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The course catalog for the Princeton graduate program in the early 1980s included a statement that read something like "Princeton University has filed an Affirmative Action Plan with the Department of Education. You can see the plan in the Office of the Provost." When I read this, my reaction was "Princeton has an Affirmative Action Plan? What could it possibly say?" From what I'd seen, it looked to me as if women weren't welcome at Princeton. The idea that Princeton actually had an affirmative action plan was surprising to me.
Unable to suppress my curiosity, I phoned the office of the Provost and asked to see the plan. The secretary who answered told me that the only place I could see it was in Firestone Library. I dutifully trotted over to Firestone Library. There was no Affirmative Action Plan in the card catalog, and the librarians didn't know what I was talking about. So I went back to my office to phone again. The secretary now claimed that the plan was in the library's basement. After several trips back and forth between Firestone Library and the phone in my office, I eventually found, hidden in the depths of some level of the basement, a few disorganized sheaves of striped computer paper (the kind with holes down the sides) that contained cryptic, undocumented raw data. Each sheaf was labeled something like "Number 9 of 25" but there were only a few such sheaves; most of the data was missing, and it certainly wasn't a "Plan".
I was getting increasingly frustrated, and the Provost's secretary was getting increasingly hostile. In one phone call she asked me for the names of my Department Chair and my PhD thesis advisor. She made it clear that it was not in my best interest to pursue this.
Well, they hadn't accounted for the fact that I was a Silverberg. We're very stubborn, even when that's not in our best interest. Trying to prevent me from seeing the Plan only made me more curious to find out what they were trying to hide, and I kept pressing. I hoped that my father, a newspaper reporter who had taught me about investigative journalism, would be proud.
I reminded the Provost's secretary of the wording from the graduate catalog, which made a promise to the Department of Education that anyone at all could see the Plan in the Office of the Provost. She told me that wasn't possible; there was none there for me to see. Surely the Provost had a copy of his own Plan. Could I please see that one? Finally, she relented, and said I could only see it that afternoon. Checking my watch and seeing that it was about 4:30 pm, I rushed over to the Provost's office.
The hostile secretary gave me a large tome. She wouldn't let me photocopy any of it or use the empty table, but she grudgingly let me sit in a chair. I balanced the tome on my knees.
Around 4:45 pm, she told me I had to start packing up to leave. She wanted to close up early for the day. Rushing through the pages, I tried to absorb as much as I could of the gist of what Princeton called its Affirmative Action Plan.
Somewhere, I still have the handwritten notes I scribbled down. I'll blame the pandemic for why I can't find them. But here's what I recall from memory.
My recollection is that the "Plan" was written with the help of Princeton's Statistics Department, and had three parts. The first part analyzed the data that the university had collected on the gender and race of its students, using a standard statistical analysis method that they were expected to use for this purpose. The university did not fare well under this analysis.
I recalled the bureaucratic paperwork process at the beginning of each academic year. Grad students were given cards on which we had to check off things including our race and gender. I remembered that I once tried to leave the race and gender boxes blank. The person who took my paperwork looked at me, shuffled through the cards until she got to the gender and race card, saw the blank boxes, and checked off "female". Annoyed, I hung around to see what she did when other people handed in their paperwork. When white men handed in their paperwork, she didn't bother to look at their race or gender boxes to see if they were blank. I walked back up to her and asked her about it, but she just shrugged. It looked to me as if Princeton wanted to make sure it got credit for all its female and minority students (but didn't bother to get accurate figures on white male students). Even fudging the figures, Princeton had a hard time making the numbers look good.
So Princeton took it up a notch. Part two of the "plan" analyzed the same (suspect) data using a different statistical method. The results still didn't look good. (It wasn't possible to make that data look good.) But it looked better.
Part three was the tour de force. In part three, the Department of Statistics came up with a brand new way to analyze data, never before used, that it created just for this data. Much of that section was a sad attempt to explain why this was a legitimate thing to do. In the end, Princeton looked a little better using this brand new method created just for this data, though not much. It all seemed like a waste of the Stat Department's time.
What struck me wasn't the questionable behavior of the university administrators (something with which I had already grown familiar). It was that the Statistics Department was in cahoots with the university to "cook the books". I expected better.
Princeton did away with its Statistics Department in 1985, the year after I graduated. Curiously, a 2013 history of the short-lived department didn't know the cause of the department's untimely demise but speculated, "It seems likely that it died of `natural causes.'" I don't really think it was killed off to cover up the department's involvement in that shameful report, though I did feel that it was a suitable punishment for its complicity.