ABSTRACT
I begin by asking a question, an affirmative answer to which seems presupposed by the current debate on affirmative action: 1 Is there necessarily something wrong if there is a low percentage of African Americans or women or Hispanics, et cetera, in the field of college teaching relative to their proportion in the population at large? Why is this a goal we should aim at? I do not mean to deny that women and racial and ethnic minorities have been victims of discrimination in academia (although this is by no means limited to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans—consider, for example, Polish, Lebanese, or Portuguese Americans) or that some discrimination still persists. Such discrimination is bad and should be eliminated; in fact, we ought to put more resources into enforcing antidiscrimination laws. My argument here is that there is no reason to believe that proportional representation of minorities and women among the professoriate is a requirement of justice or that a situation where such proportional representation obtained would necessarily be better than one in which it did not. 2
