforts do not yield an expanded applicant pool." On the other hand, if it can be demonstrated that "all recruitment steps required under its affirmative action plan" have been taken "and even though no (or very few) applications have been received from women and minorities — there would be no requirement that the recruitment period be extended Job requirements, such as the Ph.D. in a discipline, may not be waived for women or minority applicants, but retained for males or non-minorities. To the contrary, the memorandum states, such differential standards are expressly forbidden by the Executive Order, which "requires that once valid job requirements are established, they must be applied equally to all candidates."

In Dartmouth's Affirmative Action Plan, the following employment goals for the next ten years have been established: for faculty positions - 25 per cent women and ten per cent minority group candidates, with the further objective of 20 to 25 women to be appointed or promoted to associate or full professor ranks; for administrative positions - 50 per cent of replacements should be women and 10 per cent minority persons; for staff and service employees - women to be employed at, or upgraded to, higher level positions where it is found they are being under-utilized and that two per cent of projected vacancies should be filled by members of minority groups.