The Wider Political Context

Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action, which seeks to increase the representation of minority groups in areas where they are historically underrepresented such as education, merits an entire library to do the issue justice.   Here is only an attempt to summarise the bare outlines as an aid to better understanding the play.

In the United States, affirmative action in education goes back to the Civil Rights movement, as different universities tried different approaches to increase the proportion of ethnic minority students since the seventies.    In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that racial quotas were unconstitutional but allowed for ‘goals’ and ‘timetables’ to be set for diversity.  

Here, again, the United Kingdom has lagged behind the United States in debates over diversity and inclusion — in 2011, then Prime Minister David Cameron accused Oxford University of admitting just 1 black student in 2009, and Oxford shot back that 27 black students had been admitted (out of 2500 undergraduates admitted every year).

Affirmative action has sparked ferocious backlash, with opponents arguing that it discriminates against white and Asian populations.  Indeed, Asian American advocacy groups sued Harvard University in 2015, arguing that affirmative action discriminated against Asians.  Although a federal judge ruled in favour of Harvard in 2019, the US Department of Justice under Trump sided with the plaintiffs.   In the UK, Asians constitute the second largest ethnic group after white students at Oxford University, whereas Black students only make up between 1-3% of the student population. This tension between Asians and Blacks over affirmative action is an undercurrent in the relationship between Angela and Mercy. Some have argued that policies to keep the number of Asian candidates artificially low are analogous to the notorious ‘Jewish quota’ of the 1920s when Ivy League universities instituted hard quotas to keep down the number of Jewish applicants.11   Although I do not explicitly highlight this history in the final draft of ‘Acceptance,’ the fact that Ben, the Director of Admissions, is Jewish, adds an extra layer of complexity to the affirmative action debate in the play.

 

Sexual harassment and violence                                                                                      

The real-life incidents which inspired the play took place in the nineties, the decade which started with Anita Hill accusing Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment and her subsequent interrogation by the Senate (Thomas was nominated; Hill was widely vilified by conservatives), continued with several high profile sexual harassment claims against Bill Clinton and ended with Clinton's impeachment for lying about inappropriate sexual relationships with his intern Monica Lewinsky (Clinton was acquitted).  Culturally, the nineties brought us Mamet’s endlessly revived ‘Oleanna,’ a two-hander about a professor’s harassment (or not) of his student. 

Within universities, Title IX law was increasingly being used to hold universities to account in sexual harassment cases.  Title IX is an American federal civil rights law which was passed in 1972, and prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal money.   In the late 1970s, female students sued Yale University for its failure to address sexual harassment by male faculty, arguing that the sexual harassment of female students can be considered illegal sex discrimination.  Although the women lost, they achieved their objectives: most American universities instituted grievance procedures, and the courts affirmed that sexual harassment constituted sex discrimination.  

Schools, however, did not yet have procedures in place to address sexual harassment/abuse, and cases of sexual abuse by teachers continued to be swept under the carpet.  This only changed in 2016, when the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, an internationally renowned investigative team which had uncovered the extent of clerical sexual abuse in the Boston Catholic Church, published an exposè of sexual abuse in prestigious New England boarding schools.  Soon, the tide of public opinion pushed most schools to hire external investigators to look into historical cases, as well as to put into place new policies that would prevent abuse in the first place. 

The issues of sexual harassment and violence in educational institutions have become embroiled in cultural wars.  In 2011, the Department of Education under President Obama issued a letter to all higher education institutes stating that it was their responsibility to end sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus, and that failure to do so could result in fines and loss of federal funds.  Under Trump, however, the Department of Education reversed the Obama-era guidelines in 2017 and shifted the standard of evidence used in Title IX investigations from ‘preponderance of the evidence’ to the ‘clear and convincing’ evidence standard which sets a higher burden of proof.  Advocates of rape survivors argue that this makes it much harder to report sexual violence.

While the debates raged in the U.S., the issue of sexual violence and harassment in education largely flew below the radar in the United Kingdom until the 2017 #metoo movement vividly put the spotlight on powerful men abusing their positions.  In 2021, #metoo reached British private schools through the explosive popularity of the website Everyone’s Invited https:// www.everyonesinvited.uk, which collects submissions from girls who have experienced rape culture at school.