THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503190026
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: NORMAL, ILL. LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
There was a time when Steven Putt would have taken janitor's work.
Desperate to pay off more than $13,000 in student loans for classes at Illinois State University, he was willing to scrub dormitory halls and bathrooms, trudging long hours behind a cart laden with buckets of dirty water, bleach, brooms and toilet paper for $6 an hour.
These days, Putt makes $17 an hour on an auto assembly line at a Mitsubishi factory near this central Illinois college town.
But Putt is still obsessed with the job that got away. His anger over being turned down by a custodial training program at the college in 1989 has touched off a legal battle with immediate political implications for the Clinton administration as it confronts sharpening national discord over affirmative action.
The Justice Department's decision earlier this month to file a discrimination lawsuit on Putt's behalf against Illinois State came as an abrupt change of course for an agency that had aggressively prosecuted racial bias against minorities. And it has cast Steven Putt as the government's angry man - a white victim of affirmative action.
Putt inquired about the college's Building Service Worker-Learner Program, an affirmative-action training strategy started in 1982 to move blacks and women into unskilled janitorial jobs.
Most applicants for janitorial jobs are hired through state civil service procedures. But those in the program were able to transfer into full-time jobs after six months of training - without taking any civil service tests.
When he asked if he could apply to the learner program, Putt said, he was told it was designed only for minorities.
``All I wanted was a level playing field,'' Putt said. ``I never imagined this administration would back up someone like me on an issue like this.''
Filed soon after President Clinton announced plans for a major review of federal affirmative-action programs, the lawsuit has ``at the very least, good timing,'' one veteran civil rights attorney said.
``I am certain we will hear this case cited over and over again as the affirmative-action issue is brought to the forefront of political debate,'' said Charles J. Cooper, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration.
ISU President Thomas P. Wallace has defended the janitor's training program as ``a success story'' and blamed the lawsuit on Clinton's re-election efforts.
Justice Department officials have strongly denied any political agenda in their decision to represent Putt.
In announcing the lawsuit earlier this month, Deval Patrick, the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights, said that the ``administration is committed to protecting the civil rights of all Americans, and this case is no exception.''
Putt said he was stunned when a lawyer from the Justice Department's civil rights office called him ``out of the blue'' late last month with news that the government planned to sue Illinois State for reverse discrimination.
The ruddy-faced son of a Snap-On tools worker from Bone Gap, Ill., the 30-year-old Putt acknowledges his conservative sympathies, but is hardly a political firebrand.
``I had nothing against blacks getting the jobs,'' he said. ``But if we're going to be a colorblind society, it seemed to me I should have at least the same opportunities they do.'' by CNB