IN THE SHORT time since President John F. Kennedy '40 first used the term affirmative action in 1963, few programs to aid minorities and women have received as much negative scrutiny from such diverse sources. Only a few personnel managers employed by large government contractors grumbled when President Johnson signed executive order 11246 into practice. That order asked contractors to act affirmatively to recruit workers on a non-discriminatory basis. For most companies the order simply meant increased paperwork.

But under the Nixon administration the government asked for goals and timetables for hiring underutilized minorities and women. The contractor was to demonstrate good faith in striving toward those goals. In demanding goals and timetables companies now had to hire preferentially or lose government contracts.

"Result oriented," "preferential hiring," "underutilized classes," and "goals," were terms that would rally a new group of critics to the side of the big federal contractors, distressed by their liability to Federal law for their hiring practices. For the new critics, writing principally in a series of articles on affirmative action in Commentary, a prominent monthly magazine published by the American Jewish Committee, the program meant only one thing--quotas.

Many of the arguments in Commentary claimed that hard-fought principles of merit-hiring would be destroyed by affirmative action's systems of goals and timetables. Writers like Paul Seabury and Alexander Bickel, complained that affirmative action represented the abandonment of the supposedly American value: "to each according to his ability." But running subtlely through the more learned arguments and less subtlely in others, were twin elements: fear and anger.

Jews have historically nurtured a fear of quotas--quota systems had restricted them from entry to college and professions both in this country and earlier, in Eastern Europe. Because contractors were threatened with loss of funds if they did not try for results, to the writers in Commentary there seemed to be little difference between goals and quotas. And, some Jews seemed to hold a particular feeling of resentment towards blacks, who "wanted special privilege," believing that if Jews could overcome their own hardship by their bootstraps, others could as well. For those once discriminated against unofficially, it became difficult to understand why the government should sanction this new form of discrimination against them.

Most of these reactions, whether stated eloquently by Bickel or in the spirit of alarmism by authors Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Forster, were still gut reactions based on the future implications of affirmative action. And because they were acts of outrage rather than attacks based on empirical data, they have been easily parried. The best recent counter-argument to those extolling meritocracy appeared in the briefs supporting the University of Washington against Marco DeFunis in 1974. Many briefs contended that very few hiring and admissions decisions are based solely on merit--and that race could play just as much a role as old boy networks, family ties, and patronage--and other distortions of the supposed meritocracy.

But within the last few months, the first well-researched studies questioning affirmative action have emerged. One, Thomas Sowell's "Re-Assessment of Affirmative Action" appearing in this winter's Public Interest, is a short essay challenging the reasons for having affirmative action at all. The other, Affirmative Discrimination, by Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, is a major, full-length treatise designed to prove that the government is following an approach to public policy that is off-track, unnecessary, and counter to American values.

Both operate on the same premise as the earlier Commentary critiques: they would favor reverting to the affirmative action of the 60's, when firms were asked to expand pools but no minorities or women would receive advantages in hiring. But rather than base their arguments on merit values or on the bootstrap philosophy, these accounts assert that things are much better for black people than government bureaucracies care to imagine. For Glazer, the struggle is over, the redneck racists are gone; the cry of institutional racism becomes the refuge and protector of the incompetent woman or minority.

For Sowell, affirmative action programs were ill-conceived and based on racial rhetoric about disadvantage rather than fact. Glazer details the great achievements of blacks in the 60's even more explicitly. He shows through extensive statistics, that middle class blacks receive about the same average salary as middle class whites. He also cites figures for husband-wife families that show substantial gains for these families when compared to white family gains during the period. And, he consistently reminds us, this progress occurred before affirmative action became a quota system.

For Glazer, affirmative action means dividing people into new ethnic interest groups, completely artificial in their makeup. A continued policy of affirmative action could spell the end of the middle class black gains:

The evidence is now all too clear that the qualified (and a good number of the unqualified too) get jobs and admissions. It is one thing to be asked to fight discrimination against the competent, hard-working, and law-abiding, it is quite another to be asked to fight discrimination against the less competent or incompetent and criminally inclined.

They claim that affirmative action goes against the grain of the American tradition of innocent until proven guilty. "Companies underutilizing women and minorities are considered per see discriminators, often wrongly," Glazer writes.

To explain how the program even came into being, Sowell speculates that perhaps, the Nixon administration pushed it because Nixon had everything to gain by splitting the ethnic coalition of Jews and blacks that had elected liberal democrats for decades. Glazer is more elaborate. His explanation cites the needs of bureaucrats to expand their own powers, and the overstaffing of the bureaucracies that handle affirmative action programs with minorities and women.

In place of today's affirmative action, Glazer and Sowell want a policy where individual and not group qualifications are used for hiring. "Middle class blacks do not need the protection of the Negro categories in order to get equal treatment today in education and employment," Glazer writes.

On the surface, Glazer and Sowell seem to provide a much tougher challenge to affirmative action than the ax-to-grind arguments of the early 70's. But a closer look at their statistics, show that they are relatively hollow. For instance, if we are to believe Glazer's contention that the laissez-faire policy in practice was already benefitting all but a few educated blacks and women, then how do we explain that as late as 1968 in a supposedly liberal institution such as Harvard, there was not a single tenured black or woman professor on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And if Harvard has a history of discrimination why should the federal government not presume that the University is guilty.

THE GLAZER AND SOWELL arguments seem strikingly narrow as a result of their apparent ignorance of the 200 years of discrimination that black people have endured in this country. "I have argued that the heritage of discrimination as we could see from the occupational developments of the later 1960's could be overcome by simply attacking discrimination," Glazer writes.

But affirmative action, especially in the case of minorities, seeks to correct not just a few cases of economic discrimination but strives to right a system that sanctioned and still sanctions quotas against blacks. It is because of these quotas that blacks represent such a small percentage of the professions--less than two per cent of the major ones. It is this heritage of quotas, in schools, companies, government, that affirmative action seeks to remedy and not simply the cases of subtle discrimination that good faith procedures cannot mask. If society has discriminated in the past, leaving few blacks or women in the professions, then the next generation should be given preference. And that preference should be enforced until it is clear that there are no barriers to opportunities for either group. Without such goals, affirmative action is liable to become little more than rhetoric, as it was, a decade ago.