The federal government’s order to the City University yesterday to report personal information relating to the sex and racial origin of its personnel or risk cancellation of $13 million in government research contracts “is a quota system and reverse discrimination against Jews and other minority groups,” the president of the New York Board of Rabbis charged today. In a statement on his own behalf to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Rabbi William Berkowitz declared that “federal regulations saying that the ‘affirmative action’ program ‘is not intended and should not be used to discriminate against any applicant because of race, color, religion, sex and national origin’ in effect is now used to designate one group, Blacks and Puerto Ricans, as the only minorities discriminated against.”
“‘Affirmative action,'” Rabbi Berkowitz claimed, “would substitute ethnicity, color or sex instead of competence or performance for appointment and tenure. In seeking to redress past inequities and injustices we thus have a pattern of new injustice and discrimination.” The City University was given its ultimatum yesterday by the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which wants to increase the percentage of women and minority personnel.
The rabbinical board met today for two and a half hours, Rabbi Berkowitz said, but did not discuss the City University case because of “other items on the agendas.”
The University’s director of university relations, Henry D. Paley, said the order “appears to be deliberately provocative procedural conduct” and asserted that the University “will not respond precipitously or emotionally to charges it is failing to take proper action” in regard to the hiring of women and minorities.
A spokesman for Mayor John V. Lindsay told the JTA that he considered the development to be a federal matter and “will not take an active part” in it. On May 29, Mayor Lindsay issued an amendment to the city’s executive order on the annual census of city employes which provided that “nothing in this order shall be construed to require or allow the imposition of quotas in recruitment, assignment, hiring or promotion in contravention of the requirements of law.” City Hall sources said at the time that the Mayor’s office intended to resist whatever pressures may arise from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare or other federal agencies for personnel treatment that may require the establishment of quotas.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
