4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, April 12, 1994
ew rijgrtn &dlg
420 Maynard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Edited and managed
by students at the
University of Michigan
JEsSIE HAuADAY
Editor in Chief
SAM GooDSTmN
FUTr WAiNESS
Editorial Page Editors
w
Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of a majority of the Daily's editorial board.
All other articles, letters, and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily.
The war anst women
Women faculty members at the 'U' treated harshly
'The right of privacy ... is broad enough to encompass a
woman's decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.'
Justice Harry Blacknun
writing for the Court in Roe v. Wade
-}
-S/r N T O
, .:
t an open house yesterday afternoon de-
signed to inform about Political Science
Prof. Jill Crystal's ongoing gender discrimi-
nation suit against the University, one could
find a virtual who's-who of disgruntled Uni-
versity faculty members. From discussions of
tenure to issues of whistleblowing, current
and former faculty members-both men and
women alike-seemed eager to express their
concern with a University obsessed with se-
crecy, a University that continues to treat
female faculty unequally.
Prof. Crystal's case is a good place to
begin deconstructing the pillars of secrecy
that the University continues to hide behind.
While most of the issues surrounding the
Crystal case can only be resolved in a court of
law, there are several pieces of evidence that
don't bode well for the University. On June 6,
1993, after the College overturned the Politi-
cal Science Executive Committee's recom-
mendations and denied Crystal's bid for ten-
ure, Crystal filed a formal grievance. After
being stonewalled for months, the University
gave her only 36 hours to prepare evidence for
her hearing. Along with this, the University
told Crystal's lawyers that minutes from the
departmental discussions about Crystal's case
did not exist. Later, in court, the University
admitted that this was simply not true. More-
over, a recently uncovered memo written by
Political Science Professor Kenneth
Lieberthal, who was one of the internal re-
viewers charged with evaluating Crystal's
case, reads: "Her [Crystal] written record is
clearly more complete and of higher quality
than is that of at least one other person who
recently received tenure from us." He also
says that the "extraordinarily elastic" tenure
criteria have often led to the tenure of male
professorswith"mediocre 'internal'reviews."
If the Crystal case existed in a vacuum, or
was an isolated aberration, it might be easy to
dismiss it. But the fact is, the case is just a
piece in a long-standing puzzle that has left
women on the outside looking in.
The long list of chilling facts speak for
themselves: from1977to 1993, 31 percent of
the female assistant professors in LSA who
have been recommended by their department
for tenure were then denied tenure at the
College level; male assistant professors suf-
fered the same fate only11 percent of the
time. 53 percent of lecturers are female, but
only 20 percent of tenured and tenure-track
faculty are women. Since the 1989 elections,
not one female member of SACUA has fin-
ished her term. In the Political Science de-
partment, the pay gap that leaves female
faculty making less money than male faculty
has increased since 1992. And from1990 to
1992, the number of women occupying se-
nior administrative positions at the Univer-
sity actually decreased from 30 percent to 22
percent, leaving only about 1 in 10 of these
upper-level positions for women.
This is not to say that the University has
been completely silent on the issue. This
spring, President Duderstadt plans to an-
nounce the Michigan Agenda for Women,
which will probably include the implementa-
tion of commissions to look into some of the
above-mentioned problems. However, the
University continues to keep all tenure records
from the public eye, it continues to enforce
gender inequalities in pay and hiring and the
latest debacle has University lawyers suing
Crystal for defamation.
Hopefully, the Agenda will not become an
excuse for inaction. Real problems exist, and
they are problems that demand immediate
recourse.
Try economic
affirmative action
To the Daily:
Mere mention of the
phrase affirmative action can
elicit strong emotional
responses from people, both
pro and con. When I say I do
not support affirmative action
as it stands today, I have often
taken the brunt of some of
these strong emotional
responses. "How can you be
against affirmative action!? It
is one of the only ways to
ensure equal opportunity to
minorities who have been
repressed in this racist country
for hundreds of years!" While
I do not disagree with this
statement, I believe a better
way to promote equal
opportunity would be to focus
on economic discrimination.
Economic discrimination
affects those people at the
lowest income levels. They
receive a substandard
education, live in a
substandard environment and
are offered substandard
opportunities simply because
they are poor. In American
society today, economics is a
greater discriminatory force
than racism. The American
ideal of equal opportunity,
would be better served if
affirmative action would
focus on helping those who
experience economic
discrimination rather than
racial discrimination.
Addressing the problems
of economic rather than racial
discrimination improves
Affirmative Action policies in
a couple of ways. First, the
proposed alternative would
eliminate improper
exploitation of the system. In
my own limited experience, I
know of more than one
instance where minorities
with upper-middle class
backgrounds accepted
scholarships to quality
schools, while students with
lower-class backgrounds
settled for local community
colleges because of
insufficient funds. Some of
these poorer students were
minorities; some were not.
All of the poorer students,
however, lacked the
opportunities available to the
richer minority students, who
were going to college
regardless of a scholarship.
These kinds of results do not
go very far in fostering
equality of opportunity.
Second, the economic
affirmative action program
would still promote diversity
as well as the current
affirmative action policies.
Minorities still comprise a
disproportionately large
portion of the lower economic
classes in America. As a
result, they would continue to
receive assistance and
continue to contribute to
greater racial diversity on
campus and in the workplace.
Promoting diversity in
economic background would
also generate a vibrant
community with a variety of
ideas and opinions. The inner-
city and the suburbs could
interact on equal grounds.
Economic Affirmative Action
would create diversity of both
race and thought.
Finally, prejudices could
no longer stereotype
minorities in top schools and
powerful positions as being
not qualified and merely
products of affirmative action.
By taking affirmative action's
focus away from race, people
would be less inclined to
attribute minority successes to
preferential treatment. I have
spoken to minority students on
this campus who excel in their
chosen fields of academics,
but they complain that many
of their peers still perceive
them as being on this campus
solely because of affirmative
action policies. Here,
affirmative action acts as a
detriment to the very people it
is intended to help.
Discrimination is eating
away at the fabric that holds
this country together, equality
of opportunity. Changing the
way we look at discrimination
provides us with the benefits
outlined above. All of these
advantages work toward a
more equitable society, and in
our society where the gap
between the rich and the poor
is growing quickly, a little
more equality is now more
necessary than ever. Out of
fairness those people who
suffer under the grip of
economic discrimination, as
well as those who live with
the stereotype of "quota-
fillers," the University should
lead the way in reforming
affirmative actiongby
concentrating its affirmative
action policies on economic
rather than racial
discrimination.
MICHAEL VAN DRIEL
Institute of Public Policy
student
Compulsions
o beauty
My mother looked around at the
other new students gathered for the
first day of my college orientation
and turned to me: "You know,
everybody looks really nice here,"
she said. "Nobody looks like a
cheerleader or anything." Then she
studied my makeup and carefully
hot-rollered blonde hair and
reconsidered. "Except for you,
dear," she said.
I had to admit she was right.
During my junior year in high1
school I had earned an unsavory
reputation as a "smart girl" and a
feminist and had gone to great
lengths not to look like either. I
used to stand in front of my mirror
at home and experiment with
barrettes and banana clips, mascara
and matte base, trying to become
more beautiful. I would think about
my academic achievements while
checking the size of my pores, and
the narrator in my unwritten
autobiography would say, "But she
wanted to be known for being
beautiful." Even having a boyfriend
wasn't enough -- I wanted to look
like a model.
Six years later very little has
changed. My latest worry is that
everybody from my high school is
getting married, and what am I doing
still single? Almost as a reflex, I've
started to care about how I look
again. I pay attention to what
shampoo Iuse, and I bought mascara
yesterday for the first time in five
years.' Last month I even
participated in the highest worship
to the goddess of beauty - I got a
makeover (excuse me, a "beauty
consultation") at Hudson's in
Briarwood.
I was thinking about this before
Christmas when I was standing in
the all-fuschia Barbie aisle at Toys
'R Us. Three rows over the GI Joe
toys said, "Hold it or I'll blow your
head off!," but here in the Barbie
aisle you could purchase Barbie's
pink car, or pink house, or even
Barbie for President (wearing a
poofy dress that looked big enough
to conceal a bomb to blow up the
opposing candidate - and the three
terrorists necessary to plant it.)
Somehow this wasn't too bad.
But then I saw "Baby's First Purse,"
complete with play lipstick and a
small miror. The picture on the
box showed an 8 month-old infant.
Next to that was a pink hand-held
mirror that said "You look pretty" or
"Your hair looks nice" when you
pressed a button. The rest of the
aisle had fake nail sets, a "Little
Tykes" vanity table and more play
makeup sets than I could count.
The girls on the boxes smiled their
half-toothed 7 year-old smiles -
and every one of them was wearing
makeup and curled hair.
Women also go temporarily
insane when forced to look at
pictures of themselves. I don't know
a single woman who's ever liked a
picture of herself that wasn't
airbrushed. Men, on the other hand,
not only don't complain about how
they look in pictures, but do their
best to look goofy. The little angelic
boys who smiled for the camera at
five learn how to smirk, smile like
the Joker, drool and stare fixedly at
nothing by the age of nine. As they
grow up they simply refuse to smile
in pictures, choosing to look sullen,
stern, macho or still goofy. They
don't care how they look - and
they go to great lengths to prove it.
But there are the women still,
smiling for the camera and making
sure that their hair is in place and
their eyeliner on.
Men's high standards for
feminine beauty are often blamed
for this obsession, but I'm not so
sure women do all of this solely for
men. And women also deem
appearance fairly important in a
date or partner, but I don't see men
starting to wear makeup anytime
soon. Perhaps Naomi Wolf was
right - the changes of the last
thirty years have left us longing for
romance and beauty, and women
are paying the price by worrying
about how they look. A woman can
be successful and ambitious - but
she must also look feminine and
beautiful.
Sexual power plavs into this as
01
Foreign policy in disarray
Enough is enough. The Clinton foreign
policy team has proved its irrevocable
ineptness in just about every crisis it has
attempted to resolve. From Bosnia to Haiti,
from North Korea to China, several key offi-
cials responsible for formulating and carrying
out U.S. foreign policy - Secretary of De-
fense William Perry, Secretary of State War-
ren Christopher and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chair John Shalikashvili - have done an
incredibly poor job. It is up to President
Clinton to do something about this himself or
find some fresh blood to replace a number of
incapable Cabinet officials.
The United States faces a serious reevalu-
ation and reorientation of its national security
and foreign policy objectives. A fundamental
reassessment of the administration's handling
of issues of national security must be under-
taken to salvage what is left of U.S. foreign
policy.
The Clinton team's most severe and de-
bilitating problem is its inability to come to a
policy consensus and to project that single,
clear voice of reason to the American people
and to actors in the international political
system. Here is where Christopher, Lake and
Perry fail most explicitly. No one can figure
out what the Clinton administration's foreign
policy objectives are or what it wants to
accomplish in a number of crises and confla-
grations across the globe. This is a frightening
development and a threat to peace and stabil-
ity.
The latest series of miscues within the
administration concerning events in Bosnia
most clearly demonstrate this fatal flaw of
Clinton's team. Secretary Perry and General
Shalikashvilitold reporters over the past week
that the United States would not use force to
endthestrangulationofGorazde.Shalikashvili
stressed that the bullet would never bring
peace to Bosnia, and thus, the United States
would play no military role in protecting this
U.N. declared "safe haven." The statements
made by these two top officials signified a
regression in our Bosnian policy, which was
just starting to make a difference in ending the
plain nonsense. Maybe these public state-
ments reflected Perry and Shalikashvili's
personal or bureaucratic interests at stake, but
the White House was forced to later retract
their remarks, andon Sunday, twoU.S. fighter
jets hit Serb targets on the ground near
Gorazde.The question remains: how was any
rational person, or nation, supposed to know
what this administration was thinking? What
is causing this institutional paralysis?
Like a confused child, this administration
has consistently failed in addressing the pri-
mary U.S. interests at stake in both China and
North Korea - a region of the world where
the United States cannot afford to falter in its
pursuit of democracy, liberalization and non-
proliferation. In dealing with North Korea,
the Clinton circus act has juggled the carrot
and the stick to no avail. It is crucial that the
International Atomic Energy Agency be al-
lowed to inspect critical processing, research,
development and production sites inthe North.
North Korea has consistently rebuffed the
West, yet Clinton has waveredbetween shows
of American firmness and diplomatic yield-
ing. The administration has, in a span of six
months, stated that Patriot missiles would be
deployed in South Korea, that the use of
nuclear weapons would not be ruled out to
pressure the North and that joint military
exercises between the South and the United
States would be called off as a conciliatory
gesture. And once again, William Perry took
to the airwaves to declare that the United
States would not use force on the Korean
Peninsula unless the North preemptively in-
vaded the South. On the China front, the idea
of eliminating yearly approval of most-fa-
vored nation status (MFN), the backbone of
the GATT system, has been toyed with, and
will hopefully be resoundly rejected.
It is imperative, and abundantly clearfrom
the results Clinton's team has produced, that
serious change needs to occur within this
administration. Either Secretary Christopher
should be dismissed or the White House
should increase the attention the President
gives to issues of national security. We can-
Constituti
By LORETA LEE
People have called the
Michigan Student Assembly's
politics just a game,
sometimes for good reason.
The way the new Constitution
for MSA was passed serves as
a good example. While it
seems amazing that this new
dumping of democratic
principles passed, even more
striking is why it passed -
because students were denied
the right to all the information
that they needed and wanted
to know in order to vote on it.
Although the new
Constitution strips voting
rights from commissions
representing people of color
and women, and also states
that only the President can
appoint the voting members
of Steering Committee now, I
would have accepted the
election results if students had
voted "yes" to these changes
in a fair election. "Fair
election" is subjective, so let
me give the facts.
)n passes
Constitution was provided,
but the old Constitution or a
summary of the changes from
the old Constitution to the
new was not provided. Not
surprisingly, many students
abstained from voting.
The results could easily
have been different, because
the new Constitution passed
by only 11 votes, and because
of a lack of apathy: at the
polling sites, many students
actually asked and were
denied the right to see the old
Constitution or to know what
the changes were.
"Hey, we followed the
rules. There's nothing in that
election code that said we did
anything wrong," said
advocates of this new
Constitution. What concerns
me is that students who
actually took the time to vote
and to ask for full information
were left in the dark. How can
people talk about "the rules"
as if making information
accessible to those concerned
dishonestly
to information and the
importance of truth to actions
in a game.
His words demonstrate that
he has lost sight of, forgotten,
or perhaps never known
fundamentals of policy
making: integrity and honesty,
particularly to those students
MSA represents. When we
lose sight of these, then
politics indeed becomes
reduced to just a game of
rules, with no concepts of
right and wrong entering the
picture.
Incidentally, although my
case centers on violations of
student rights to information
and the right to uniform
regulations, the way the new
Constitution was passed did
indeed violate the "rules," as
Meg Whittaker showed me.
An amendment text longer
than 300 words must be
summarized and displayed for
seven days, and must appear
on the ballot question. It
wasn't.
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