The Military and Equal Opportunity:
Lessons for Civilian Society
by Edwin Dorn
Speech to Texas State NAACP Convention
San Marcos, Texas
October 3, 1997
Introduction
Thanks, Gary Bledsoe, for that kind introduction. I am very pleased to be here. As Gary mentioned, I just returned to Texas after 30 years away, the last 20 of which I spent in Washington.
It's good to be back in Austin. This is where, just over 30 years ago, I voted in my first Congressional election. This is where I drank my first beer (legally) and participated in my first protest demonstration. And this is where 30 years ago, I determined to pursue public service. Those were the heady days of the Civil Rights Movement, the Peace Corps and the Great Society.
But that also was a time of tragedy and turmoil. Several of our great leaders were assassinated--JFK, MLK, RFK, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X. We became embroiled in a costly, divisive conflict in Southeast Asia. We witnessed destructive, deadly riots in America's cities.
It has become fashionable in recent years to emphasize the failures of that time. As a scholar, and as a dean whose job it is to prepare young men and women for public life, I try to maintain a more balanced perspective.
True, we didn't end poverty, but we reduced it, especially among the elderly. We made it possible for millions of people to get medical care. And, for a brief shining moment, the nation shared Dr. King's dream of racial equality. We didn't achieve it, but millions of Americans still believe in it; and we're closer to it than we were three decades years ago.
Deja Vu
But we still have a long way to go. Every once in a while, something happens that makes us realize that this is a very long road, with lots of sharp corners and deep potholes along the way.
Thirty years ago, for example, the University of Texas was debating whether blacks should play on the UT football team. As an undergraduate, I observed many of those debates and participated in a few. Invariably, a white student or UT-Ex would say in a sympathetic voice, "Well, of course, I'd like to have some black boys on the team. But you wouldn't want us to recruit people who aren't academically qualified, would you?"
It was a trick question. It implied that it was impossible to find black students who were both academically qualified and athletically gifted. It was an especially odd question to raise at UT 30 years ago, when this university eagerly recruited big, fast white boys to play football, whether they could make it academically or not.
When I returned to UT this past summer, I was struck by how much things had changed. This year, the starting quarterback and the student body president are black. At the late summer convocation for new UT students, the liveliest pep talk came from a student of Indian ancestry who had grown up in Kenya. This campus is a lot more diverse than it was 30 years ago; and the university is of much higher quality.
Nevertheless, the old trick question has re-emerged, this time in a debate over the recent decrease in African-American and Hispanic students at UT Law School. "Of course, we want diversity", some folks will say, "but you wouldn't want us to sacrifice quality, would you?"
The Military
I have spent the last four years working with an institution in which quality and diversity are seen as complementary, not competing, assets--the US military. We have the best army in the world in large part because we recruit our soldiers from the largest available pool of qualified young men and women. It is harder to get into the military than into many of this nation's colleges, yet the military has a much higher percentage of African-Americans and Hispanic Americans than do most colleges. And, the US military is one of the few institutions in which blacks and browns routinely supervise, command and teach whites.
Today, about 8 percent of officers and about 30 percent of NCOs are African American. It is virtually impossible for a young enlistee to spend 4 years in the military without having an African-American in his or her chain of command. By contrast, it's easy for an undergraduate to spend 4 years in many of our universities without ever having a black or Hispanic teacher. You could spend a whole career in many of our corporations without ever having a black boss.
It's odd, I think, that the army had black officers qualified to command troops in battle years before many of our universities had black professors "qualified" to teach undergraduates in classrooms.
In truth, however, the military didn't become the nation's leader in equal opportunity overnight. Getting there took years. In the process, there were high-level political debates, training mistakes and probably more than a few racial confrontations in the ranks. And the military is certainly not a perfectly color-blind world; it has to struggle every day against discrimination and stereotype. So in a sense, to say that the military is the leader in a slow race.
Still, the military has succeeded to a greater degree than other institutions. We can learn from how it has approached the challenge of equal opportunity. One key to the military's success is that it learned to disregard the trick questions. Imagine if, today, someone were to walk into an NCO club at Fort Hood, just up the road, and asked whether African-Americans have the courage or the intellect or the leadership skills to make good soldiers. Imagine if, today, someone were to venture into the headquarters of the Air Force's training command, just down the road in San Antonio, and ask the four-star general in command whether he thought blacks and Hispanics had the "achievement motivation" needed to become senior officers and NCOs. That commander is a black fighter pilot and former Thunderbird named "Fig" Newton. I have a pretty good idea what he'd say.
Again, it's odd. On the one hand, have black and brown soldiers risking their lives daily for this country; we have black and brown officers commanding tens of thousands of military personnel, managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment. And on the other hand, we have some eccentric professor suggesting that these same men and women don't have the motivation to get through law school.
But energy spent arguing with eccentrics is energy wasted. We're not likely to change them, and we don't need to. What we need to do is to keep our eyes on the prize. We need to find ways to propel ourselves down the long road.
Keys to the Military's Success
One of my UT colleagues, Professor John Butler, has coauthored a very informative book about the success of blacks in the Army. I've learned a lot from John's research and from my practical experience in overseeing military personnel policy for the past four years. John and I have both found that the military's success is attributable to a number of factors. If I were forced to pick just one, however, it would be motivation.
That is, the main reason the military stole a lead on civilian society, and has maintained its lead, is something called military necessity. A commitment to racial justice helped; outside political pressure certainly helped. But the paramount reason was necessity.
Here's a short version of recent history. With the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the US decided that, for the first time in its history, it would need to maintain a large standing military. But there was a problem--a shortage of manpower. You see, the cohort of young men reaching draft age in the late 1940s and early 1950s had been born during the depression years of the 1930s. During the depression, people had fewer children. Which meant that there was a shortage of draft-age white men. The only way to maintain a large standing military was to rely more on blacks. Further, civil rights leaders, including the NAACP's Walter White, met with President Truman at the time. They threatened to encourage young black men to boycott the draft unless they were treated more fairly.
In July 1948, President Truman signed EO 9981, the order that called for equal opportunity and treatment of all persons in the armed forces. He was responding both to the military's need for people and to civil rights leaders' demands for fairness. It was a combination of inside and outside pressure, of military necessity and political necessity.
Similarly, it wasn't a blinding flash of sexual enlightenment that caused the military to open more opportunities for women in the mid-1970s. It was military necessity. At the time, we'd just abandoned conscription in favor of an all-volunteer force. And, in the wake of the Vietnam conflict the services were having trouble finding enough young men. The solution: make it possible for women to do more.
In the spring of 1993, then Secretary of Defense Les Aspin signed a memo that opened up even more jobs to women. For the first time, women were able to fly combat aircraft and serve on combattant vessels. What's interesting about Aspin's memo is that it doesn't use the phrase "equal opportunity"--not even in the title. It talks about the military's need to attract high quality people and its need for flexibility in assigning them where they can make the greatest contribution. In short, it talks about military necessity.
Application to Civilian Institutions
The military is a unique institution, separate from civilian society. Many of its methods cannot be adapted for civilian purposes. The motivation factor applies in both the military and civilian domains, however.
Many corporations began to practice EO solely because the government made them do it. However, more and more companies are discovering that EO is a necessity. If you want to market your products and services to an increasingly diverse population, you need product designers and marketing experts and sales people who understand the many different components of the population.
Why, for example, did Avon, the cosmetics company, get so heavily involved with diversity programs? Well, a decade or so ago, Avon executives discovered that Hispanic women wear makeup. Not a profound discovery, but one with important implications. If you want to sell Avon products to Hispanics, it helps to have sales people who speak Spanish. And it helps to have cosmetics in shades that Hispanics prefer--not just the traditional "Anglo" shades. Looked at from another perspective, if your labor pool is diverse, you need to learn to recruit and manage diverse human resources.
A similar dynamic is starting to influence American universities, especially those in states such as California and Texas that are undergoing major demographic shifts. A decade from now, Texas will have more black people and brown people than white people. By the year 2030, Anglos will comprise less than 40 percent of this state's population. Public institutions will have trouble sustaining widespread public support if their racial and ethnic composition varies markedly from the composition of the state. To be even more direct, the survival of the University of Texas at Austin depends on its ability to attract--and to graduate--a lot more blacks and Hispanics than it is serving today.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The University of Texas is both more diverse and higher quality than it was when I was an undergraduate 30-plus years ago. However, recent events may affect UT's ability to continue attracting talented blacks and Hispanics. The dramatic decline in the number of blacks and Hispanics in this year's entering law school class may be a harbinger of tough times across the university.
So, what can the University do, and what can we in this room do to help it. First, we must recognize an inescapable ramification of an inexorable demographic trend: UT's student body must look like the taxpayers who support it.
One way to accomplish this is through more aggressive recruiting, especially of those exceptionally talented blacks and Hispanics who are being wooed by high quality out-of-state schools. We need a concerted effort to keep Texas best in Texas.
Recruiting is something that's new to the University--except for the football team. But it can learn how to do it, just as the military had to learn to recruit aggressively after the draft was eliminated. You can help us. The NAACP, with its statewide reach and influence, can help us. The next time a young brother or sister asks about UT, say that it's a great university; because it is. Say that, despite what they may have heard, it's a welcoming place. But also say that it's a demanding place, where students are challenged to do their best.
There are folks out there who beat up on the University, who say they wouldn't be caught dead at UT, then beat up on the University some more when it fails to recruit large numbers of black and brown students. That's not a helpful approach.
We need to keep Texas' best in Texas. I think the University is gearing up to do its part--through aggressive recruiting and other measures. I'm going to do my part to recruit people to the LBJ School. And, you can help. Send us your best. We'll demand the best from them, and make sure they're prepared to lead this state when their time comes.
