Bias Still Exists in America’s Top ‘executive Suites,’ Slawson Tells A. J. C.

Dr. John Slawson, executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee, charged here today that bias at top levels of American industry represents the “greatest lag” in the American trend toward reduction of discrimination.

In a report to the AJC’s executive board, which will convene here tomorrow for a two-day session, Dr. Slawson declared that, while there has been a sharp drop in discrimination against Jews in the United States since the end of World War II, there exists an “ethical gap” between civic leadership and publicly professed principles of major American business leaders, whose corporations still practice “widespread discrimination in the executive suite.” He said that, in the “executive suites, artificial barriers and stereotypes still exclude qualified personnel for irrelevant reasons of religion or race.”

Dr. Slawson said that the American Jewish Committee is cooperating in three long term projects at major institutions of higher learning to study the effect of discrimination on full utilization of top management levels of American industry. The studies are now under way, he said, at Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, and the University of California Graduate School of Business.