Glazer and Guest Coordinator Debate on Affirmative Action

Forty people listened and questioned in Longfellow Hall yesterday as a Harvard sociologist and an affirmative action spokesman debated the necessity for special minority employment practices.

James Allison and affirmative action coordinator for the University of Gainsville in Florida, charged Harvard with unprofessional employment practices, while Nathan Glazer, professor of Education and Social Structure, disagreed.

"I've not seen conscious or unconscious discrimination," Glazer said. "In fact, what I've seen is interest, willingness to expand employment," he said.

Glazer focused on the University's requirement to establish a goal of minority utilization on its employment practices.

He said he opposed affirmative action because the government should be "colorblind" and because the country is "too multi-ethnic" to adequately define "what qualifies as an oppressed minority."

Responding to Glazer's "colorblind" comment, Allison, a black, said "with all the handicaps you've already put on me, I'm supposed to forget about it and run the 100-yard dash with you with a twentypound weight around my neck. That weight may seem invisible to you, but it sure slows down the process for me."

"What would happen with affirmative action seems to be happening without it in large parts of society," Glazer said. He added that only economic measure or special programs, not different hiring practices, would benefit the less skilled minorities.

Allison said he agreed with Glazer that "affirmative action is dead and we don't have enough nails to put in the coffin." He said hiring minorities has stopped being the moral issue of hiring "poor blacks from the ghetto."

Because businesses select from applicant pools of equally skilled whites and minorities, employers no longer hire minority applicants voluntarily, Allison said. When courts had to impose requirements, affirmative action died, he said.