Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!princeton!udel!wuarchive!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway
From: mks!linda@watmath.waterloo.EDU (Linda Carson)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: AA Urban Legends?
Message-ID: <9011201819.AA23507@mks.mks.com>
Date: 21 Nov 90 05:40:34 GMT
Lines: 194
Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu
Nntp-Posting-Host: zola.ics.uci.edu

The recent vague and ill-informed postings about the Ontario College
of Art's new hiring policies should make everyone question the
accuracy of any affirmative action urban legends they hear. Please do
not circulate friend-of-a-friend stories or I-heard-that-they accounts
without confirming the details. They will be used as *facts* to
support people's positions (pro and con) on affirmative action. We've
already gone from alarmist headlines in (Canadian) newspapers to an
inaccurate soc.feminism posting (con?)  [without any details of the
history of the case or the nature of the decision-making body] to a
sweeping judgement of some kinds of affirmative action plans (pro?)
based on that description.

Some of the headlines bore little resemblance to the articles they
introduced ("Men Need Not Apply") and OCA and the media handled the
situation badly.

Perhaps on the basis of reading the headlines rather than the
newspaper articles, Steve Watson (watson@spock.UUCP) said:

> Subject: Re: Feminism's ill effects on men?
> Summary: Ontario College of Art: Men need not apply.
> Keywords: oppression reverse_discrimination
>
> Last year the Ontario College of Art instituted a policy according to which
> teaching vacancies will only be available to WOMEN.  This will continue
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
           Untrue: only openings created by *retirement*
           will be limited to women.

> until the faculty is 50% women.  At current turnover rates, this should
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  The target is 38% female
  representation.

> take 10 or 20 years.  (I may have some details wrong, corrections welcome)
             ^^^^^^^^
             Since this policy is based on retirements,
             they can predict quite accurately how long it
             will take to reach the target. They expect
             to be there in a decade (not two).

>                                    ...However, I find this extreme form
> reverse discrimination to be more than I can quite swallow.  It constitutes
> a clear case of oppression of men by (an aberration of?) feminism.
> If you are a young male art teacher in Ontario, you are automatically
> disqualified from competing for a job at the province's most prestigious
> art school (I believe most of us would accept denial of employment for which
> one is otherwise qualified as constituting 'oppression'?).
>
> But the men who are locked out at OCA are NOT, in general, the ones who
> created the situation: it is not fair to them.

Then "r.a." (RA04@Lehigh.UCAR.EDU) follows up:

> From: RA04@Lehigh.UCAR.EDU
> Subject: Re: Feminism's ill effects on men?

> The Ontario College of Art's women-only hiring criteria mentioned here
> sounds suspiciously like an "affirmative action" taken chiefly so that
> it can be thrown out as obviously unfair.  I know of such a situation
> in an American university; several departments were all men, and the
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
     danger sign of an apocryphal
     story; this story may well be true,
     but anonymous participants and
     locations are prime symptoms of
     an urban myth in the making...

> university had a bunch of federal dollars coming in, so some kind of
> AA had to be instituted, so the guys in dept ---- were unfairly beat
> on because their field was kind of wimpy, y'know, not EE or CE, and so
> the top men in that dept made a point of hiring some very mediocre
> women as new asst profs, with the intention of terminating them for
> not meeting department standards before the tenure decision rolled
> around.  And ya wonder why some feminists feel paranoid?
>
>                               r.a.

For people who are concerned about the fairness or unfairness of the
recent decision at OCA, I have gone to the files to briefly recap the
story (from articles in the Toronto Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and
U.W. Gazette):

-- In 1985, OCA internal review concludes that representation of women
   on faculty is unsatisfactory
-- OCA decides to implement an informal, voluntary program of
   increased hiring of women
-- In 1988, OCA reviews its progress: 25% of faculty members are
   female and they teach only 13% of the courses; cost-cutting
   measures had *reduced* full-time female faculty by half over
   a decade
-- OCA has the second-lowest proportion of women faculty of any
   art college in Canada (after Emily Carr in B.C.: 22%)
-- With provincial grant money, OCA does research to check its figures;
   is there some way to account for the decrease? Maybe there aren't
   any quality women artists?
   -- student body includes slightly more women than men
   -- female students graduate and win the majority of the awards
   -- Canada Council grants to artists in the 80s: 40% female
-- OCA concludes, to its own satisfaction, that there *is* a pool of
   well-qualified women available and that OCA has somehow been
   discriminating systematically against hiring them in spite of
   having explicitly set out to reverse existing discrimination
   [Many Ontario universities, colleges and businesses have been
   making similar investigations and establishing their own hiring
   policies in response to human rights legislation that is being
   introduced now and over the next few years. Hiring equity for
   women is the first phase: visible minorities, native peoples and
   the disabled have also been identified as victims of historical
   discrimination.]
-- OCA resolves to set up a *formal* policy of affirmative action,
   since the well-intentioned informal approach was completely ineffective
-- September 1989, OCA sets a 38% target for women on faculty
   and chooses what it initially believes will be the least
   controversial hiring policy -- it will fill only openings created
   by *retirement* with qualified women for 10 years
-- all hell breaks loose
   -- public controversy (such as Steve Watson's initial posting)
   -- faculty backlash within OCA
   -- meetings, press coverage, infighting on-campus
   -- irresponsible media coverage including publication of commentary
      articles when no *news* coverage had been printed
-- OCA (backed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission) upholds its decision

That's the story.

The Ontario College of Art is still hiring men. The hiring for all
positions left open by retirement will be limited to women, but all
other hiring will be open competition. The college is aiming for 38%
female faculty.

Here's some opinion, just as a bonus. Do not repeat this information
as fact. Say "Linda Carson said..."

*Gossip* has it in the fine arts community of Ontario/Canada that, in
spite of how unpleasant it will probably be to work at OCA under these
conditions, the college has been astonished by the numbers and calibre
of qualified women available. If you think about it, OCA (arguably one
of the most prestigious art schools in Canada) has hired (net) no
women for a decade. The qualified women they passed over ten years ago
now have the same excellent credentials *plus* ten year exhibition
records.  (In the visual arts, your exhibition record is the
professional equivalent of papers and publications. Scientists do
research; artists make and show art.)

It's not even a question of young male art teachers being shut out of
job opportunities by *equally* qualified women any more. If OCA could
figure out a way to ensure fair hiring, those men would simply be less
well-qualified than the women who are also available. OCA has not
(after a decade of voluntary effort, sincere or otherwise) been able
to ensure fair hiring -- hence the new hiring policy.

This is as clear a case in favour of an affirmative action policy as I
can imagine. The institution agrees that an abundance of qualified
women exist. The institution agrees that women are seriously
under-represented on faculty, and that this is unhealthy. The
institution endeavours to hire more women, informally, and yet the
representation of women on faculty actually drops. It's embarrassing,
but clearly the institution finds itself guilty of practicing some
sort of discriminatory hiring so systematic that even when it sets out
to redress the problem, it worsens.

If you believe hiring discrimination is wrong, how else would you go
about remedying this situation? Saying "we'll just make sure that the
hiring process is fair" *didn't work*. Saying "we'll set a reasonable
measure of fairness and state explicitly how we plan achieve it"
might.

Fact:

During the 1970s, the Canadian woman artist Joyce Wieland wrote to the
Ontario College of Art twice looking for a teaching appointment.  [A
painter, film-maker, mixed media and textile sculptor, Wieland is
arguably the most illustrious contemporary woman artist in Canada. She
became the first woman *ever* to be featured in a retrospective at the
prestigious Art Gallery of Ontario.]

She did not even receive a reply.

Linda Carson

Major references:
Art College Uproar: Fairness or Folly? by Lynda Hurst,
Toronto Star, 21 January 1990
   "...there is universal agreement that the college handled the outside
   announcement of its equity plan with all the finesse of a circus
   elephant..."

New OCA hiring policy reflects old inequities in Canadian workplace,
by Bronwyn Drainie, Globe & Mail, 20 January 1990
   "You may not agree with the college's decision to fill staff
   vacancies created by retirement exclusively with women for the
   next ten years, but it clearly indicates that any voluntary attempt
   the college has made to be fairer to women has ended in failure."