Editor’s Note: This column was submitted by a member of the UT community

Affirmative action has re-entered the American scene with a fury as the Supreme Court considers banning the use of race and ethnicity as factors in the admission of students into universities.  If race can no longer be used in student admissions, what will happen with the policy of affirmative action in the workplace to improve the hiring of more minorities and women in jobs that have been unfairly dominated by white men?

Affirmative action was a policy that universities had to implement if they wanted to continue to receive federal grant funds for research projects that their faculty had been awarded from NIH, NSF, Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

When I graduated from UT in 1968, the impact of affirmative action was yet to be felt on UT admission and hiring standards, but by the mid-1970s, UT was under pressure to hire more minority faculty. 

When I had my interview for an open pharmacy professor position at UT in 1974, I was unaware that it was an affirmative action position. When I was being interviewed by a white professor for the position, he pointedly questioned the validity of my resumé, which stated I had received a nationally competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. He thought that I should have listed it as an NSF Fellowship for Blacks and Hispanics. That is when I first learned about affirmative action at UT.  

I explained that in 1968, when I was awarded the fellowship, affirmative action was yet to be considered federal policy, and I had correctly listed the award. Of course, the white professor was suggesting that non-minority NSF graduate fellowships were more competitive and prestigious to receive than the newly established affirmative action minority fellowships.

How should minority faculty react when they are confronted with conscious or unintended episodes of discrimination? Sadly, I let them slide off my back and continued to do the best work I could.

When I asked for advice from my supervisor on how to advance my career by taking on more administrative responsibilities, I was told that the best job for me was to continue my research endeavors in toxicology and to recruit minority students into the professional pharmacy and graduate pharmacology programs.

This type of attitude by some white administrators to assign minority faculty extra duties to recruit students of color and to be the “go-to person” when students have personal and academic problems puts an extra burden on them that white professors do not have. This additional workload often has a negative impact on tenure, promotion and raises for faculty of color because they may not be able to devote sufficient time to their teaching and research responsibilities in comparison to some white faculty.

President Trump once said that he would not mind being a highly educated minority because of the special treatments that minorities receive over white Americans.

As one of those educated minorities, I have experienced subtle forms of discrimination from educated white professionals throughout my career, rather than the open racism my father experienced working as a carpenter under the hot sun of El Paso. Ironically, Trump was alluding to affirmative action and its supposedly discriminatory treatment of white Americans in the workplace.

Not seeing any opportunities for advancing my academic career, I left UT in 1996 to become the Dean of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and later a senior FDA administrator.

I am proud of my time here, but UT has to do much more in promoting faculty diversity on campus. Affirmative action should be a process by which faculty of color are welcomed, supported and retained as professors at UT.

Acosta is Dean Emeritus of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, former Deputy Director of FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research and Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology at UT.