Discrimination in Hew: Is the Doctor Sick or Are the Patients Healthy?*

EXECUTIVE Orders No. 11247 and No. 113751 require that federal contractors with a contract larger than $50,000 or with fifty or more employees develop and enforce a written plan of affirmative action that guarantees equal employment opportunity. Under these orders and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972,2 the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) has been given the responsibility for carrying out these regulations and ensuring that no employment discrimination exists at the nation's universities.3 The higher education sector, in turn, has faced the task of convincing HEW that indeed no discrimination exists or it risks losing all federal funds received by the particular universities. A surprising development is that HEW is currently "suggesting" that universities perform sophisticated statistical analyses to determine whether or not wage discrimination exists at a particular institution. Thus, for example, the Chicago office of HEW has reviewed affirmative action plans at six uni-