From the issue dated August 15,
2003
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i49/49b01001.htm
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10 Questions College Officials Should Ask About DiversityBy 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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Copyright ©
2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education