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Entertainment with A Purpose
Workshops for a Wonderful World

 
From the issue dated August 15, 2003



http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i49/49b01001.htm 
 

10 Questions College Officials Should Ask About Diversity
By ROBERT SHIREMAN

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the use of affirmative action in college admissions, many observers are calling the ruling a victory for diversity. But issues concerning how to sustain and encourage diversity are far from settled on most campuses across America. Colleges still have to grapple with questions about the mix of students they enroll, the experiences those students have, and the academic and social progress they make. 

Several years ago, the James Irvine Foundation, where I used to direct the higher-education program, decided to demand more of the 30 or so private colleges in California to which it had given grants to support diversity. Why? Progress in the enrollment of underrepresented minority students had stalled, and it was not clear whether efforts to improve the campus climate and deal with diversity in the curriculum were successful. In the early 1990s, after the first round of diversity grants, the number of minority students at those private institutions rose at a rate close to the rise in the proportion of minorities in the college-age population. But in the mid- and late 1990s, even though the elimination of affirmative action in the public sector had expanded the pool of potential private-college students in the state, minority enrollment at grantee institutions barely budged and even declined on some campuses.

In response, we required colleges seeking grants to do self-assessments focused on diversity. We asked them to examine their own history and data related to diversity issues, as well as outside research, and to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Some colleges completed impressive self-assessments on the first try, wrote proposals that focused on the key issues, and developed logical ways to assess progress. Others had an exceedingly difficult time figuring out how to evaluate their achievements and challenges. Often an institution would list the many diversity-related activities that it was engaged in: "A diversity council was formed"; "Twelve new courses were added"; "An African-American admissions officer was hired"; "Student leaders participated in a racial-reconciliation workshop." We would then ask, "So what does it all add up to? How is the campus doing with regard to diversity?" In several cases, the response we got was simply a longer list of activities -- just more detailed and perhaps organized differently.

Why has it been so difficult for colleges to see the forest for the trees?

Foundations are part of the problem. They carry a virus called "projectosis," which causes them to look for projects to support and to ask how project A leads to outcome B -- even though causation is almost always much more complicated than that. It is difficult for foundations to get out of project mode -- and sometimes even more difficult for campuses because getting the money has always seemed so tied to the project.

What's more, some colleges are asking the wrong people to define the institution's diversity goals. At too many institutions, the special assistant for diversity, the development director, or a faculty member is charged with keeping foundations happy. But more often than not, those people simply don't have a broad enough view of the institution. To see the forest, they need significant guidance from above. When presidents and provosts take some responsibility for the overarching assessment and the vision for change, it makes all the difference in the world.

Even with leadership, however, it is not easy to put together a good self-assessment -- especially with a diversity lens. So I'd like to suggest 10 key questions college officials should ask when evaluating their progress in diversity: 

How do we define diversity? Although the Irvine Foundation was most interested in improving educational outcomes for students of color and from low-income families, we encouraged college leaders to examine diversity using a definition that makes sense for their own institutions. In many cases that will lead to an additional focus on gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or other factors.

In particular, colleges should analyze enrollment and student success both by race and by "class" indicators like family income and the educational background of the parents -- for several reasons. First, it can help a college determine the most effective approaches for obtaining greater diversity. For example, if an institution finds that it has a low retention rate for African-American students, it should ask if such students come from lower-income families than do other students. If it turns out that low-income students of other races have similarly low retention rates, that may lead the college to look at how its financial-aid programs and other support systems help low-income students. However, if African-American students have lower retention rates than other students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the institution might instead concentrate on improving the campus climate for black students.

Second, by focusing exclusively on race we may be feeding negative stereotypes. While achievement gaps by race are alarming, and ameliorating them must be a goal of our educational institutions, the real gaps are usually reduced when socioeconomic factors are included in the analysis. We must be more sophisticated in our thinking and consider race and class both separately and together.

Third, while not as visible as race and without the same disgraceful history, class is nonetheless an issue in America. We pretend that we are a society without class divisions because we like to think of America as a land of opportunity -- a place where someone of modest means and without friends in high places can join the top tier of society through brains or brawn, and maybe a little luck. Perhaps the most important role of higher education is to make that national self-image a reality.

Why do we have this particular array of students? A college should evaluate who chooses the institution, and to whom the institution offers admission. The first part of the analysis should look at outreach: "What is the economic and ethnic profile of the high schools that we visited, the students whom we talked to, and the students who visited us?" Each institution should then compare the results to the profiles of those students who actually applied and enrolled. Although that may sound like basic enrollment management, it's amazing how often the various parts of a college can fail to work together. While one office is working furiously to redress a failure to increase the diversity of the student body, another is reaching out to the same group of predominantly white, high-income students that it always has.

Who gets financial aid? A president boasted in a newspaper about using institutional financial aid as a way to enhance his college's "reputation." He said that he gave away, for example, a $12,000 scholarship to a student who got an offer of only $2,000 from another institution. I don't know how much financial need she had, but if her major qualification was her grades, this large scholarship is questionable. Buying valedictorians in order to improve a college's reputation is like paying ringers to play on a Little League team. It is a cop-out. Instead of coaching our students to greatness, it's purchasing greatness.

However, if bringing valedictorians onto the campus has an educational rather than reputational justification, then it may be a reasonable investment of some financial-aid money. As Thomas J. Kane, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, points out, "Because a college's customers [students] are also contributors to their classmates' education," scholarships for talented students can be one strategy for obtaining a high-quality educational experience for a diverse class of students. The president who bought the valedictorian for $12,000 should be criticized for focusing on reputation rather than access and quality education. But his institution actually has a large enrollment of low-income students, and it is possible that their campus experience would benefit from a larger enrollment of less-needy, high-achieving students. That is a good example where looking solely at a particular program or practice doesn't paint a complete enough picture. A holistic view is critical to understanding what is happening on a campus.

How successful are our students? Institutions need to ask which students are being encouraged to take leadership roles. Which undergraduates are faculty members approaching for participation in research projects? Which students are going on to graduate school?

It is also useful to look at the extent to which students of different backgrounds are concentrated in particular majors or are changing majors. During our campus visits, for example, a student told me that she had changed from economics to sociology because the latter was more supportive of diversity. We also heard complaints from students of color about faculty members who pushed them into, or away from, ethnic studies, and about counselors who encouraged them to pursue easy instead of more challenging majors. We heard of faculty members whose attitudes tended to turn off women more than men, or Latino more than non-Latino students. 

Colleges should also examine who takes advantage of academic support services compared with who actually needs that support. If the data show significant gaps in achievement among groups, and that students with particular backgrounds are less likely to seek help when they need it, the campus should reach out to them.

What multicultural education are students receiving? It is not enough to report that 30 new multicultural courses have been created or improved, and that minority students at a campus are happy with the curriculum. Colleges must be more explicit about the diversity-related content and developmental advances that they consider important and how they know their students are obtaining it.

One goal of a diversity requirement, for example, might be what Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago Law School, describes as the "capacity for critical examination of oneself and one's traditions." If that is the goal, how does the curriculum help obtain it? How does a student's own background affect his readiness for the curriculum? Which students is the curriculum reaching effectively, and which might require a different approach? Institutions should help students from various backgrounds find themselves in the curriculum, affirming their identity, but then move all students toward a common connection to humanity as a whole. 

What does it feel like as a student to be here? At one campus I visited, a thoughtful student asked, "When will this be my campus, instead of someone else's campus that is trying to be a welcoming place for me?" In too many cases, the work that we have all done to deal with the issue of diversity has been much too shallow. Ethnic theme parties, films, and guest speakers can be important symbols, but they are a small part of what influences the campus climate. 

Most important is what goes on in the classrooms -- what is taught, how it is taught, and how people are treated. A professor who singles out the one Hispanic student in the classroom to provide "the Hispanic perspective" can undermine all of the other efforts to make her feel like an integral part of the campus rather than "other." It is critically important that colleges understand how the campus climate may be burdening some students more than others and not to accuse them of "causing" strife when they get the courage to raise the issues that concern them. What is needed is a more careful diagnosis of the problems, coupled with strategic interventions.

Who are our faculty leaders? Probably the most common conclusion among the colleges that the Irvine Foundation has supported has been that they need to do more to diversify their faculties. While any professor can be a role model for any student, it is difficult for students of color when there is virtually no one among the faculty members with whom they share their ethnic identity. The same has been true for women in some disciplines. Also, minority professors often bring perspectives to the curriculum that are less likely to come from other faculty members. In addition, the extent to which an institution attracts and retains faculty members of color indicates whether it has embraced diversity in more than a token way.

What are our relationships with nearby communities? Colleges generally cite the number of hours that students work in neighborhood schools, the activities that faculty members perform in the community, and the campus events to which the community members are invited. Although important, those activities help form the relationship, but they don't describe the relationship itself. How do community leaders view the college? Is the community a subject of research or an equal partner in solving problems? How would you know if the campus's relationship with various community groups was worsening?

Who is thinking about these issues on our campus? A couple years after we began requiring the self-assessments, we started asking colleges to give us a list of the people who worked on the document and a list of those who had read it. Just asking for those lists prompted institutions to do a better job involving various people throughout the institution -- representatives from the faculty, student affairs, admissions, housing, community service, and sometimes even trustees and students. In many cases, the creation of the document started important conversations across various offices and constituencies. 

What do we want to change, and how will we know that we have changed it? My favorite Yogi Berra quote is, "You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Far too often, a college thinks it has made great progress but isn't able to celebrate and boast because there was no baseline and no assessment of the change. Other institutions can spend years doing the same thing and thinking it's making a difference, only to discover that it was ineffective or even damaging. The only way we will do better is if we know what we are trying to accomplish and learn from what we are doing.

In elementary and secondary education, under President Bush's No Child Left Behind program, schools are looking at how their low-income, black, and Hispanic students are performing compared with white students. They are making efforts to close those gaps and monitoring their progress. Educators on college campuses need to work at least as hard to assess student needs, intervene, monitor progress, and adjust their strategies. Only then will they be able to close achievement gaps and improve outcomes for students from all backgrounds.

Robert Shireman is a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute's Program on Education in a Changing Society and the former director of the higher-education program of the James Irvine Foundation.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 49, Issue 49, Page B10 

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