CABINET SEAT RESERVED FOR WOMEN ONLY?

Dec. 10, 1992
Los Angeles Daily News

     Donna Shalala's qualifications to be a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet are no worse than those of most of the male retreads from the hapless Carter administration. But if the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin's huge Madison campus goes to Washington, her achievement will be tainted by suspicion verging on certainty that Clinton picked her because he needed a few women in high positions.

      There's a certain elegance to that fate. Shalala has been among education's most zealous promoters of the idea that gender and race are more important than merit when it comes to choosing students and faculty. If she is dismissed as just another affirmative-action hire, it's no more than she deserves.

     Earlier this week Shalala, 51, was listed among top female prospects for a cabinet post, as Secretary of Education or possibly Commerce. She was an assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, then president of Hunter College in New York before taking on the top job at the nation's fourth-largest university.

      No one can doubt that assigning jobs by gender is what the Clinton transition team is doing. "There's sensitivity about rolling out four white males" for top economic posts, a Clinton aide told The New York Times. "They want to show their sense of diversity."

      Shalala ought to fit right in with that politically correct brand of rigid tribalism. "From the moment (students) walk on campus as freshmen," she told Time magazine in 1990, "we make them very aware of racial and sexual insensitivities and what's acceptable behavior."

      She nods in the direction of free speech, but her heart's not in it.

      "If students are not going to hear controversial ideas on college campuses, they're not going to hear them in America. . . . It doesn't mean we don't denounce them and say that kind of behavior is unacceptable."

      Faculty at Madison, especially young faculty without tenure, worry about saying things the chancellor disagrees with, says Theodore Hamerow, a retired professor of European history. "If you're on the good side, you will get better perks and advantages, and critics never get them.

      "Our profession is not particularly heroic, and she has been quite effective in forging a coalition of ardent feminists and militant activists" for her multicultural agenda.

      Hamerow believes she would take that same agenda to Washington.

      "We long wished we could get rid of Shalala," he said, "but I would hope not at the expense of the country as a whole."

      Shalala's by-the-numbers multiculturalism was put on record with "the Madison plan," introduced with great fanfare in February 1988, only a few weeks after she took over the chancellor's job. The plan rounded up all the usual suspects, establishing a "multicultural" center on campus and an ethnic-studies requirement for undergraduates. It pledged to more than double the number of entering minority students within five years and to add more than 200 minority staff members by 1991.

      The affirmative action office at Madison declined to comment on the success of the plan, but news reports suggest it has fallen short. One part of the problem is finding minority students who will enroll at Madison, in the midst of a genteel but ferocious bidding war for academically talented minorities. The other problem is keeping them. In April, Shalala announced measures to halt a troublingly high dropout rate among American Indians at Madison, including a full-time retention specialist and a course on American Indians in higher education.

      One part of the Madison plan no longer exists: a hate-speech code under which students could be disciplined for derogatory remarks based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation or ethnic origin if the slurs created a "hostile learning environment" for someone.

      The American Civil Liberties Union sued the University of Wisconsin system on behalf of a number of student groups including a campus newspaper, and a federal judge ruled the code violated First Amendment rights of free speech.

      "The problems of bigotry and discrimination sought to be addressed here are real and truly corrosive of the educational environment. But freedom of speech is almost absolute in our land. Content-based prohibitions such as that in the UW rule, however well intended, simply cannot survive the screening which our Constitution demanded."

      Chancellor Shalala apparently saw no constitutional problems with Wisconsin's code. If she is chosen for the Cabinet, I'll have to send her a copy of the Bill of Rights, with the First Amendment highlighted.

      Remember this, Donna: It'll be on the exam.