Last month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with enforcing the nation’s employment discrimination laws, announced that it will drastically reduce the number of lawsuits it files aimed at obtaining relief for entire classes of employees, such as blacks and women, and will instead focus more attention on complaints filed by individuals.
The major policy shift was announced less than a week after William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, told a group of lawyers in Florida that “it will not be long” before affirmative-action plans involving quotas and other race- and gender-conscious remedies become a thing of the past.
Mr. Reynolds’ statement, in turn, was preceded by President Reagan’s first meeting in late January with his top appointees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who reported to him that his Administration has “turned the corner on the civil-rights debate.”
“We believe that quotas are a dead issue,” Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., the chairman of the panel, told reporters following the Jan. 29 meeting with the President. “We want to keep on course and make certain that we do those kinds of studies and activities that make certain that discrimination is not the only factor in lack of opportunity and that there is equality of opportunity and not a mandate for positive results.”
Former Critic Now Ally
A little more than a year ago, such a statement from the commission would have been unthinkable, as would have been its silence on the new eeoc policy and on the statement by Mr. Reynolds. The 28-year-old bipartisan fact-finding panel was then one of the Administration’s harshest critics, regularly lambasting its positions on issues such as tax exemptions for racially discriminatory private schools and busing for desegregation purposes and its funding proposals for agencies charged with the enforcement of civil-rights laws.
The commission has indeed turned a corner. Today, not only has such criticism ceased, but the panel has initiated a handful of studies and taken positions lending support to Administration theories on the nature of discrimination and the proper response of government when such discrimination is discovered.
According to its critics, the commission’s sudden shift of direction following the appointment last year of a majority of members ideologically congenial to the President indicates that it has lost its credibility and is now little more than a “mouthpiece” for the Administration.
But for their part, the commission’s supporters, while defending what they claim is the President’s prerogative to mold executive-branch agencies like the commission, maintain that the panel “is a far more independent body today than it has been perhaps in its history.”
Focus on Education
Much of the commission’s recent work deals with the field of education--an area that has long been one of the panel’s major areas of inquiry and one in which it has had a significant effect in the shaping of public opinion and policies.
Often cited as its greatest achievement in education was its successful advocacy of what is now Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964--the law that empowers federal agencies to cut off federal funds to schools and colleges that have violated civil-rights statutes. Observers also point out that a series of commission studies on school desegregation in northern urban centers in the early 1970’s helped thwart attempts by members of the Congress to restrict busing for desegregation purposes.
“The commission’s investigations and testimony in education and in other areas proved in many cases to be even more effective than the work of the Justice Department,” says Bruce L. Payne, a lecturer in ethics and public policy at Duke University and a member of the commission’s North Carolina advisory committee during the mid-1970’s. “Its independence and its singlemindeness in the pursuit of civil rights made it an unusual and powerful instrument for change.”
That power, says Mr. Payne, was sharply diminished with the appointment to the panel last year of a majority of members whose views are consistent with those expressed by the Administration.
“The effectiveness of the old commission depended on public perception that it was generally independent,” he explains. “And that perception was widespread because the commission was often critical of those in government.”
Debate Over Independence
The debate over the commission’s independence can be traced back to 1983, when President Reagan, who in 1981 replaced two of the panel’s six members, attempted to replace three more. That move led to a prolonged battle between the Administration and civil-rights lobbyists and senators to opposed the President’s civil-rights policies.
The issue was finally resolved late in the year in a compromise that expanded the commission to eight members, four to be appointed by the President and four by Congressional leaders.
According to Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and one of the chief negotiators of the compromise, the agreement assumed the retention of five of the six incumbent commissioners. White House and Republican Congressional leaders, however, denied the existence of such an arrangement, and together they appointed the three nominees sought by the President and the two members he had appointed in 1981, thus vaulting the Administration’s selections into the majority.
Charting a New Course
The commission’s new majority began charting a new course for the panel at its first meeting, in January 1984. After first voting to reject all policies adopted by the previous commission--giving the new commissioners, as Mr. Pendleton said at the time, “a clean slate"--the panel approved a number of studies grounded in concepts supported by the Administration. (See Education Week, Jan. 25, 1984.)
Among the topics to be studied are affirmative action in higher education, with special attention to possible links between such programs and declining academic standards; the possible role of bilingual-education programs in the isolation of Hispanic students; and the reasons that discrimination does not explain all the problems faced by minority groups. The first of these studies should be ready for release late this year.
The commission approved several more studies early this year, including an examination of racial isolation in housing to determine to what degree it is the result of discrimination or individual choice; a study of public attitudes to find out whether “racism and sexism are ingrained in American society"; and a study of standardized tests to see whether they discriminate against racial minorities, as some critics claim.
In addition, members of the commission’s majority have released several controversial statements during the course of the year on recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and on civil-rights legislation pending before the Congress.
For example, the panel’s vice chairman, Morris B. Abram, recently denounced legislation designed to ensure “institutionwide” coverage of federal civil-rights laws. The measure, he said, represents an attempt by its supporters to create “a society standardized by the federal bureaucracy, turning out men and women fashioned by a government-shaped cookie cutter.”
And at a highly publicized November press conference, Mr. Pendleton criticized the concept of equal pay for comparable work as “the looniest idea since Looney Tunes came on the screen.”
Philosophical Shift Defended
According to Linda Chavez, the Administration-appointed staff director of the commission, the approval of the studies and other actions taken by the panel in the past year represent “a shift toward the ideals that marked the civil-rights movement in the mid-1960’s.”
“The goals of the movement were to provide equal opportunity without regard to race, gender, national origin, or religion,” says Ms. Chavez, a former special assistant to Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We have tried to rededicate ourselves to those principles. [The previous] commission and the leadership of many civil-rights organizations moved away from those principles during the past 10 or 15 years and moved toward the idea that certain groups should be granted preference.”
Holdover Commissioners
Administration officials recently lashed out at the two holdover commissioners who regularly vote against the panel’s majority for taking such a stance last July. Their statement apparently attracted the Administration’s attention after it was published last month as part of a commission report on the Supreme Court’s ruling last year prohibiting a lower court from ordering the Memphis fire department to layoff senior white firefighters in favor of less-senior blacks in order to preserve the effects of an affirmative-action plan.
On July 17, the commission’s majority passed a resolution applauding the Court’s decision in Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 v. Stotts as having properly rejected the concept of “discrimination in order to remedy discrimination.” But in a dissenting statement, the holdover commissioners—Mary Frances Berry and Blandina Cardenas Ramirez—stated that “civil-rights laws were not passed to give civil-rights protections to all Americans” but rather to protect historically “disfavored” groups such as blacks, Hispanics, and women.
In pre:;s reports last week, White House and other Administration officials cited the dissenters’ statement as evidence of “a new racism against whites” and “an outrageous invitation to new forms of discrimination.” The commissioners stood by their statement.
A Question of Ownership
According to Ms. Chavez, the holdover commissioners and organizations like the Leadership Conference, an umbrella organization representing 165 civil-rights groups, have rebuked the commission for its change of direction “because they felt they owned [the commission] lock, stock, and barrel, and they don’t anymore.”
“They don’t want us to be independent, they want us to be dependent on them,” she explains. “They want us to be their spokesman, to do their research. Much of the research this institution used to turn out made wonderful polemics for political speeches. We have staff here of over 200 people and a budget of over $12 million. Who would want to give that up?”
But according to Mr. Neas of the Leadership Conference, no group or person—including previous Presidents—ever held a lease on the commission.
“Historically, this body was viewed by all as being composed of prestigious individuals—representing the entire political spectrum—who conducted their work as objectively as possible while at the same time acknowledging their role as advocates of civil rights,” Mr. Neas says. “It engendered the wrath of all Administrations. None escaped criticism from the commission. Reagan got rid of commissioners because they dared to criticize him.”
Sending Signals
Mr. Payne of Duke University adds that although the current commission “is not in any great way opposed to the gains of the 1960’s” in areas such as voting rights and access to public accommodations, “it is no longer a independent agency in that it is functioning as part of an Administration plan to use current disputes about reverse discrimination, quotas, and numerical goals” to buttress the President politically.
“They seem not to be trying to solve problems, but rather to send signals, and the signals are being sent to the conservative supporters of Reagan, many of them Southerners who remain somewhat angry about the changes of the 1960’s and who remain somewhat racist in their attitudes,” he says. “What we have is a commission that functions in concert with the Administration to keep the pots boiling, to keep controversies brewing in a way that might benefit the Administration but makes the problems harder, not easier, to solve.”
“They seem to define issues in such simple terms,” adds Mary Louise Smith, one of the commissioners the President declined to reappoint when the panel was reformed in late 1983. “They tend to narrow things down, to reduce things to stark symbols. Their approach tends to divide people, rather than to bring them together to talk things through.”
Ms. Smith, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1974 to 1977, also says she disagrees with the direction the new commission is taking. “I see an almost conscious effort to obfuscate the real meaning behind issues like busing and affirmative action,” she explains. “They talk of a color-blind, sex-blind society. They talk as if there was no discrimination in this country. The direction they’re taking will simply lock in the status quo, and if you do that, you will be locking in discrimination. That’s the reality they don’t seem to grasp.”
Monitoring Role Questioned
The new commission has also come under fire for allegedly abandoning its responsibility to monitor the federal government’s enforcement of civil-rights laws in order to spare the President any embarrassment. Previous reports by the old commission, for example, had been highly critical of the Administration’s funding proposals for the Education Department’s office for civil rights and the Justice Department’s condemnation of busing for desegregation purposes.
Ms. Chavez acknowledges that monitoring activity at the commission has declined somewhat, but rejects accusations that the commission has given up its responsibility in this area.
“We’ve had a lot of staff attrition in this particular office and have had difficulty filling some of the positions,” she explains. “We also happen to have in that particular office a number of the union officials for the agency. They are given time off for union activities, so that office does not always work at its optimum level of productivity. Yet I think we do a decent job of monitoring.”
A former commission staff member who asked not to be identified claimed that Ms. Chavez has refused to fill vacancies in the monitoring office. Ms. Chavez, however, says that the allegation is “absolutely not true.”
The former staff member adds that “while there may be monitoring going on, the question is, can the staff do anything with what they’ve uncovered? With respect to the issues I was following, it was clear from the viewpoints of the staff director and the commissioners that nothing was going to go out of the agency.”
Staff Role Altered
The former staff member and others who continue to work at the Commission also claim that Ms. Chavez has shifted the traditional reliance on career civil servants to conduct the work of the commission, moving the work toward consultants and newly hired staff members.
“At the staff level, you basically have old staff and new staff,” said the former staff member. “The new staff is kept busy on important things and the old staff is not. Also, there’s no more communication among the different staffs. The general counsel’s office [headed by Mark Disler, a former assistant to Mr. Reynolds at the Justice Department], which now does much of the commission’s work, doesn’t communicate with other offices, it doesn’t share drafts. There’s just a whole sense of mystery about what commission is doing.”
Former and current staff members also claim that, under Ms. Chavez, career employees have much less influence than before in the formulation of the “menu” of proposed studies presented to the commission annually. In addition, they say that Ms. Chavez has done away with an administrative rule requiring staff members from a given office to present their draft reports to staff members in other offices to review the drafts for accuracy and balance. Such reviews, they say, are now conducted by the the originating office and the offices of the staff director and general counsel.
Ms. Chavez, however, defends her staffing actions in the face of such criticism. “When I came here, despite the fact that the majority of work that came out of this commission was economic research, we did not have a single economist on staff, not one,” she says. “We didn’t have a single statistician, although much of our work is statistical in nature. I changed that. I brought in mathematicians, statisticians, historians, economists—people who are recognized in the academic world. I have brought in consultants and advisers to various projects who have standing in the academic community. And they are being brought in in a balanced way.”
Ms. Chavez and members of the commission’s majority have also been criticized for a number of other actions taken during the course of the year. For example, civil-rights lobbyists accused the staff director of assisting conservative senators’ efforts to derail a bill intended to nullify the Supreme Court’s decision in Grove City College v. Bell, which restricted the application of federal civil-rights laws to those parts of an institution that receive federal aid directly. They have also characterized as censorship the commission’s decision to require its state advisory committees to submit their reports to Ms. Chavez’s staff prior to public release.
Chavez Responds
Ms. Chavez responds to the first charge by stating that she was only answering senators’ requests for assistance on the Grove City bill. She adds that it is hypocritical of her critics to condemn such action in light of the fact that previous commission staff directors regularly consulted White House officials during the 1960’s on the passage of major civil-rights legislation.
With respect to the charges of censorship of state advisory committees, Ms. Chavez says the change in policy is only intended to ensure that “clearly erroneous” material bearing the commission’s name is not distributed to the public.
Other policy shifts effected by Ms. Chavez have angered civil-rights lobbyists and, in one case, even some members of the commission’s majority.
One move, which the staff director says was required to bring commission rules in line with an Office of Personnel Management directive, empowers her to require Washington-based commission staff members to accept assignments in regional offices across the country. At a recent commission meeting, Ms. Chavez said that “at this time” she has no intention of requiring such staff shifts.
Ms. Chavez also rewrote an internal commission policy in such a way as to allow her to release certain publications without the prior consent of the commissioners. The first document released under this procedure was the legal evaluation of the Supreme Court’s Stotts decision.
In a rare move at their February meeting, a majority of the commissioners sided with Ms. Berry, one of the two holdover commissioners, in passing a resolution requiring the staff director to afford them the opportunity to review all commission materials carrying their names.
Concern Over Policies
According to William L. Taylor, the panel’s staff director during the Johnson Administration, the current commission’s greatest failing is the ease with which it has rejected previous commission policies and adopted new ones on controversial topics such as affirmative action.
“What characterized the commission in my day was that members were genuinely open to ideas and information,” says Mr. Taylor, who is now the director of the National Center for Policy Review at Catholic University of America. “They had a judicial temperament and would weigh information carefully. And that’s what’s missing now.”
Mr. Taylor points out that the commission announced its policy against the use of quotas in affirmative-action plans at its very first meeting, without having first studied the issue. By contrast, he says, the previous commission’s position in support of quotas, announced in 1981, came after two years of hearings and investigation.
“They already have their positions,” Mr. Taylor says. “Anything they do after the fact just lends color to their positions.”
‘Bent Over Backwards’
Ms. Chavez, however, contends that the commission “has bent over backwards” to ensure that it examines topics in a balanced manner.
“When the old commission did its hearing on affirmative action it heard from 29 witnesses, of whom only two or three had questions about the use of quotas,” she says. “Our assumption is that we want to hear both sides. Their position was that they already knew the truth and had all the answers.”
By contrast, she continues, this month the commission will hold a new hearing on affirmative action featuring witnesses such as Nathan E. Glazer, a Harvard University professor whose book, Affirmative Discrimination, questions the use of quotas, and Julius L. Chambers, director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P.
“Judge us by the quality of our work,” Ms. Chavez says. “I think that any objective, open-minded person taking a look at the kind of work we are doing will be left with the unmistakable belief that we’re approaching matters far more objectively than the previous commission did. I don’t know how else one proves this.”
