From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for March 8, 1973:

Paul Mostert, Kansas University professor of mathematics, had given up his duties as department chair in protest of certain aspects of the university’s recently adopted affirmative action plan. On the basis of an executive order from the President, the federal government had recently required affirmative action plans from educational institutions receiving federal funding. However, as chair of a committee of the American Mathematical Society charged with the responsibility of investigating charges by mathematicians of improper intrusion by administrators and boards of trustees into academic affairs, Mostert said that it would be “a strange state of affairs were I to ignore such a case in my own university.” Speaking specifically about the plan that had been proclaimed university policy by Chancellor Raymond Nichols, Mostert called it “immoral in an academic setting” said he believed that there was “no possibility to correct an injustice to one person by doing an injustice to someone else…. I don’t believe in asking an applicant if he’s black or white, or a man or woman, where we can’t tell. We should be ignoring these aspects rather than ferreting them out — I object to preferential treatment.” He also objected strenuously to an item in the plan forbidding the use of the words “man,” “he,” and “his” when used in the generic sense in all university publications, calling this policy “the height of idiocy.”