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The 1997 SPSSI presidential address: affirmative action: a compelling state interest - Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues President Dalmas Taylor - Transcript

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998

Michelle Wittig's Introduction:

Dr. Dalmas A. Taylor was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He received his B.A. in psychology from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, his M.S. in psychology from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Delaware, and he also has a certificate from the Harvard University Business School. He has been honored by the APA in a number of ways. He received, in 1991, the Distinguished Contribution to Education and Training Award of the Association. In 1992, he received the Distinguished Service Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest.

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He has had many years of service to the American Psychological Association, most notably as a member of the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs, the Policy and Planning Board, the Committee on Employment and Human Resources, and the Committee on the Ethics Code Revision. He also has been a member of APA Council. Maybe some of you don't remember, but he also was the first director of the Minority Fellowship Program, which still exists today.

His service to SPSSI in particular has taken a number of different forms. Way back in the 1970s, he was chairing the Dissertation Award Committee, he served for a number of years on the SPSSI Council, he served on the Public Policy Oversight Committee, and he was APA Program Chair, not once, but twice, in 1979, and again in 1987. Many of you know him also as a Past President of Division 45, the Division on Ethnic Minority Affairs. Some of you may not know that Dr. Taylor and Dr. James Jones formed an ad hoc committee, quite a number of years ago, that made site visits to various departments of psychology in an unofficial capacity. They never said they were from the APA, but they made visits and gave colloquia in an effort to try to cajole people into admitting more racial and ethnic minorities into their programs.

His early research was on self disclosure as well as correlates of authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. Most recently, he has distinguished himself in the areas of the psychology of racism and prejudice.

After working his way up through the ranks in the academic faculty, he became Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, and then he began moves into administration, and he now serves as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. I don't know what the "A" stands for in Dalmas A. Taylor, but James Jones told me, and perhaps we will see at the social hour tonight, some evidence for the acronym D.A.T. or "DAT," which apparently James Jones liked to call him when the two of them were at the APA program on Minority Fellowships. James Jones tells me that it stands for "dance your ass off Taylor." His talk today is entitled "Affirmative Action: A Compelling State Interest."

Dr. Dalmas Taylor:

This was going along quite well until we hit rock bottom. The other day at the SPSSI Council Meeting, Phyllis Katz said that for some reason JSI issues take on a variety of titles before they get published, and I find this equally true for presentations. I'd forgotten what this topic was, as a matter of fact, because it's been through so many changes. I knew that it was going to be generally on affirmative action, because Michelle Wittig and I talked about that last year when she gave a very dramatic and informative presentation on this topic at Ann Arbor, and I told her we needed to keep the initiative and the momentum for affirmative action alive, and agreed that I would do this. Little did I know then that the issue was going to continue to heat up; as it moves beyond any of our reasonable reaches in terms of where this is going. So, I'd like to put my oar in this pond in terms of where I think it needs to go and simultaneously look at where it's been.

I title this "Affirmative Action: A Compelling State Interest" because as the Supreme Court has trimmed the reach of affirmative action, it has developed a code in which it refers to a "strict scrutiny" and essentially places an acid test on affirmative action procedures to determine whether or not they are undertaken in the context of government interest. The recent brouhaha born out of the Hopwood case directly hits at the issue of whether affirmative action represents a compelling state interest, and it will probably not surprise you that my thesis is directed at affirming that proposition.

Affirmative action programs began in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations with the issuance of Executive Order 10925 by President Kennedy and Executive Order 11246 by President Johnson. These orders created the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. It has the authority to conduct compliance reviews of federal contractors and to impose sanctions where warranted. Johnson later issued an additional Executive Order 11375, which added sex discrimination as an area to be addressed and extended the coverage of federal contracts to at least $50,000. These Executive Orders were ultimately buttressed by legislative initiatives, namely Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972. From the time of their adoption to this very day, these programs have been associated with considerable controversy.

The 1997 SPSSI presidential address: affirmative action: a compelling state interest - Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues President Dalmas Taylor - Transcript

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998

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