Opinion ID: 439066
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Stony Brook's Affirmative Action Program

Text: 18 After reviewing the University's affirmative action program, Judge Pratt found as a fact that Stony Brook ha[d] acted in good faith, even before Title VII required it to do so, to ensure that its policies and practices have operated without discrimination based on sex. 587 F.Supp. at 579. The evidence in the record supports his conclusion. 19 Stony Brook's affirmative action program subjects its employment decisions to mandatory procedures and to review by affirmative action officials at Stony Brook. Every faculty or NTP hiring decision is individually reviewed by such officials as to recruitment, the pool of applicants interviewed, and the selection of the person finally hired. These procedures also provide review of claims of other forms of discrimination. Women at Stony Brook participate actively as members of the various equal opportunity commissions. 20 The evidence indicates this program operates in good faith. On several occasions, the University reviewed and altered various employment policies in response to complaints of sex discrimination. In 1974, for example, a review of faculty salaries resulted in retroactive salary increases for certain individuals. In 1975, the University's affirmative action commission concluded that women were underutilized given national labor pools, and prompt efforts were made to correct this. 21 The sole evidence in the record, apart from the plaintiffs' statistical studies, indicating flaws in Stony Brook's affirmative action plan are occasional departures from its procedures where the hiring of senior tenured faculty with offers from competing schools was involved. We agree with Judge Pratt that these instances were isolated, that they involved circumstances in which the usual search procedures would have resulted in Stony Brook's losing opportunities to hire highly desirable candidates and that they did not involve discrimination based on sex. They are, therefore, not probative either of bad faith in the execution of the affirmative action program or of a pattern and practice of discrimination. 22 It should be emphasized that the finding that Stony Brook has an effective affirmative action program is of central importance to this litigation. The existence of a comprehensive affirmative action program is the antithesis of a pattern and practice of discrimination based on sex. Such a program is evidence of an intent to eliminate gender as an employment criteria and to root out subtle forms of discrimination. It thus directly controverts a claim that discrimination is the standard operating procedure. Teamsters, 431 U.S. at 336, 97 S.Ct. at 1855. 23 We note, moreover, that affirmative action programs such as that at Stony Brook aid plaintiffs in obtaining evidence for use in Title VII litigation involving a pattern and practice of discrimination. First, they subject employment decisions to a process which openly scrutinizes them on an individual basis with a view to detecting discrimination. Second, they allow individuals to bring claims, to present evidence in support thereof, and to force an explicit decision by the employer on those claims. Such procedures thus provide an individualized record of hiring and other employment decisions and greatly facilitate the discovery of particular instances of discrimination. 24 The failure of the plaintiffs here either to mount a significant challenge to the good faith of Stony Brook's affirmative action program or to provide a meaningful number of individual instances of discrimination 2 is thus a major weakness in their case. We by no means take the position that the probative impact of the existence of an affirmative action program may not be rebutted by statistical evidence alone. However, where a pattern and practice of discrimination is alleged, such evidence must be weighed in light of the failure to locate and identify a meaningful number of concrete examples of discrimination given the existence of procedures which would ordinarily cause such examples to come to light.