Belief in Meritocracy an Equal-Opportunity Myth : Preferences: It appeals to notion of fairness, but distorts realities of social mobility, historians say.

Before affirmative action, there was merit. Or so the argument goes.

You were admitted to college, hired for a job and promoted through the ranks not because you belonged to a disadvantaged racial or ethnic group but because you deserved it, by dint of hard work, superior effort and proven good results.

Affirmative action, its opponents lament, subverted that most American of principles: that merit--not favor--is the fuel that propels you upward through the system.

Affirmative action, intones ardent foe Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), “flies in the face of the merit-based society (envisioned by) the Founding Fathers.”

Abolishing it, said Glynn Custred, co-author of the proposed California Civil Rights Initiative, will move us closer to a system of “advancement by merit” and ensure that people “get ahead by what they can do,” not by who they are.

Sounds simple enough.

But historians and other experts say the truth is more complicated than that. Arguments about merit appeal to Americans’ basic notions of fairness, but they are dangerously deceptive, distorting the realities of social mobility in this country.

American society, many scholars maintain, is no meritocracy--never was, perhaps never will be.

“The notion that affirmative action unfairly tilts the playing field implies that we had a level playing field,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley education professor who studies labor issues. “The notion that we at one point had a system based on merit and then gratuitously introduced affirmative action (is an argument that) rewrites history. It is a powerful and confining myth.”

Doubters can find ample evidence in every era. There was no meritocracy for blacks before the Civil War or during the Jim Crow era. There was no level playing field for Native Americans during the westward expansion, for Irish Catholics in the mid-1800s, for Chinese Americans in the late 1800s, for Japanese Americans in the 1940s, for migrant farm workers in the 1960s.

“So-called merit,” said Norman Cohen, professor of American history at Occidental College, “was based upon being ‘American.’ That definition always changed, too. But, basically, it was Protestant, it was white, it was American.”

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Today, for better and for worse, informal systems of preference still mold much of American life and extend advantages to some, whether it’s for a seat at a top-rated college, a job at a blue-chip law firm or a chance to learn a steady trade.

“Our society,” said William Gray III, a black former congressman and now special presidential envoy to Haiti, “has been loaded with preferences.”

Ask the third-generation Harvard graduate whose status as a wealthy “alumni brat” helped ensure her admission to that Ivy League bastion. Ask the second-generation electrician whose father helped him learn the trade and join the union. Ask the disgruntled Hollywood screenwriter who saw a prized job go to the boss’ friend, a case, in her view, of “affirmative action for friends and relatives.” Or the young law school graduate observing the dynamics of the labor market for the first time.

“It was perfectly obvious to anyone at the top of the class that certain law firms drew from certain schools, certain schools fed to certain judges, certain judges went to certain government agencies and those agencies fed back to certain law schools,” said Rosa Cumare, now an attorney handling employment discrimination cases in a small Pasadena firm.

“It’s who you know, where you went to school, who were your professors. That’s true in many businesses.”

Connections and privilege.

From the dusty union halls of construction workers to the citadels of academe, preferences based on family ties, “old-boy” networks, intra-ethnic bonds and other alliances still make for a rather bumpy playing field in the 1990s. But what is a fair advantage and what isn’t? That may be the real crux of the bruising debate enveloping a nation uncomfortable with its past.

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Anita Sierra, a 39-year-old New Mexico native, remembers the moment a couple of years ago. She was the new apprentice on an electrical crew fixing street lights on Sepulveda Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport when a co-worker filled her in.

“That’s the foreman, that’s his brother, that’s his son, . . .” Sierra, the only woman on the job, recalls being told.

How did it make her feel?

“Like I’m going to have to work hard, kiss butt, to stay in there,” she said recently at a job fair to entice more women into her predominantly male trade. “Who you know is very important. It’s always been like that.”

Although times have changed, her union wasn’t called a brotherhood for nothing. A few decades ago, the only way to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 11, was to be sponsored by your father, uncle or other close relative.

“It didn’t matter if you were white, black, green or purple,” said a black electrician who entered the union 24 years ago. “You had to be a son or a nephew or a cousin or an extremely close friend.”

David Cartier can attest to that.

When he joined the union almost 30 years ago, “people were astounded that I didn’t have a relative” in the trade, he said. “The first question they would ask me on a job was who was I related to.

“It was a country club,” Cartier, now an electrical contractor, recalls. “Everybody was trying to protect what they had. They didn’t want too many people doing it.”

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Although competitive exams for apprenticeships and a push to sign up more union members have broken down many barriers, kinship networks persist today. Cartier, for instance, helped his two sons, Eric, 27, and Bret, 24, join the union, giving them recommendations when they went before the apprenticeship board.

“I probably wouldn’t have thought about it (becoming an electrician) if he hadn’t been in the trade,” said Eric, now an inside wireman in an industry that pays journeymen like him as much as $26 an hour.

The system rewarding familial ties serves several purposes, some good, some bad.

One purpose, says UCLA sociologist Roger Waldinger, is to transmit skills in occupations where much of the training occurs on the job. Family connections also make it easier to recruit a reliable work crew.

“In most cases, (the father-son) system was fairly successful,” said Arch Macnair, 73, a retired electrician. “The old man would see to it that the son would do the trade correctly, coach him nights and weekends, if necessary.”

One drawback, however, was that sometimes “incompetent people would be brought in who would be a burden to everybody,” Macnair said.

Another problem, said Waldinger, who has studied the impact of friendship and family networks in New York’s construction trades, is who such informal hiring systems leave out. Nationally, only 2% of the skilled jobs are held by women; blacks hold 6.5% and Latinos 11.4%, according to 1994 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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“If you are not part of the network,” he said, “you are in a lot of trouble.”

Even after getting in the door, women and minorities in the trades say, the struggle to fit into what is still a tight-knit fraternity is far from over. Racial tensions sometimes flare on the job site. Sexual harassment is common, ranging from catcalls, whistles and verbal harangues--”Why aren’t you at home? You should be a housewife”--and blunt refusals to give women crucial on-site training, to more serious incidents.

“There are rational reasons to prefer the group already established in the industry,” Waldinger said. “But there is also a great deal of antagonism,” particularly in today’s tight economy.

“These are good jobs to have. Since there are not that many good jobs and your cousin wants one, you’d much rather give it to your cousin. If blacks or other visible minorities are trying to get your job, that’s a reason to hate them.

“It’s a pretty evil brew, and very difficult to change.”

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Such obstacles are foreign to Julia Cutler’s world, where privilege is a given.

Cutler, 26, is a self-described “alumni brat” from a very exclusive club. The Philadelphia native is a third-generation Harvard graduate, having trailed her father, grandfather and great uncle to that illustrious institution. When she applied for a spot in the Class of 1991, her lineage was a definite plus.

In the lingo of college admissions, Cutler’s application was bolstered by the “legacy tip,” a preference that Ivy League and other elite schools give to the children of alumni.

“It builds more of a sense of loyalty,” Cutler said in defense of the practice. “I’m more likely to donate money (to Harvard), my father is more likely to donate money. And I’m very involved in alumni activities.”

Legacy admissions have not attracted the scrutiny heaped on other protected classes of students--chiefly, blacks and Latinos admitted under affirmative action guidelines, with lower grades and test scores than other students. Critics of the alumni preference call it the “dirty little secret” of higher education.

Studies have shown that even at some of the nation’s most discriminating universities, legacy students are admitted at a much higher rate than non-alumni applicants, despite having lower SAT scores.

“Graduates of elite colleges are overwhelmingly among the well-to-do, so giving preference to their children is, in effect, affirmative action for the rich,” said sociologist Jerome Karabel, who has studied the issue at Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

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The legacy tip is not insignificant.

Looking at Harvard’s freshman class of 1988, Karabel and colleague David Karen, a Bryn Mawr College sociology professor, calculated that if “legacies” had been admitted at the same (lower) rate as applicants without alumni connections, the number of alumni offspring would have fallen by nearly 200, a figure that exceeded the total of blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans admitted as freshmen that year.

And a 1991 report by Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change noted that “far more whites have entered the gates of the 10 most elite institutions through ‘alumni preference’ than the combined number of all the blacks and Chicanos entering through affirmative action.”

University of South Carolina historian Marcia Graham Synnott, author of “The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” said alumni preferences began almost 100 years ago. They were devised to keep down the numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants and Jews who began applying to the elite schools in the early 1900s.

What began as a protective device evolved into a fund-raising tool. In fact, during a 1990 federal investigation of its admissions practices, Harvard gave as one of three chief reasons for the alumni preference its usefulness in encouraging alumni generosity.

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The probe shined rare light on the workings of the legacy tip.

The U.S. Department of Education’s office of civil rights examined Harvard’s policies in response to complaints of discrimination against Asian-American applicants, who were admitted at a lower rate than whites despite superior academic records.

Harvard told the investigators that a “tip” is essentially a tie-breaker, a preference that does not ensure admission but that, when all other factors are “substantially equal,” may tip the scales in favor of a student who falls in one of three special categories. Those divisions were: racial and ethnic minorities, alumni children and recruited athletes.

In a twist of logic that some observers found odd, the office of civil rights found that the disparity in admission rates was the result of Harvard giving more weight to the tips for legacies and athletes, two groups that are predominantly white, than it did to the “ethnic tip” for Asians.

The federal agency cleared Harvard of the discrimination charges, concluding that preferential treatment of athletes and legacies was legal and served “legitimate institutional goals” that could not otherwise be met.

Over the last 10 years, Harvard’s admission rate for legacies has ranged between 35% and 40%, more than twice the overall admission rate of about 15%.

Alumni preferences are strong at other schools. Stanford University, for instance, admits alumni children at twice the rate of other applicants. At the University of Virginia, 57% of legacies are accepted, compared to a 36% overall rate.

On campus, students without alumni parentage often view legacies with scorn. “To be called a legacy is a negative,” said Amy Horng, a communications coordinator for the World Bank who graduated from Harvard last June. “The common stereotype is they are not as well qualified, although you find wide variation. I had friends who were legacies who could come in on their own merits.”

Judging purely on the numbers, however, the stereotype appears more true than false. Calculating average SAT scores over a 10-year period, the office of civil rights found that the mean score for Harvard’s legacy students was 35 points lower than that of non-alumni students who were not athletes. (Recruited athletes had the lowest mean scores--about 130 points lower than the non-alumni group--although still in the top percentiles of SAT test takers nationally.)

Harvard senior admissions officer Robert Clagett emphasizes that comparing legacies’ average scores with those of students in “almost every college in the country” would show that Harvard’s legacy admits are still extremely well-qualified.

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Indeed, tougher admission standards have substantially improved the caliber of legacies admitted over the past three decades, according to Synnott, the University of South Carolina history professor. But at some institutions, she said, the SAT gap remains quite broad, “as much as 50 points below some of the best people who are not alumni children.”

Given the test score gap, are alumni preferences any different from what affirmative action foes call lowering the standards to admit “unqualified” blacks and Latinos?

“Ironically, no one is talking about legacies or athletes,” said Andrew Wright, 21, president of the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper.

For white males like Wright, frustration runs deeper over race- and gender-based affirmative action, which he says “makes white men feel, even at the college level, that they are being left in the dust” in the competition for summer jobs, scholarships and grants.

“People say, ‘Oh, you go to Harvard, you’re all set up in the old-boy network.’ That is a joke,” said Wright. “That is history.”

Cutler, the third-generation Harvard graduate, would disagree. Through the Harvard network, she landed “two fabulous internships in Japan” and made useful job contacts. Now she is a senior account executive for a Sherman Oaks graphic design and marketing firm that caters to the entertainment industry.

“I have always found my Harvard background to be an asset and an advantage,” she said. “It’s not a free ride, it’s a tool.”

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Whether a privilege or a tool, the alumni preference, like other forms of preferential treatment, has rarely met with serious challenge. To William Gray, the former Pennsylvania congressman who now heads the United Negro College Fund, this point stirs righteous indignation.

“Our society is loaded with preferences. Preferences for veterans, preferences for senior citizens, preferences for farmers. Government contracting has had a preference for small business--small white business--that far exceeds the preferences for (businesses owned by) racial minorities. I don’t see anyone saying ‘Let’s stop that preference.’ . . . The only one they want to get rid of is race. Why?”

According to opponents of affirmative action, the answer isn’t hard to figure out.

The Constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of race. That includes reverse discrimination, say affirmative action foes like Linda Chavez, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Ronald Reagan Administration and head of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington.

Custred, the co-author of the California ballot measure that would abolish most forms of government-sponsored affirmative action for women and minorities, says the reason for the race focus goes deeper than that.

“Race, ethnicity, religion--those are what sociologists and anthropologists call primordial ties, the basic, most primitive ways we form groups,” said Custred, a Cal State Hayward anthropology professor.

“If you place a premium on race or ethnicity, then you encourage people to overly identify with racial or ethnic ties. Then you are encouraging ethnic and race-based interest groups. This is very dangerous, more dangerous than having subsidies of wheat farmers as opposed to beef farmers.”

The question, he insists, is not whether some preferences are more evil than others because some, at least in his mind, are.

“There has always been that extra edge for some people,” he acknowledged. “The question is, do you want to keep it and color code it, or do you want to do something different? I want to do something different.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Voices

“Our society has been loaded with preferences. Preferences for veterans, preferences for senior citizens, preferences for farmers. Government contracting has had a preference for small business--small white business--that far exceeds the preferences for (businesses owned by) minorities. I don’t see anyone saying let’s stop that preference. . . . The only one they want to get rid of is race.”

--William H. Gray III, president of United Negro College Fund

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“Veterans’ preferences are qualitatively different. Anybody can have a fair shot at having been in that pool. That’s very different from distinctions based on characteristics that can’t be changed. You can’t change sex. You can’t change race.”

--Linda Chavez, president of Center for Equal Opportunity

Who Deserves a Break?

The affirmative action debate has focused on race-based preferences in hiring and schooling, but society grants favored status to many kinds of groups. There is a growing debate over whether some preferences are more justified than others. Some examples:

ALUMNI CHILDREN

Children of university alumni may be granted favored consideration in admissions.

* Pro: Good for alumni relations. Boosts university fund-raising.

* Con: Allows less academically qualified applicants entrance. Favors whites and the wealthy.

VETERANS ON GI BILL

Provides housing, employment and educational benefits to veterans.

* Pro: Earned by men and women serving their country.

* Con: No longer needed to help the economy absorb returning veterans.

AGRICULTURE

Includes many subsidy programs, such as price supports and payments to keep land out of production.

* Pro: Helps support family farms. Encourages conservation and responsible farming practices.

* Con: Programs are abused, with subsidies flowing to agribusiness and urban dwellers.

SENIOR CITIZENS

Many public programs, such as Medicare, and private services, such as discounted merchandise, are available.

* Pro: Society has a responsibility to care for the elderly, whose earning power is often limited.

* Con: Benefits not based on need. Costs may burden the economy and younger taxpayers.

BUSINESSES

Subsidies and tax breaks are provided for industries, such as banking and transportation, and corporations.

* Pro: Provide financial aid and incentives for research, add to the economy, create jobs.

* Con: Programs amount to corporate welfare; funds often go to billion-dollar industries.

STUDENT ATHLETES

Colleges and universities provide scholarships and other aid to outstanding athletes.

* Pro: Rewards talent with educational opportunity. Adds to campus diversity.

* Con: Athletes often unprepared academically to succeed. Keeps more qualified students out.

VETERANS SEEKING CIVIL SERVICE JOBS

Most state and local agencies, and the federal government, give veterans preference in hiring.

* Pro: Rewards men and women for service in the military.

* Con: Women and non-veterans cannot fairly compete, especially for upper-level jobs.

HOMEOWNERS WITH MORTGAGES

Homeowners are allowed to deduct mortgage interest from federal income tax.

* Pro: Enables millions of middle- and moderate-income families to own homes.

* Con: Penalizes the poor and renters. Deprives the federal treasury of tax dollars.

SCHOLARSHIP STUDENTS

Some scholarships are based on criteria such as race, gender, organizational membership, parent’s employer.

* Pro: Expands access to education. Fosters a more diverse educational community.

* Con: Not based on need. May reward connections rather than achievement.

Sources: Congressional Quarterly; “Guide to American Law”; Andrew Hacker, “Two Nations”; Frances Gottfried, “The Merit System and Municipal Civil Service”; Times files

Researched by NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times

About This Series

In this series, The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the workplace and college campuses over the last 30 years. With some now questioning whether giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which will appear periodically throughout 1995, will measure its impact on American institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Previously: Why affirmative action became an issue in 1995, its legal underpinnings, its impact on presidential politics, the difficulties of defining a minority, the views of its beneficiaries and a Times poll showing ambivalent attitudes on the issue.

* Today: Before affirmative action, there was merit. Or was there? Informal systems of preferences have always molded American life, extending advantages to some and shutting out others.

* Monday: How the same mechanisms of the mind involved in seeing optical illusions may be at work in racial stereotyping.

* Tuesday: “Diversity” programs aimed at defusing racial conflict in the workplace have survived both the recession and the anti-affirmative-action backlash.