But the real pressure on universities came as the result of an amendment to the executive order which the Department of Labor released on January 30, 1970. The order, Title 4, requires Federal contractors to submit a general plan for ending discrimination, and also to set goals and timetables for correcting existing situations in the affirmative action plan. This came out at the same time WEAL and other women's groups began using their new-found legal resources.

"Women did everything from demanding to see the Secretary of Labor to letter campaigns; at one point, they (the government) were receiving so many letter they had to hire a full-time letter reader," a WEAL spokesman explained. "Because of the publicity and pressure, women were asked to come in and give comments on the order. There was a very direct result from this pressure...the government never moves until someone puts on pressure."

Revised order no, four came out almost two years later, after women from WEAL and NOW were consulted on the draft. The revised order required that the affirmative action plans contain a "utilization analysis" for women as well as for minorities, as was previously required. The definition of "Underutilization" of women is slightly different from that of minorities; the proportion of minority members on the work force is to be defined by the "minority population of the labor area surrounding the facility" while the acceptable proportion of women is to depend on "the availability of women seeking employment in the labor of recruitment area of the contractor." In other words, the order takes into account the fact that many women don't seek employment.

That many women don't work seems to have stirred a philosophical controversy in the time preceeding the drafting of the revised order: should employers consider their possible workforce as only those now employed or seeking employment, or their potential presence in the workforce? Statistically the proportion of both women and minorities who don't work is higher than that of white males; the philosophical question is whether the government should encourage people to work.

IT IS THE GOALS and timetables which are really forcing universities to take affirmative action. The goals are to be "measurable and attainable" deriving from university estimates of the applicant pools for each rank and department, based on the available talent. For example, if x per cent of the people holding doctorates in psychology in the country are women, then a university might reasonably set its goal for women faculty in the psychology department at x per cent. And if they can figure out the approximate turn-over of faculty in the psychology department, they can derive from that a timetable are not absolutely binding--all the institution has to do is show a "good faith effort" in meeting them. As documented by "support data" "including but not limited to prog, line charts, applicant flow data, and rejection ratios, seniority rosters."

At the same time, the institution is supposed to be developing methods for recruiting, training and promoting employees, so that failure to meet the goals and timetables may not necessarily imply lack of effort or reluctance on the part of university officials, but poor methods. This could be one excuse a university might use to avoid loss of Federal funds for a poor affirmative action program. Without the goals and timetables, however, the inadequacy of the methods would not be apparent, and a university could, rightly, say only that it had done its best to end discrimination in employment. Only as measured against the goals and timetables is it evident that the university's current "best" efforts need to be improved to meet reasonable goals.

However, even the revised order leaves many points unclarified, and has sparked a controversy between HEW, university presidents, and women.

After a meeting of the American Council on Education (ACE) last year, the Council appointed the presidents of five colleges "to iron out confusion between college presidents and the Department of HEW," according to committee chairman Derek Bok. Three of the universities represented on the committee--Harvard, the University of Michigan and Columbia--were then under investigation by HEW. Columbia soon became the first institution to lose Federal funds for failure to comply with the executive order, when the government withheld $13.8 million for several months until HEW accepted a revised affirmative action plan last month.

One issue is over goals and timetables for tenured faculty. A clause in the revised order allows a contractor to get out of establishing goals if his affirmative action plan is otherwise complete and if he can "detail his reason for a lack of a goal." In a letter to the deans of the faculty dated Dec. 27, 1971, President Bok outlined his reasons for opposing goals for tenured faculty:

First. I believe that the setting of meaningful targets is often impossible. In the smaller schools, a very limited number of appointments may be made each year, and it is not possible to predict in advance how many persons in a very small, highly select pool will turn out to be women or minority persons. In larger faculties, more appointments are made, but the appointment process consists of a host of individual searches by many individual committees covering a shifting number of highly varied fields of knowledge. Once again, no one can predict what proportions of women or minority persons will emerge within the sum of these separate search efforts. Second, I fear that setting targets will inevitably exert strong pressures to meet outside goals--a pressure that will undermine to some extent the University's overriding obligation to select the very best candidate for each available position.

Instead, Bok suggested "procedural safeguards that will minimize the risk of bias or inadvertence in our selection process:"

We must search for other ways of eliminating the risk of bias while protecting ourselves from pressures that may conflict with our desire to achieve the highest quality of appointments.

On March 1, 1972, Bok sent another memo to the deans, this time stating that "recent communications" from the Regional and Washington offices of HEW had "clarified certain aspects" of the affirmative action requirements, including the issue of goals for faculty:

HEW states that it decided several weeks ago that numerical targets and timetables may not be appropriate for faculty positions.

HEW has never officially announced this stance, and about a month ago, John G. Bynoe, New England regional director of the Office of Civil Rights still held that universities were required to submit goals and timetables for all faculty levels.