Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach 9780415874519, 9780415874526, 9780203836743

Citation preview

DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Diversity has been a focus of higher education policy, law, and scholarship for decades, continually expanding to include not only race, ethnicity, and gender, but also socioeconomic status, sexual and political orientation, and more. However, existing collections still tend to focus on a narrow definition of diversity in education, or in relation to singular topics like access to higher education, financial aid, and affirmative action. By contrast, Diversity in American Higher Education captures in one volume the wide range of critical issues that comprise the current discourse on diversity on the college campus in its broadest sense. This edited collection explores: • • •

legal perspectives on diversity and affirmative action; higher education’s relationship to the deeper roots of K–12 equity and access; policy, politics, and practice’s effects on students, faculty, and staff.

Bringing together many of the leading experts on diversity in higher education scholarship, Diversity in American Higher Education redefines the agenda for diversity as we know it today. Lisa M. Stulberg is Associate Professor of Educational Sociology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Sharon Lawner Weinberg is Professor of Applied Statistics and Psychology and former Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at New York University.

DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION Toward a More Comprehensive Approach

Edited by Lisa M. Stulberg and Sharon Lawner Weinberg

First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Diversity in American higher education : toward a more comprehensive approach / edited by Lisa M. Stulberg and Sharon Lawner Weinberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Minorities—Education (Higher)—United States. 2. Universities and colleges—United States—Admission. 3. Educational equalization— United States. I. Stulberg, Lisa M. II. Weinberg, Sharon L. LC3731.D58 2011 378.1'9829—dc22 2010051840 ISBN13: 978–0–415–87451–9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–87452–6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–83674–3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO

To our wonderful and devoted families, for their love and continuing support during the length of this project – and always. Evan Rudall and Avery and Eli Rudall-Stulberg Steven Weinberg, Allison Weinberg and Jason Barro, Carolyn Weinberg and Philip Korn, Danielle and Julia Barro, and Sarah Korn

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Lisa M. Stulberg and Sharon Lawner Weinberg

x xii xiii xxi 1

SECTION I

The K–12 Pipeline: Impacts on Educational Equity

5

1 Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Academic Skills: Their Origins and Consequences Meredith Phillips

7

2 Inside the K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students Amanda E. Lewis and Michelle J. Manno

25

3 Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Educational Equity Linda Darling-Hammond

36

viii

Contents

SECTION II

The Diversity Imperative: Postsecondary Institutional and Legal Ramifications 4 A Long View on “Diversity”: A Century of American College Admissions Debates Lisa M. Stulberg and Anthony S. Chen 5 The Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions Mitchell L. Stevens and Josipa Roksa

49

51

63

6 The Diversity Rationale: Its Limitations for Educational Practice Mitchell J. Chang and María C. Ledesma

74

7 The Official Organization of Diversity in American Higher Education: A Retreat from Race? anthony lising antonio and Chris Gonzalez Clarke

87

SECTION III

Understanding Progress and Continuing Challenges in American Higher Education 8 Trends in the Education of Underrepresented Racial Minority Students Peter Teitelbaum 9 Gender Equity in Higher Education Claudia Buchmann and Thomas A. DiPrete

105

107

117

10 LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff: Past, Present, and Future Directions Debbie Bazarsky and Ronni Sanlo

128

11 Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual: Diversifying the Faculty Daryl G. Smith

142

12 Asian Americans and Diversity Talk: The Limits of the Numbers Game Dana Takagi

153

Contents 13 Conservative Critics and Conservative College Students: Variations in Discourses of Exclusion Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood 14 Explaining Professors’ Politics: Is It a Matter of Self-Selection? Neil Gross and Catherine Cheng 15 Experiences of Exclusion and Marginalization: A Study at the Individual Student Level Bonita London, Vanessa Anderson, and Geraldine Downey

ix

165

178

195

SECTION IV

Future Implications for Diversity: Practice, Policy, and the Law

207

16 HBCUs: Continued Relevance in the New Century Sarah Willie-LeBreton

209

17 The Role of Women’s Colleges in the Twenty-First Century Leslie Miller-Bernal

221

18 The New Financial Aid Policies: Their Impact on Access and Equity for Low-Income Students Bridget Terry Long 19 Improving Assessments of Faculty Diversity Sharon Lawner Weinberg

232

247

20 New Legal Perspectives: Implications for Diversity in the Post-Grutter Era Lia Epperson

260

Index

276

FIGURES

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 7.1 8.1

8.2

8.3

Ethnic and Social Class Test Score Disparities Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in College Application Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in College Attendance Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Four-Year College Completion Ethnic and Social Class Test Score Disparities among Four-Year-Olds Academic Growth between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade, by Ethnic Group Academic Growth between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade, by Parents’ Education Test Score Mobility between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Eighth Grade Test Scores Functional Areas of CDO Offices The Percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Whites, African Americans and Latinos Who Earned a Bachelor’s Degree between 1940 and 2007 The Percentage of the Freshman Class That Was African American, Latino or Native American at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Berkeley between 1996 and 2008 The Percentage of Students Who Enrolled as Freshmen in four-year, Title IV Institutions in the 1997 and 2001 Academic Years and Graduated within Six Years, by Race

8 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 99

109

110

112

List of Figures 8.4

8.5 19.1 19.2

19.3 19.4

The Percentage of All Bachelor’s, Master’s, First-Professional, and Doctor Degrees Earned by African American and Latino Students between 1981 and 1997 The Percentage of Lawyers, Doctors and Tenured Professors Who Were African American and Latino in 2000 and 2001 Nation-Wide Percentage Distributions by Year for U.S. University Doctoral Recipients School-Wide Percentage Distributions by Year for Full-Time Faculty in the School of Arts and Science at a Private Research University Discipline-Wide Percentage Distributions by Year of Full-Time Faculty in the Humanities at a Private Research University Department-Wide Percentages of Black Full-Time Faculty in the Humanities

xi

113 114 258

258 259 259

TABLES

1.1 7.1 12.1 12.2 14.1 14.2 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 19.1

19.2 19.3

Standardized Reading and Math Percentile Scores, by Ethnicity and Social Class Characteristics of Dominant Rationales for CDO Programs and Policies in Higher Education Mean National SAT Scores by Race, 2008 Projected Increases in Admissions after Policy Changes at University of California Timing of Political Formation by Field Synopsis of Political Formation Narratives of Self-Identified Liberal Interviewees Low-Income Students at Highly Selective Colleges and Universities, 2001–2002 Timeline of Financial Aid Policies: Date Initiatives Started No-Loan Programs by Eligibility Criteria The Net Cost of Attendance by Income, 2009–2010 Percentage Distributions of Full-Time Instructional Faculty and Staff in Degree-Granting Institutions by Race/Ethnicity and by Program Area: Fall 1998 and Fall 2003 Total U.S. Population and Doctoral Degree Attainment: Percentage Distributions by Race/Ethnicity Utilization Analyses for Black Full-Time Faculty in the Humanities at a Private Research University

9 91 159 163 191 192 241 242 244 245

256 257 257

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Vanessa Anderson has over a decade’s worth of experience in education, as a teacher in public school and summer and after-school enrichment programs and as an education researcher. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University, where she explored the psychosocial predictors of college choice and satisfaction among high-achieving high school students of color. She is currently a Policy Research Analyst at the City University of New York, where she explores such issues as racial and gender disparities in achievement, pipeline issues, and predictors of student success. When not pondering educational equity issues, Dr. Anderson enjoys raucous karaoke sessions, learning foreign languages, and writing short stories. anthony lising antonio is Associate Professor of Education and Associate

Director of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research at Stanford University. antonio’s research interests focus on stratification and postsecondary access, racial diversity and its impact on students and institutions, student friendship networks, and student development. His work on racial diversity was cited in a number of amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court for the historic case on affirmative action at the University of Michigan in 2003, and he received the Promising Scholar/Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2004. His current work includes studies of engineering education trajectories and college counseling. Debbie Bazarsky has been the Director of the LGBT Center at Princeton University for the past ten years. Formerly, she was the Coordinator of the LGBT Center at the University of California Santa Barbara. She earned an M.S. in college student counseling from Miami University.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

Amy J. Binder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, at the

University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are in the areas of culture, education, social movements, and organizations. She is the author of the award-winning book Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2002), and will publish a book on conservative college students with co-author Kate Wood. Claudia Buchmann is Professor of Sociology and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Ohio State University. After receiving her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1996, Buchmann taught at Duke University before moving to OSU in 2004. Buchmann’s recent research focuses on gender, race and class inequalities in education. Research with Thomas A. DiPrete in the American Sociological Review, Demography and the Annual Review of Sociology examines the growing female advantage in college completion and its implications for American Higher Education and women’s status. Research with Vincent Roscigno and Dennis Condron in Social Forces examines social class inequalities in access to SAT test preparation and their impact on SAT scores and subsequent college admission. She has also written extensively on comparative and international topics in education and stratification. Professor Buchmann is a deputy editor of the American Sociological Review and a past chair of the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association. Mitchell J. Chang is Professor of Higher Education and Organizational

Change at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chang’s research focuses on the educational efficacy of diversity-related initiatives on college campuses and how to apply those best practices toward advancing student learning and democratizing institutions. His publications include Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education, which was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Grutter v. Bollinger, one of two cases involving the use of race sensitive admissions practices at the University of Michigan. In 2006 the national magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education profiled Professor Chang as one of the nation’s top ten scholars under forty and in 2008 he received the ACPA Asian Pacific American Network Outstanding Contribution to APIDA Research Award. Anthony S. Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University

and a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research. In collaboration with Lisa M. Stulberg, Chen is completing a book on the origins and development of affirmative action in college admissions. Chen’s first book, The Fifth Freedom (Princeton), taps a wide range of primary sources to rethink the origins of affirmative action in employment; it was the recipient of several awards, including the Gladys M. Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association

Notes on Contributors

xv

and the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association. Chen is in the early stages of a new research project on the transformation of the regulatory state since the 1970s. Catherine Cheng is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of British

Columbia. Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at

Stanford University and faculty co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on teaching quality, school reform, and educational equity. Her most recent book is The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity will Determine our Nation’s Future. Thomas A. DiPrete is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison. His current research is focused in three areas. The first concerns the rising gender gap in educational attainment, and its implications both for the overall trend in educational attainment and for entry and persistence by women into science and other elite professional and managerial careers. The second concerns the mechanisms underlying the sharp rise in executive compensation in the U.S. The third concerns the structure of segregation in social networks in the U.S. along dimensions defined by class, race and ethnicity, religious behavior, political ideology, and family structure. Geraldine Downey is a Professor of Psychology and a former Vice-Provost for

Diversity Initiatives and Department Chair at Columbia University. Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent rejection. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. Recently, Dr. Downey has been using the knowledge acquired from her research on rejection to develop models of personality and attachment disorders. She has also been interested in the study of identity, specifically on the way in which individuals use their multiple social identities strategically to cope with daily stressors. Lia Epperson is an Associate Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law. She is an expert in the areas of civil rights, constitutional law, and education policy. Prior to joining the law faculty at American University, she was a faculty member at Santa Clara University, and served as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. She has also served as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Professor Epperson’s research interests are informed by her experiences litigating education cases throughout the country, and lobbying

xvi

Notes on Contributors

for the maintenance and enforcement of civil rights protections. Prior to entering academia, she served as the Director of Education Litigation and Policy for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she litigated in federal and state courts, advocated for federal reforms, and authored multiple amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. Prior to her time at the Legal Defense Fund, she worked as an attorney with Morrison & Foerster, and clerked for the Honorable Timothy Lewis on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Epperson received her B.A. in sociology, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. She received her law degree from Stanford University, where she served as an editor of the Stanford Law Review as well as the Stanford Law and Policy Review. Chris Gonzalez Clarke is a Ph.D. candidate in the Higher Education program at Stanford’s School of Education. His research interests revolve around key issues related to diversity in American higher education. His dissertation research seeks to bring greater understanding to how organizations affect cross-racial interaction in an effort to maximize the benefits of diversity as required by the legal rationale for affirmative action in higher education. Neil Gross is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and the editor of Sociological Theory. María C. Ledesma is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at the University of Utah. Ledesma’s research focuses on critical policy analysis and the role and impact of jurisprudence on educational opportunities for historically under-represented groups throughout the K–20 pipeline. As a doctoral student, Ledesma sat as Student Regent on The Regents of the University of California, the first Latina to hold this post. In this capacity, Ledesma led a study on the impact of Proposition 209 on the University of California ten years after its passage. The study and its recommendations now serve as guidelines for the University of California system. Amanda E. Lewis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Emory University. She is also a co-leader of Emory’s university-wide strategic initiative on Race and Difference, which seeks to promote understanding of and generate new knowledge about race and other intersecting forms of human difference Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities from kindergarten through graduate school and on how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life. A native of San Francisco, she was educated in San Francisco public schools and received her B.A. in educational studies from Brown University, her M.A. in education for the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Her book on how race shapes everyday life in elementary schools, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the color-line in classrooms and communities (Rutgers University Press 2003) was featured

Notes on Contributors

xvii

on TV, on radio and in newspaper outlets. She had two additional books published recently: her edited volume (with Maria Krysan), The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity (Russell Sage, 2004), and Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice (with Mark Chesler and Jim Crowfoot – Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2005). Her research has appeared in a number of academic venues including Sociological Theory, American Educational Research Journal, American Behavioral Scientist, Race and Society, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. She is currently at work on a new book (with John Diamond), titled Despite the Best Intentions: Why racial inequality persists in good schools (Oxford, forthcoming). She lectures and consults regularly on issues of educational equity and contemporary forms of racism. Bonita London is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University.

Her research addresses the psychological processes underlying social identity activation, coping, and the academic and social engagement of women and students of color. Dr. London has conducted several longitudinal studies of the academic engagement of women and students of color entering traditionally exclusionary academic environments, for example, women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields and students of color and women in law. Dr. London has served as a consultant and a member of advisory committees for universities and organizations seeking to create “social identity safe” environments for students of color and women. Dr. London teaches courses in the Psychology of Prejudice, the Psychology of Women, Social Psychology and Children at Risk. She has also received several teaching awards and is the faculty mentor for the Minorities in Psychology organization at Stony Brook University. Bridget Terry Long: As an economist specializing in the study of education, Dr.

Long examines the transition from high school to higher education and beyond. Past projects have examined the role of information in college decisions, the effects of financial aid programs, and the impact of postsecondary remediation on student outcomes. Dr. Long received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Harvard University Department of Economics and her A.B. from Princeton University. She is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. In July 2005, the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION featured her as one of the “New Voices” in higher education, and in 2008, National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) awarded her the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award for excellence in research and published works on student financial assistance. In June 2010, Long was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a member of the National Board of Education Sciences, the advisory panel of the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.

xviii

Notes on Contributors

Michelle J. Manno is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on how inequalities around race, gender, and sexuality get reproduced within the institution of sports. She is currently conducting ethnographic research on how race shapes female athletes’ use of gender strategies for negotiating conflicts between their athletic and gender identities. Leslie Miller-Bernal received her Ph.D. in the Sociology of Development at Cornell University in 1979. She taught Sociology at Wells College from 1975 to 2006 at which time she became Interim Dean. She is currently Provost and Dean of Wells College. Her research has focused on women in higher education, from the mid-nineteenth century to today, particularly in women’s colleges, former women’s colleges, and coeducational institutions, with special attention to transitions from single-sex to coeducation. Her research has resulted in several books – Separate by Degree (2000), Going Coed (co-edited with Susan L. Poulson, 2004), and Challenged by Coeducation (co-edited with Susan L. Poulson, 2006) – journal articles, and book chapters. Meredith Phillips is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Phillips studies the causes and consequences of educational inequality and is particularly interested in the causes of ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in academic success and how to reduce those disparities. Josipa Roksa is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research examines social stratification in educational and labor market outcomes, with a specific focus on higher education. She is particularly interested in understanding how families transmit advantages to their children and how interactions between the educational system and the labor market produce unequal patterns of individual attainment. She is a co-author with Richard Arum of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press 2011). Ronni Sanlo is a Professor in the Higher Education/Educational Leadership Division at the California State University Fullerton. Before retiring from UCLA, Dr. Sanlo was a Professor in Education and Director of the UCLA LGBT Center. Ronni was the founding chair of the Consortium of Higher Education Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Professionals and founder of Lavender Graduation, an event that honors LGBT graduating students. She earned her doctoral degree in educational leadership from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL. Daryl G. Smith is Professor of Education and Psychology at the Claremont Graduate University. She is author of Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Notes on Contributors

xix

Mitchell L. Stevens is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard, 2007), and Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton, 2007). Lisa M. Stulberg is Associate Professor of Educational Sociology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research focuses on the politics of urban schooling, race and education policy, affirmative action in higher education, and school choice policy and politics. She is the author of Race, Schools, and Hope: African Americans and School Choice after Brown (Teachers College Press, 2008) and the co-editor (with Eric Rofes) of The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools: Toward a Progressive Politics of School Choice (SUNY Press, 2004). She currently is working on a book with Anthony S. Chen on the history and politics of affirmative action in college admissions. Dana Takagi is a Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz where she has taught since 1987. She is the author of The Retreat from Race (1992), an editor of a special anthology on social theory called Thinking Theory for Amerasia Journal, and is completing an anthology titled GN2GO on what the Pew Charitable Trust has coined, “Generation Next.” She also has written on Buddhism, sexuality, and gender. Peter Teitelbaum founded EduProfile LLC – a company that helps parents find the right school (preschool through high school) for their children – and teaches K–12 and higher education policy classes at the School of Public Policy at Baruch University. Prior to starting his own company, Peter was the Assistant Vice Provost of the Office of Institutional Research and Program Evaluation at New York University where he also taught statistics, program evaluation and research methods at the Wagner School of Public Policy. Peter has an MPP from Harvard and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley. Sharon Lawner Weinberg is Professor of Applied Statistics and Psychology and former Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at New York University. Her portfolio as Vice Provost included the assessment of faculty diversity at NYU. She received an A.B. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in psychometrics and research design from Cornell University. She is the co-author (with Sarah Abramowitz) of Statistics Using SPSS: An Integrative Approach, published in its second edition in 2008 by Cambridge University Press. She is a member of the Editorial Board of The Educational Researcher, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, and received the 2010 AERA Outstanding Reviewer Award for her editorial work in connection with this journal. She is a recipient of the NYU Steinhardt School Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. She currently is President of the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women, a foundation

xx

Notes on Contributors

devoted to helping advance financially needy women by providing scholarships for their education. Sarah Willie-LeBreton (also known as Sarah Susannah Willie) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College where she currently chairs the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and regularly coordinates the Program in Black Studies. Willie-LeBreton considers herself a public or applied sociologist whose work is concentrated in the fields of education, work, organization, identity, and social inequality. She is the author of “Black, White, and Brown: The Transformation of Public Education in America,” with her father, Charles V. Willie, in Teachers College Record (Columbia University Press 2005), Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race (Routledge, 2003),and “Outing the Blackness in White: Analyzing Race, Class, and Gender in Everyday Life,” in Annals of Scholarship (Temple University Press, 2000). A convinced Quaker, she works with groups attempting to un-cover connections between participation, authenticity, and joy. Kate Wood is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation research examines how undergraduates from diverse backgrounds and at different universities understand their lives in relation to popular ideas about the ‘college experience’. She is also coauthoring a book on conservative college students with Professor Amy Binder.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to our editors at Routledge, who have worked closely with us on this project and have given us unswerving support. Sara Burrows had the foresight to recognize the importance of publishing a book that conceptualized diversity broadly and was instrumental in helping us to begin this project. Our editors, Alex Masulis, then Heather Jarrow, worked consistently to keep the project on track and bring it to completion, and their efforts have strengthened the book substantially. Thanks to Alex Sharp, editorial assistant at Routledge, for her critical role in moving the project forward. Thanks, too, to Jane Olorenshaw, our copy-editor, for her patience and her wonderful attention to detail. We are enormously indebted to Claudia Castañeda for her impressive editorial skills, diligence, and strong commitment to the project. She worked closely with us on each chapter, helping to give the entire volume clarity and a cohesive style. Finally, thanks to our wonderful colleagues and friends at NYU and, in particular, in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Steinhardt, for their generously-shared insights that have helped us to hone our thinking on the many important issues covered in this book. Sections of Chapter 9 appeared previously in “Gender Inequalities in Education” by Claudia Buchmann, Thomas A. DiPrete and Anne McDaniel and are reprinted with permission from the Annual Review of Sociology 34: 319–37, © 2008 by Annual Reviews, www.annualreviews.org. Portions of Chapter 19 appear in “Monitoring Faculty Diversity: The Need for a More Granular Approach” by Sharon L. Weinberg and are reprinted with permission from the Journal of Higher Education 79(4) (July/August 2008). Copyright 2008 The Ohio State University. Reproduced with permission.

INTRODUCTION Lisa M. Stulberg and Sharon Lawner Weinberg

At least since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1978 affirmative action case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, there has been no shortage of scholarly attention to the topic of diversity in higher education. In 2003, when the Supreme Court revisited its affirmative action ruling with a pair of decisions involving the University of Michigan, diversity in higher education gained new and additional attention. In both cases, a quarter-century apart, the Court considered and affirmed the importance of diversity, broadly defined, to living and learning on college and university campuses. As the affirmative action debate continues and higher education becomes a goal, and even a necessity, for more and more Americans, there is still a very active conversation about the way in which diversity is defined and achieved in lecture halls, dorm rooms, and dining halls on campus and the extent to which it is or should be a core educational value. So, too, the question of what it means for a diverse group of university faculty and staff to provide equal and excellent education to a diverse group of students is increasingly urgent. Our volume attempts to capture under one cover a wide range of critical issues that comprise the current discourse on diversity in higher education by including issues not only related to race/ethnicity and gender, but also to socioeconomic status, and sexual and political orientation. It recognizes that higher education access and equity challenges do not begin when students apply for college, but are rooted in the politics and practice of K–12 education. Accordingly, Section I, the first of the four major sections of this volume, begins with a focus on educational equity in K–12 schooling. Section II moves to the postsecondary level and addresses the shifting meaning of diversity over time and the ramifications of the current diversity rationale on admissions, educational practice, and organizational structure. Section III begins with an assessment of progress made toward

2

Stulberg and Weinberg

diversity and equality in American higher education and confronts the many challenges that persist for many groups on campus, including women students; LGBT students, faculty, and staff; underrepresented racial minority faculty; Asian American students; and politically conservative and liberal students and faculty. It also presents a closer look at the individual by providing a psychological perspective on the obstacles that women and underrepresented minorities face in joining predominantly white male institutions. The last section, Section IV, focuses on the future and, in particular, on the continued relevance of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and women’s colleges in the twenty-first century, and the potential implications for diversity of the new financial aid policies, new approaches to assessing faculty diversity, and the new legal landscape. Organized by section, a more detailed description of the chapters in this volume follows. Section I, “The K–12 Pipeline: Impacts on Educational Equity,” begins the collection with three chapters on K–12 schooling. In Chapter 1, Meredith Phillips presents data on racial and socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement and demonstrates the ways in which gaps that appear very early in children’s lives can persist as educational inequalities in high school and college. In Chapter 2, Amanda Lewis and Michelle Manno examine the everyday ways that current elementary and secondary schools and classrooms reproduce racial inequality, focusing on the legacies and continued persistence of structural inequality. In Chapter 3, Linda Darling-Hammond focuses on No Child Left Behind and its reliance on testing as a measure of student and school achievement and progress. She examines the impact that this focus on testing has had on teaching and learning and educational access and equality, and she makes some policy suggestions towards true quality and equality in schools. Section II, “The Diversity Imperative: Postsecondary Institutional and Legal Ramifications,” consists of four chapters that collectively explore the meaning of diversity and its impact on institutional practice in higher education. It begins with Lisa Stulberg and Anthony Chen’s Chapter 4, which argues that the concept of diversity in selective college admissions did not arise de novo with the advent of race-based affirmative action. Instead “diversity” has long been a part of a broader, decades-old debate about the kinds of qualities that colleges should seek to identify in their applicants as well as the larger purposes of American higher education itself. Chapter 5, by Mitchell Stevens and Josipa Roksa, looks at the post-civil rights-era conception of diversity in college admissions and argues that “diversity” measured in a narrow way has become an important metric of status and excellence among elite schools and has supported the maintenance of race-based affirmative action. In Chapter 6, Mitchell Chang and Maria Ledesma examine the “diversity rationale” for affirmative action offered by Justice Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision and argue that this judicial reasoning has not been maximally helpful in guiding college educators and administrators toward practices that promote true diversity and equality on campus. Chapter 7, by anthony lising antonio and Chris Gonzalez Clarke, also

Introduction 3

examines the impact of the diversity rationale on campus, by looking at the extent to which U.S. colleges and universities embrace a definition of diversity that stresses plurality of ideas and experiences and the positive impact that this plurality has on the entire campus community or embrace an understanding of diversity that stresses remediation for past discrimination and structural inequality. The eight chapters of Section III look more closely at American colleges and universities with respect to a broad range of diversity-related issues and debates. The section, titled “Understanding Progress and Continuing Challenges in American Higher Education,” begins with Peter Teitelbaum’s Chapter 8, which provides an introductory look at broad historical trends in educational access, persistence, and equity for underrepresented students of color. Chapter 9, by Claudia Buchmann and Thomas DiPrete, does the same for gender, and it looks closely at some of the individual-level and institutional mechanisms that have contributed to the historical shifts from male to female advantage in college enrollment and graduation. In Chapter 10, Debbie Bazarsky and Ronni Sanlo examine the historical developments and current experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty, and staff on campus, with a particular focus on the organizational structures that have developed since the 1970s to support LGBT students and on the persistent question of how to best support, serve, and protect LGBT campus community members. Chapter 11, by Daryl Smith, turns our attention specifically to faculty, in a look at how university practices particularly impact the hiring and retention of women of all racial/ethnic backgrounds and men and women of color. This chapter also offers some practical suggestions to faculty and administrators who are committed to increasing faculty diversity. In Chapter 12, Dana Takagi turns our attention to the role of Asian Americans in contemporary diversity debates, arguing that the public focus on numbers (or parity and representation) as the key measure of our progress on diversity in higher education leaves Asian Americans—as a broad group—out of the conversation in many ways. Chapters 13 and 14 focus on political diversity. In their chapter, Amy Binder and Kate Wood look closely at the experience of conservative students, with a focus on one elite private university. They argue that the institutional dynamics on this campus minimize conservative students’ feelings of being in the political minority—a finding that raises questions about the universal applicability of the conservative claim that right-learning students suffer in college. In the following chapter, Neil Gross and Catherine Cheng examine faculty politics and seek to understand why it is that university professors tend to be more liberal than the average American. This section ends with Chapter 15, by Bonita London, Vanessa Anderson, and Geraldine Downey, which examines the ways in which structural inequality and the historical legacy of exclusion and marginalization from institutions of higher education impacts individuals and their academic engagement and success. The chapter focuses in particular on women and students of color. Finally, Section IV, consisting of five chapters, looks to the future and is appropriately titled, “Future Implications for Diversity: Practice, Policy, and the Law.”

4

Stulberg and Weinberg

The first two chapters of this section examine the continued relevance of institutions initially designed for those who were excluded from our nation’s campuses. In Chapter 16, Sarah Willie-LeBreton provides a discussion of the history of HBCUs and an argument about the role they can and do play in the new century. Leslie Miller-Bernal provides a similar discussion in Chapter 17, but with a focus on women’s colleges and their historical and continued roles. In Chapter 18, Bridget Terry Long offers an introduction to the new financial aid policies that have developed since the end of the 1990s and a discussion of the impact these policies have had and are likely to continue to have for low-income student access and equity. Chapter 19 provides a return to our discussion of faculty diversity, as Sharon Weinberg explains the limitations of customarily-used aggregate measures of faculty diversity. She proposes a new, more granular approach that is more consistent with the broader conceptualization of diversity post-Grutter. The volume concludes with Chapter 20, by Lia Epperson, which examines recent law and policy as it impacts diversity in higher education, particularly in admissions. Epperson also takes a look at the road ahead, offering some policy recommendations in light of current law and a discussion of the future politics and effectiveness of both race-neutral and race-conscious policies designed to increase and maintain diversity. Although our book incorporates under one cover many of the most critical current issues of diversity in higher education and their roots in the policies and practices of K–12 schooling, our coverage is not exhaustive. Important topics that are not covered include, among others: a discussion of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and an assessment of the extent to which universities have become truly accessible to all; a discussion of international students and, for example, the politics of international study in the post-9/11 age; a discussion of religious identity and the inclusion of differing perspectives that arise from religious diversity on campus; and a discussion of access, funding, and equality for undocumented students—an issue that has received attention recently with the federal consideration of the DREAM Act. We hope, though, that this volume provides the reader with a broader perspective on diversity, one that goes beyond the more traditional conceptualizations of diversity that are confined to considerations of gender and race/ethnicity. In Diversity in American Higher Education, we bring together many of the leading scholars in both K–12 and higher education who collectively have helped to define the agenda for diversity in higher education today. There is no necessary agreement in these pages about how diversity is best defined, measured, and achieved; what purposes diversity serves on campus; how much progress has been made in the past few generations; and how the concept of diversity moves us forward or holds us back from true educational equality. We hope that the material covered and the perspectives presented here provide a starting point for debate, reflection, scholarship, and action.

SECTION I

The K–12 Pipeline: Impacts on Educational Equity

1 ETHNIC AND SOCIAL CLASS DISPARITIES IN ACADEMIC SKILLS Their origins and consequences Meredith Phillips

If African American and Latino high school graduates had the same grades and test scores as their white and Asian American counterparts, policy debates over race-based affirmative action would be largely moot. Unfortunately, however, African American and Latino students finish high school with much lower grades and scores, on average, than their white and Asian American counterparts. These achievement gaps emerge long before students enter high school, and can be traced to students’ experiences both inside and outside of schools. I begin this chapter by describing the extent of ethnic and social class disparities in academic achievement among twelfth graders. I then show how these academic disparities translate into disparities in the likelihood of applying to, enrolling in, and graduating from college. I conclude by describing disparities in elementary and middle school students’ academic skills, how those disparities change during the school years, and what social scientists currently know about the causes of those disparities.

High school students’ achievement The best source of national data on students’ test scores is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP tests a nationally representative sample of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders in various subjects every few years. The most current data available for twelfth graders were collected in 2005.1 Figure 1.1 uses standardized scores to show how twelfth graders from various ethnic and social class backgrounds scored on the NAEP reading and math tests.2 Because test scores (unlike height or income) have no real metric, social scientists often convert test scores to standardized units. This metric allows researchers to compare scores on different kinds of tests, as well as tests of different subjects

8

Phillips 0.8

0.6

0.4

.37 .34 .28 .22 .18

Standard Deviations

0.2

.04

.01

0 -.05

Reading

-0.2

Math -.30

-0.4

-.36

-.37

-.51

-.48

-.49

-0.6

-.58

-.69

-0.8

African Asian American American

FIGURE 1.1

Latino

White

Less than H.S.

H.S. Grad.

Some College

College Grad.

Ethnic and Social Class Test Score Disparities among Twelfth Graders

Source: Author’s tabulations of data from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2005 Reading and Math Assessments (http://nces. ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/). Note: Estimates are z-scores calculated using the standard deviation for all students. Asian Americans include Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians.

and grade levels. Because standardized scores are unintuitive to readers without a statistical background, however, it often helps to compare them to scores on tests that readers have taken, such as the SAT. For example, the standardized math gap between African American twelfth graders and their white counterparts of 0.91 standard deviations (see Figure 1.1) is equivalent to a 106-point gap on the math section of the SAT. The standardized reading gap between Latino twelfth graders and their white counterparts of 0.55 standard deviations is equivalent to a 62-point gap on the critical reading section of the SAT.3 Table 1.1 shows these same achievement gaps but focuses on students’ scores throughout the distribution rather than just on group averages. These data show

Ethnic and Class Disparities 9 TABLE 1.1 Standardized Reading and Math Percentile Scores, by Ethnicity and Social

Class

10th 25th 50th 75th 90th

10th 25th 50th 75th 90th

White Reading Math

Ethnicity African American Latino Reading Math Reading Math

Asian American Reading Math

–1.11 –0.42 0.24 0.85 1.36

–1.75 –1.11 –0.46 0.14 0.66

–1.28 –0.58 0.10 0.72 1.28

–1.01 –0.41 0.25 0.88 1.41

–1.79 –1.28 –0.70 –0.12 0.45

–1.59 –0.98 –0.32 0.26 0.79

–1.62 –1.11 –0.51 0.13 0.68

–1.00 –0.35 0.40 1.09 1.72

Less than H.S. Reading Math

Parents’ Education H.S. Grad. Some College Reading Math Reading Math

College Grad. Reading Math

–1.75 –1.09 –0.44 0.19 0.70

–1.60 –0.91 –0.24 0.37 0.90

–0.98 –0.32 0.34 0.94 1.43

–1.70 –1.19 –0.61 0.04 0.58

–1.55 –0.98 –0.35 0.27 0.84

–1.20 –0.56 0.06 0.63 1.15

–1.22 –0.67 –0.03 0.57 1.08

–0.95 –0.30 0.37 1.02 1.56

Source: Author’s tabulations of data from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2005 Reading and Math Assessments (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/). Note: Estimates are averages at a specific percentile, standardized using the standard deviation for all students. Asian Americans include Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians.

that the median African American and Latino student scores lower than over 75 percent of whites and Asian Americans in math (Jencks and Phillips 1998). These test score disparities persist even among the highest-scoring students—those whose scores place them near the very top of their respective ethnic or social class group (Espenshade and Radford 2009; Hedges and Nowell 1999). For example, African American or Latino students who score higher than 90 percent of their same-ethnic peers in math, nonetheless score higher than only approximately 60 percent or 70 percent, respectively, of their white peers. Similar patterns emerge when comparing students whose parents did not attend college to students whose parents graduated from college. These achievement gaps at the very top of the distribution underscore why diversifying highly selective colleges and universities is difficult in the absence of affirmative action. Selective institutions can either insist on a uniform admissions threshold with respect to academic characteristics, with the result that the fraction of African American and Latino twelfth graders who are denied admission will be much higher than the fraction of whites and Asian Americans.4 Alternatively, selective institutions can set a lower academic threshold for African American and Latino students, thereby admitting a larger fraction of such students and potentially enrolling them.

10

Phillips

The consequences of achievement disparities Academic skills affect every stage of the college-going process—from application to enrollment to completion. Students’ academic qualifications influence where they decide to apply, and whether they apply at all (Turley et al. 2007). Admissions committees’ heavy weighting of academic criteria, at least at selective colleges and universities, influences whether students are accepted, and where they enroll. And academic skills at college entry influence students’ success in their college courses. Because of this link between academic skills and college outcomes, eliminating ethnic and social class differences in academic skills would reduce, and in some cases might eliminate, ethnic and social class differences in college enrollment and graduation (Jencks and Phillips 1998; Ellwood and Kane 2000). The most current data on the impact of achievement disparities on college application and enrollment come from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS), which surveyed and tested a large, nationally representative sample of tenth graders in 2002 and has since followed them until 2006, when those who had enrolled in college right after high school were finishing their sophomore year. ELS asked students whether they applied to, or enrolled in, any postsecondary institutions. The dark bars in Figure 1.2 show ethnic and social class gaps in college application.5 These bars indicate that ethnic disparities in college application are far smaller than socioeconomic disparities. Whites were 4 percentage points more likely to apply to college than blacks, and 10 percentage points more likely than Latinos. In contrast, students whose parents completed graduate school were 25 percentage points more likely to apply to college than students whose parents graduated from high school. The lighter bars show disparities in college application among students who scored the same on reading and math tests at the end of tenth grade and who earned similar grades in the first two years of high school.6 These lighter bars for ethnic disparities are negative, indicating that when African American and Latino students have the same test scores and grades as white students, they are more likely than white students to apply to college (see Turley et al. 2007 for analogous results based on data from earlier cohorts). In contrast, when students of high school educated parents have the same grades and test scores as their tenth grade counterparts whose parents have graduate degrees, students of high school educated parents are still nearly 13 percentage points less likely to apply to college. Ethnic and socioeconomic disparities are larger for college attendance than for college application—11 and 15 percentage points, respectively, for the black– white and Latino–white gaps, and 31 points for the parent education gap (see Figure 1.3). Yet comparisons among students with the same high school grades and test scores show similar results to those for college application. For example, Figure 1.3 shows that among black and white students with similar academic records, black students are 8 percentage points more likely than white students to attend college. Latino and white students with similar academic records are

Ethnic and Class Disparities 11 35

30 24.5

25

20

Pe ercentage

15

12.43 9.75

10

5

4.1

0 -3.6

-5

-10

-8.36

-15 White-Black White-Black Gap Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

FIGURE 1.2

WhiteLatino Gap

WhiteLatino Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

Grad. Sch. Parents vs. High Sch. Parents Gap

Grad. Sch. Parents vs. High Sch. Parents Gap, Similar Grades and Test Scores

Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in College Application among Students Who Were Twelfth Graders in 2004, Controlling for Test Scores and Grades

Source: Author’s calculations using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002. Note: Estimates are weighted with f2bywt and limited to students with non-missing test scores and grades. The first bar in each series shows the absolute disparity in postsecondary application. The second bar shows the predicted disparity from a logistic regression equation that includes students’ transcript-reported 9th & 10th grade grades and a composite of their scores on reading and math tests taken at the end of 10th grade. The equation includes squared terms for grades and test scores when statistically significant. Predicted values are estimated at the sample mean of grades and scores.

approximately equally likely to attend college. In contrast, social class disparities in students’ academic profiles do not explain even close to the entire social class gap in college attendance. Even among students with the same high school grades and test scores, students whose parents only completed high school are 18 percentage points less likely to attend college than their counterparts whose parents have graduate degrees. This large college attendance gap, even among students with similar academic profiles, can probably be attributed to a mix of financial, cultural, and social capital barriers to college enrollment (see, e.g., McDonough 1997, 2004).

12

Phillips

35 30.88 30

25

20

Perrcentage

17.88 15.06

15 10.95 10

5

0 -2.35 -5

-8.03 -10

-15 White-Black Gap

FIGURE 1.3

White-Black Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

White-Latino Gap

White-Latino Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

Grad. Sch. Grad. Sch. Parents vs. High Parents vs. High Sch. Parents Sch. Parents Gap Gap, Similar Grades and Test Scores

Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in College Attendance among Students Who Were Twelfth Graders in 2004, Controlling for Test Scores and Grades

Source: Author’s calculations using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002. Note: Estimates are weighted with f2bywt and limited to students with non-missing test scores and grades. The first bar in each series shows the absolute disparity in postsecondary attendance. The second bar shows the predicted disparity from a logistic regression equation that includes students’ transcript-reported 9th & 10th grade grades and a composite of their scores on reading and math tests taken at the end of 10th grade. The equation includes squared terms for grades and test scores when statistically significant. Predicted values are estimated at the sample mean of grades and scores.

Students who participated in the ELS study have not yet been followed long enough to collect accurate data on whether they completed college. However, an earlier longitudinal survey, the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS), followed a nationally representative sample of eighth graders from 1988 until 2000, when they were about 26 years old on average. Those data allow us to describe disparities in four-year college completion among all NELS participants, as well as among those with similar grades and test scores. Overall, 34 percent of white NELS participants had completed at least a B.A. by 2000, compared to about 17 percent of African American participants and 15 percent of Latino participants. The contrast between students whose parents had

Ethnic and Class Disparities 13

completed high school and those whose parents had completed graduate school was far starker—with 69 percent of the group with graduate school-educated parents completing a four-year degree, compared to a mere 16 percent of those with high school-educated parents. The dark bars in Figure 1.4 show these ethnic and social class disparities in four-year college completion. The lighter bars in Figure 1.4 show disparities in completing a B.A. among students who had the same grades and test scores in eighth grade. These data reveal that African American and white students who had similar academic profiles by the end of eighth grade were nearly equally likely to complete a four-year degree (see Jencks and Phillips 1998 for similar results from the earlier High School and 60

52.69 50

40

Percentage

37.13

30

20

18.94 17.35

10.38

10

3.17

0

White-Black White-Black Gap Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

FIGURE 1.4

White-Latino White-Latino Gap Gap, Similar Test Scores and Grades

Grad. Sch. Grad. Sch. Parents vs. Parents vs. High Sch. High Sch. Parents Gap Parents Gap, Similar Grades and Test Scores

Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Four-Year College Completion among Students Who Were Twelfth Graders in 1992, Controlling for Test Scores and Grades

Source: Author’s calculations using the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988. Note: Estimates are weighted with f4bypnwt and limited to students with non-missing test scores and grades. The first bar in each series shows the absolute disparity in four-year college completion. The second bar shows the predicted disparity from a logistic regression equation that includes students’ self-reported 8th grade grades and a composite of their scores on reading and math tests taken at the end of 8th grade. The equation includes squared terms for grades and test scores when statistically significant. Predicted values are estimated at the sample mean of grades and scores.

14

Phillips

Beyond survey).7 Among students who had similar academic profiles as of the eighth grade, however, Latino students were still 10 percentage points less likely to complete college than their white counterparts. And the gap between students whose parents completed high school and those whose parents completed graduate school was especially large—about 37 percentage points, even among students who had similar academic profiles at the end of eighth grade. As with the ELS results on college attendance, these remaining disparities in college completion imply that substantial social, cultural, and financial barriers likely impede the educational mobility of Latinos and lower class students from all ethnic backgrounds, independent of their academic preparation.

Achievement disparities during elementary and middle school Although disparities in academic skills are not the sole cause of disparities in college enrollment and completion, Figures 1.3 and 1.4 show nonetheless that these academic disparities often explain an important fraction of ethnic and social class disparities in college outcomes. Thus, reducing ethnic and social class disparities in students’ grades and test scores, even as early as the end of eighth grade, would probably go a long way toward reducing disparities in students’ eventual educational attainment. Academic skill disparities emerge early in children’s lives. Jencks and Phillips (1998) reported large black–white disparities in children’s receptive vocabulary as early as age three using data from a national sample tested in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More recent, and more nationally representative, data on early academic disparities come from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), which tested four-year-olds’ early reading and math skills in 2005. Figure 1.5 displays those data, showing that black–white and Latino–white gaps among four-year-olds average approximately 0.5 standard deviations (the equivalent of a little more than 50 points on the math or reading SAT) and that gaps between four-year-olds whose parents are college graduates and four-yearolds whose parents are high school graduates are larger, at approximately 0.8 standard deviations.8 Because the black–white gaps in Figure 1.5 from the ECLS-B are smaller than those in Figure 1.1 from the NAEP, it may be tempting to conclude that black–white gaps widen as children age. However, such conclusions can only be drawn from longitudinal data, which test the same children over time, using vertically-equated tests.9 We can examine how disparities change between the beginning of kindergarten and the end of eighth grade using relatively recent data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). Figures 1.6 and 1.7 display averages of a composite of students’ math and reading scores for students who were first tested in the fall of kindergarten and then tested four more times—in the spring of first, third, fifth, and eighth grade. As Reardon and

Ethnic and Class Disparities 15 Four-Year-Olds

0.8

0.6 .52 .48

.47 .43

0.4

.21

Standard Deviations

0.2

.17

0 -.03 -.04

Reading

-0.2

Math -.26 -.29

-.27 -.30 -.32

-0.4 -.41

-0.6

-.59 -.64

-0.8

African Asian American American

FIGURE 1.5

Latino

White

Less than H.S.

H.S. Grad.

Some College

College Grad.

Ethnic and Social Class Test Score Disparities among Four-Year-Olds

Source: Author’s calculations using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort. Note: Estimates are weighted using w31c0 and calculated using the standard deviation for all students. Asian Americans include Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians.

Galindo (2009) have shown, the Latino–white test score gap shrinks in the early years of elementary school and remains relatively constant thereafter. In contrast, the black–white test score gap widens during the elementary school years, largely because the test scores of blacks decline throughout elementary school.10 Test score disparities between children of the most and least educated parents start out larger than ethnic disparities, may narrow somewhat during the early grades, but remain large throughout elementary and middle school. Test score averages can mask important individual variation in learning trajectories. A simple way to examine the stability of students’ relative rankings in the test score distribution is to examine what proportion of students from each quartile of the kindergarten test score distribution remain in the same quartile or move to a different quartile by the end of eighth grade. Although students move around in the achievement distribution during the elementary and middle school years, Figure 1.8 shows that students who start out behind are very unlikely to catch up to their peers in later years. For example, when students start kindergarten in the bottom quartile (bottom 25 percent) of the achievement distribution, they have only about

16

Phillips 0.9

0.6

Standard Deviations S

0.3

Asian Americans Whites 0 African Americans Latinos

-0.3 03

-0.6

-0.9 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Approximate Grade Level When Tested (Fall of Kindergarten=0)

FIGURE 1.6

Academic Growth between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade, by Ethnic Group

Source: Author’s calculations using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort. Note: Estimates are weighted using c1_7fco. Sample is restricted to students with valid data on ethnicity and test scores for each grade level. Estimates are a composite of reading and math tests at each grade level; students receive an estimate for a particular grade level as long as they have valid data for math or reading. Estimates are standardized within grade level. Asian Americans include Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians.

a 16 percent (.12 + .04) chance of moving into the top half of the achievement distribution by the end of eighth grade. And very rarely—only about 4 percent of the time—do they move into the top quartile. Only about one fifth of students who start kindergarten in the bottom half of the achievement distribution end up in the top 25 percent (i.e., the top quartile) by eighth grade.11 Because selective colleges and universities draw heavily from that top quartile, these results suggest that children’s academic skills, as early as the fall of kindergarten, affect their college admissions chances and graduation outcomes years later. In NELS, for example, students with bottom quartile eighth grade test scores had only a 7 percent chance of graduating from a four-year college by age 26 compared to the 61 percent chance that their peers with top quartile eighth grade scores had (author’s calculations, results not shown). We can also assess the relative importance of academic skills acquired before children enter formal schooling by estimating the extent to which students from

Ethnic and Class Disparities 17 0.9

0.6

Graduate Degree College Grad.

0.3

Some College

Stan ndard Deviations

High School Grad. Less than High Schl 0

-0.3

-0.6

-0.9

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Approximate Grade Level When Tested (Fall of Kindergarten=0)

FIGURE 1.7

Academic Growth between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade, by Parents’ Education

Source: Author’s calculations using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort. Note: Estimates are weighted using c1_7fco. Sample is restricted to students with valid data on parents’ education and test scores for each grade level. Estimates are a composite of reading and math tests at each grade level; students receive an estimate for a particular grade level as long as they have valid data for math or reading. Estimates are standardized within grade level. Asian Americans include Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians.

disadvantaged ethnic and social class backgrounds who begin elementary school with the same academic skills as their more advantaged counterparts fall behind as they move though middle and high school. Piecing together data from several longitudinal cohorts, Phillips, Crouse and Ralph (1998) argued that at least half of the black–white test score gap that existed at the end of high school could be attributed to the test score gap that already existed by first grade. The ECLS-K provides better data for producing such estimates because it followed the same students from the beginning of kindergarten through the end of eighth grade. The dark bars in Figure 1.9 show eighth grade test score disparities on a composite of the reading and math tests in the ECLS-K. This figure shows, for example, that the black–white test score gap among eighth graders in this sample is approximately 0.9 standard deviations (see the dark bar on the left side of the figure). The next three bars show the gaps in eighth grade among students who had the same

18

Phillips 0.6 Lowest Quartile in 8th

.55

.56

Second Quartile in 8th Third Quartile in 8th Top Quartile in 8th

0.5

0.4 .36

Prop portion

.33 0.3

.30

.29

.29

.27 .24 .23 0.2 .15 .13

.12

.11

0.1 .04

.03

0

Lowest Quartile in K

FIGURE 1.8

Second Quartile in K

Third Quartile in K

Top Quartile in K

Test Score Mobility between Kindergarten and Eighth Grade

Source: Author’s calculations using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort. Note: Estimates are weighted using c1_7fco and restricted to children with valid reading/math composite test scores in both the fall of kindergarten and spring of eighth grade. Students receive an estimate for a particular grade level as long as they have valid data for math or reading. Bars show the proportion of students from each quartile of the fall of kindergarten test score distribution who fall into each quartile of the spring of 8th grade test score distribution.

test scores in kindergarten. The gray bar assumes that the kindergarten tests are measured without any error and the next two bars provide estimates assuming different amounts of measurement error in the kindergarten tests. Eighth-grade test score disparities among black and white students with the same kindergarten skills are between 50 and 60 percent as large as the overall disparities, implying that 40 to 50 percent of the black–white test score gap at the end of eighth grade can be attributed to the black–white gap that already existed at the beginning of kindergarten. Far more—approximately 80 percent—of the Latino–white gap at the end of eighth grade can be attributed to the Latino–white gap that already existed at the beginning of kindergarten.12 And about half, and possibly more (depending on our assumptions about measurement error), of the gap between the children

Ethnic and Class Disparities 19 1.4

No Controls Kindergarten Tests (r=1) Kindergarten Tests (r=.90) Kindergarten Tests (r=.80)

1.2

Sttandard Deviations

1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0

White-Black Gap

White-Latino Gap

GradSchl-HS Grad Gap

FIGURE 1.9 Ethnic and Social Class Disparities in Eighth Grade Test Scores, Controlling for Kindergarten Scores

Source: Author’s calculations using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort. Note: Estimates are weighted using c1_7fco and restricted to children with valid reading/math composite test scores in both the fall of kindergarten and spring of eighth grade. Students receive an estimate for a particular grade level as long as they have valid data for math or reading. Bars show estimates of raw gaps (bar 1), and gaps after controlling for the composite kindergarten score, assuming no measurement error in the tests (bar 2), and test score reliabilities of .90 or .80 (bars 3 and 4).

of well educated and less well educated parents is already present when children first start school.

The etiology of achievement disparities Taken together, these results reinforce the conclusion that the academic disparities that translate into college application, enrollment, and graduation disparities among older students have their origins both before children enter kindergarten and during the school years. Before children enter school, their early environment, such as the vocabulary to which they are exposed (Hart and Risley 1995)

20

Phillips

and how often they are read to (Phillips, Brooks-Gunn et al. 1998; Brooks-Gunn and Markman 2005), influences their academic skills. Once students start school, both in-school and out-of-school factors influence academic development but researchers currently know too little about the relative importance of each. African American and Latino students, and economically-disadvantaged students, are more likely than their advantaged peers to attend schools that are inferior on a wide range of dimensions (see Phillips and Chin 2004). Some of those dimensions, such as teacher experience and subjectmatter knowledge, are related to student learning (see, e.g., Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 1998; Goldhaber and Brewer 1997), and thus disparities in exposure to high-quality teaching probably contribute to growth in the achievement gap. Likewise, exposure to challenging coursework seems to improve student learning (see, e.g., Phillips 1997; Meyer 1999) and disadvantaged students are less likely to be exposed to such coursework (Phillips and Chin 2004; Tach and Farkas 2006). During the school years, however, students also spend a lot of their time outside of school—after school, on weekends, and during summer vacation. Research suggests that disadvantaged students fall farther behind their advantaged peers, especially in reading, over the summer (see, e.g., Entwisle et al. 1997), and thus, students’ out-of-school experiences—in their homes and communities—probably also contribute to the persistence or growth of the achievement gap during the school years. Scholars are only now accumulating strong evidence about the kinds of programs that can consistently reduce academic disparities. This renewed research focus on the development and evaluation of interventions designed to improve children’s in-school and out-of-school experiences will improve our understanding of the causes of skill disparities and how to ameliorate them. If scholars also collect data on participants’ long-term outcomes, evaluations of interventions targeted at preschool and school-age children will also help us understand whether such programs have sufficiently enduring effects that they influence students’ post-secondary enrollment and success.

Conclusion Ethnic and social class disparities in academic skills are large when students finish high school. These disparities, even when measured as early as the end of eighth grade, have important consequences for students’ likelihood of applying to, attending, and completing college. For example, test score and grade disparities explain the entire black–white gap in college application, attendance, and four-year college completion. These results imply that efforts to improve black students’ academic skills could have dramatic consequences for black students’ educational attainment. Test score and grade disparities explain less of the Latino– white and social class gaps in college outcomes, but Latino students and low-SES

Ethnic and Class Disparities 21

students nonetheless have much more favorable college outcomes when their academic skills as adolescents match those of their white and high-SES peers. Ethnic and social class disparities in academic skills emerge before children enter school and persist—and in the case of the black–white gap, probably widen—during the elementary school years. Social scientists still know far too little about the causes of these early disparities in academic skills and the relative contribution of families, communities, and schools to their development over the school years. Nonetheless, students who start kindergarten with relatively weak reading and math skills have a high probability of finishing eighth grade with relatively weak skills as well. And students with weak eighth grade grades and test scores are very unlikely to finish college. Thus, selective colleges and universities seeking to diversify their student bodies would be wise to target their outreach efforts not only at high school students. Investments in the development and rigorous evaluation of programs intended to improve the academic skills of disadvantaged students, even before those students have set foot in a kindergarten classroom, will likely yield important diversity pay-offs down the road.

Notes 1 Scholars often avoid describing disparities among twelfth graders because such students are a select group that has persisted through high school. To the extent that students from disadvantaged social classes or ethnic groups are more likely to drop out of high school, data from twelfth graders will understate academic disparities among 17- and 18-year olds in the population. For a book focused on higher education, however, academic disparities among twelfth graders are quite relevant because these are the students most likely to graduate from high school and matriculate to college. 2 Throughout this chapter, I use parents’ educational attainment as a proxy for social class. Other common proxies for social class include family income and parents’ occupational status. I rely on parents’ education because it is the only one of these three measures available in the NAEP. In addition, parents’ education tends to be more strongly related than either family income or occupational status to children’s test scores (Phillips, Brooks-Gunn et al. 1998). Note, however, that parents’ education would be an insufficient measure of social class if the purpose of this chapter were to examine the extent to which social class explains, say, ethnic disparities in academic success. Phillips, Brooks-Gunn et al. (1998) show, for example, that increasingly comprehensive measures of social class explain increasing amounts of the black–white test score gap among young children. See Duncan and Magnuson (2005) for an excellent discussion of the role of social class, broadly conceived, in explaining ethnic disparities in test scores. 3 To calculate standardized disparities from Figure 1.1, compute the difference between the bars for the relevant groups (e.g., .22– (–.69) = 0.91). The SAT comparisons are based on standard deviations for the SAT math (116) and SAT critical reading (112) as reported by the College Board (2010). 4 Note, however, that even when institutions apply uniform academic thresholds in their admissions process, there will still be social class and ethnic achievement disparities among students who matriculate to those institutions (see Kane 1998). 5 All estimates come from weighted logistic regressions with the standard errors adjusted for the clustering of students within schools. The figures show predicted probabilities that a given group would apply to college, holding test scores and grades at their

22

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

Phillips

overall sample means. Test scores are a composite of standardized math and reading Theta scores; students are given a value on the composite as long as they have valid data for at least one of the tests. In the ELS, black tenth graders scored 0.89 standard deviations lower than their white counterparts on a composite of the math and reading tests; Latinos scored 0.83 standard deviations lower. The test score gap between tenth graders with high school graduate parents and their counterparts whose parents completed graduate school was 0.86 standard deviations. Disparities in students’ ninth and tenth grade grades were smaller than test score gaps but still large—at 0.79 and 0.63 standard deviations for the black–white and Latino–white grade gaps, respectively, and 0.72 standard deviations for the parental education gap. The gap between these students is only 3 percentage points, which is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Although most children were four years old when they took the tests, approximately 16 percent of the sample was younger than four and approximately 4 percent had already turned five. Note, however, that comparing achievement gaps as children age, even with longitudinal data and vertically equated tests, is not as straightforward as it seems, because tests are ordinal rather than interval metrics (Phillips 2000). As a result, different measurement assumptions will yield different answers about how much gaps grow, or shrink, between groups. See Reardon and Galindo (2009) for an excellent description of the importance of metric choice when measuring age-related changes in test score disparities, and Ho and Haertel (2006) and Neal (2006) for descriptions of metric-free measures that are less sensitive to age-related changes in the distributions of students’ scores. Following Reardon and Galindo (2009), I use wave-standardized Theta scores in this chapter because such scores are commonly used and easily compared across studies. This conclusion that the black–white test score gap widens during the school years is broadly consistent with conclusions based on longitudinal samples collected in earlier decades (see Phillips, Crouse, and Ralph 1998). But other national and state-based samples do not always support the conclusion that the black–white gap widens during the school years (see Reardon and Robinson 2007 for an excellent review of this literature). We do not yet know the extent to which between-study differences in the development of the black–white gap are attributable to sample differences, test differences, or both. This estimate comes from combining the four percent of students from the first quartile of the kindergarten distribution (.04) and the 15 percent (.15) of students from the second quartile of the kindergarten distribution who ended up in the top quartile of the eighth grade distribution. Note, however, that these estimates only apply to a sample of Latino children who were already enrolled in US schools as of kindergarten and who had strong enough English skills to be tested in math or reading in kindergarten.

References Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne and Lisa Markman. 2005. The Contribution of Parenting to Ethnic and Racial Gaps in School Readiness. Future of Children 15(1): 139–68. College Board. 2010. Total Group Profile Report. College Board. Duncan, Greg J. and Katharine A. Magnuson. 2005. Can Family Socioeconomic Resources Account for Racial and Ethnic Test Score Gaps? Future of Children 15(1): 35–54. Ellwood, David and Thomas J. Kane. 2000. Who Is Getting a College Education: Family Background and the Growing Gaps in Enrollment. In Sheldon Danziger and Jane Waldfogel (Eds.), Securing the Future. New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 283–324.

Ethnic and Class Disparities 23

Entwisle, Doris R., Karl L. Alexander, and Linda S. Olson. 1997. Children, Schools, and Inequality. Boulder, CO: Westview. Espenshade, Thomas J. and Alexandria Walton Radford. 2009. No Longer Separate; Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton. Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. 1995. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing Company. Hedges, Larry V. and Amy Nowell. 1999. Changes in the Black–White Gap in Achievement Test Scores: The Evidence from Nationally Representative Samples. Sociology of Education 72: 111–35. Ho, Andrew D. and Edward H. Haertel, E. H. 2006. Metric-Free Measures of Test Score Trends and Gaps with Policy-Relevant Examples (CSE Report No. 665). Los Angeles, CA: Center for the Study of Evaluation, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Jencks, Christopher and Meredith Phillips. 1998. The Black–White Test Score Gap: An Introduction. In Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Eds.), The Black–White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 1–51. Kane, Thomas. 1998. Racial and Ethnic Preferences in College Admissions. In Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Eds.) The Black–White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 431–56. McDonough, Patricia M. (1997). Choosing Colleges. How Social Class and Schools Structure Opportunity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McDonough, Patricia M. (2004). Counseling Matters: Knowledge, Assistance, and Organizational Commitment in College Preparation. In William G. Tierney, Zoë B. Corwin, and Julia E. Colyar (Eds.), Preparing for College: Nine Elements of Effective Outreach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Pp. 69–88. Meyer, Robert H. 1999. The Effects of Math and Math-Related Courses in High School. In Susan E. Mayer and Paul E. Peterson (Eds.), Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 169–204. Neal, Derek A. 2006. Why Has Black–White Skill Convergence Stopped? In Eric A. Hanushek and F. Welch (Eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Education (Vol. 1). New York: Elsevier. Pp. 511–76. Phillips, Meredith. 1997. What Makes Schools Effective? A Comparison of the Relationships of Communitarian Climate and Academic Climate to Mathematics Achievement and Attendance During Middle School. American Educational Research Journal 34: 633–62. Phillips, Meredith. 2000. Understanding Ethnic Differences in Academic Achievement: Empirical Lessons from National Data. In David W. Grissmer and J. Michael Ross (Eds.), Analytic Issues in the Assessment of Student Achievement. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Pp. 103–32. Phillips, Meredith and Tiffani Chin. 2004. School Inequality: What Do We Know? In Kathryn M. Neckerman (Ed.), Social Inequality. New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 467–519. Phillips, Meredith, James Crouse, and John Ralph. 1998. Does the Black–White Test Score Gap Widen after Children Enter School? In Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Eds.), The Black–White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 229–72.

24

Phillips

Phillips, Meredith, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg J. Duncan, Pamela Klebanov, and Jonathan Crane. 1998. Family Background, Parenting Practices, and the Black–White Test Score Gap. In Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Eds.), The Black–White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 102–145. Reardon, Sean F. and Claudia Galindo. 2009. The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. American Educational Research Journal 46(3): 853–91. Reardon, Sean F. and Joseph Robinson. 2007. Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Academic Achievement Gaps. In Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy. New York: Routledge. Pp. 497–516. Turley, Ruth Lopez, Martin Santos, and Cecilia Ceja. 2007. Social Origin and College Opportunity Expectations across Cohorts. Social Science Research 36: 1200–18.

2 INSIDE THE K–12 PIPELINE FOR BLACK AND LATINO STUDENTS Amanda E. Lewis and Michelle J. Manno

Many today assert that the United States has become a “post-racial” society, one in which race no longer plays a significant role in shaping opportunities in education and beyond. In questions of college admissions, this “post-racial” assertion often works together with longstanding beliefs about American meritocracy to shape how we understand why some students attend college and others don’t, who ends up in which educational institutions, and who succeeds once enrolled. These “race doesn’t matter, what matters is who is smart, motivated, works hard and values education” narratives take many forms, are deeply entrenched, and often persist even in the face of contradictory evidence. One example of how this plays out comes from within college classrooms. For well over a decade Amanda Lewis (the first author) has taught an undergraduate Racial and Ethnic Relations course. Before discussing contemporary issues, the first half of the semester focuses primarily on the history of racialization of different groups in the U.S. One reason for this sequencing is so that when the class gets to the discussion about the present, students have theory and data with which to evaluate common sense, “post-racial,” ahistorical narratives that suggest that even the very recent past it not relevant to what is happening now. After some early false starts, students generally hit their “sociological” stride, grasping race as a socio-historical construct with vast effects on different groups’ histories and experiences. Then we get to the inevitable discussion of affirmative action and fairness in college admissions. Most students entered the class imagining themselves as abstract individuals who did or did not work hard, do or do not have innate capacities for learning calculus or mastering grammatically correct prose, and therefore who did or did not deserve admissions into relatively select institutions. Having, for the most part, bought whole-sale into the ideology of meritocracy they temporarily lose track of the history we’ve been studying when we get to this most pressing personal issue for all of them—college admissions.

26

Lewis and Manno

In the crass version of this memory lapse, the conversation turns when a student complains about person A who got into [Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, Duke, Princeton] when person B, their [sibling, cousin, friend] who had better [scores, grades, extracurriculars] did not. In such scenarios, Student A is always a student of color and student B, a hard-working white student who suffered a devastating rejection “due to affirmative action.” Luckily, by this point in the semester enough students have been paying attention that the conversation gets complicated quickly. Students have attained knowledge about several centuries of structural racism in the United States and at least partially understand that this history continues to matter in the present. They also have read enough recent research about persistent racial disparities to see that these different groups continue to have different experiences and opportunities. But navigating through this conversation still requires great discipline as it brings the reality of race home for the group as a whole. It requires them to apply what they have learned, to let go of a fixation on themselves as abstract individuals floating through the world on their own efforts and merits and, instead, to think of themselves as members of groups who are differently facilitated or constrained because of their social location. Who gets access to which educational resources and how is race involved? For students, for all of us, the answers to these questions are directly relevant and the stakes are high. The dilemma of race in higher education admissions appears not just among students in classrooms, but at every turn in broader academic and popular discussions. Too many of these discussions operate without historically informed understandings of race, its legacies, and the persistence of structural racism and discrimination in determining educational outcomes (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Lewis et al. 2009). In reality, there has been no point in our national history in which the school system has not been fundamentally shaped by the color line (Adams 1995; Anderson 1988; Chesler et al. 2004; Litwack 1998; Takaki 1993).

Histories of racial discrimination in education All racial minority groups in the United States at one time or another experienced forced exclusion from even the most basic formal schooling. Before Reconstruction, Black children were subjected to a “system of compulsory ignorance” (Weinberg 1977: 11) in which Whites maintained a subordinated class of Black slaves and laborers, partly by systematically denying them access to education (Litwack 1998; Takaki 1993). In response to organized efforts by racial minorities to gain access to schools, authorities in many locales begrudgingly ended practices of total exclusion by creating separate, segregated schools. This was not only true in the long Jim Crow period in the south, but also throughout other parts of the country. For example, early in the twentieth century, a separate Mexican school system was established in Texas as part of a larger set of rules that limited interracial contact and attempted to control and exploit a vast laboring class

K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students 27

(Montejano 1987). Segregation of Mexicans occurred not only in Texas but across the southwest and was repeated in other parts of the west for new groups entering the U.S. racial hierarchy, including Japanese workers on plantations in Hawaii and Chinese immigrants in early California (Takaki 1993). Formal, legalized segregation ended finally in the second half of the twentieth century but was never replaced by a truly integrated educational system that could provide all with equal opportunities. In fact, while the key mechanisms involved in shaping school policies and practices have changed over time, many patterns remain the same. Systematic White dominance of schooling is less overt today but no less real. Intergenerational transmissions of racial resources provide Whites in the U.S. far greater access to quality education. These are (White) “racial” resources because they were originally accrued largely through a combination of discriminatory private practices and the operation of racist federal, state, and local laws (Lipsitz 1998; Massey and Denton 1993; Quadagno 1994). The benefits resulting from “the moment not long ago when affirmative action was white” (Katznelson 2005: xv) continue to be passed on to successive generations. This enduring legacy includes powerful social networks, wealth accumulated in homes purchased before fair housing laws, seniority accrued in previously segregated employment sectors, and alumni status (which provides advantage to offspring as “legacy admits”) at previously all-White colleges and universities. Such resources are concentrated within particular (White) communities not by accident but as a result of centuries of formal, state-supported racial domination in all arenas, including education (Mickelson 2003; Walters 2001; Wells et al. 2009).

Inequality in contemporary education The resulting racial inequalities in education are still pervasive and profound. Today, school segregation levels between Whites and other racialized groups are high and getting higher (Orfield and Gordon 2001). Whites are the most racially isolated group in our country’s educational institutions, while they attend schools with the highest levels of resources (Kozol 1991; Mickelson 2003; Orfield and Gordon 2001). In direct contrast, Blacks and Latinos are not only more likely to attend high-poverty schools, but also schools with fewer resources. For example, schools with majority minority enrollments are much more likely to have under-qualified instructors or to use long-term substitutes to fill teacher vacancies, have lowerquality facilities, have less availability of instructional materials, have less access to technology, college preparatory curricula, and advanced placement courses, and students in such schools are less likely to take either the SAT or ACT (Allen et al. 2002; Darling-Hammond 2003; Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access 2004; Mickelson 2003; Nettles and Perna 1997; Oakes 2003; U.S. Census 2001). Unlike in the past, inequalities in school resources today are not a result of explicit segregation and direct action to limit minority access to quality education.

28

Lewis and Manno

Instead, they are the direct or indirect result of a number of school and nonschool processes, including the racial segregation of communities, the concentration of poverty in specific locations, the dependence on local property taxes to fund schools, and White aversion to sending their children to minority schools (Johnson 2006; Kozol 1991; Massey and Denton 1993; Saporito and Lareau 1999; Shapiro 2004; Wells et al. 2009). Some of these processes involve seemingly “race-neutral” public policies (e.g., funding schools locally) and some involve “private” practices (e.g., families’ school choice processes). The fact that mechanisms of racial hierarchy have become more subtle and implicit does not make them any less powerful; their cumulative impact is unquestionable. For example, in 2002–03 over 80 percent of White students nationally attended schools with poverty rates below 10 percent while only 5 percent of Black students and 7 percent of Latino students did. At the same time Black and Latino students “comprise 80 percent of the student population in extreme poverty schools (90 to 100% poor)” (Orfield and Lee 2005: 21). Overall, Black and Latino students do not have access to the same educational experiences as White students. Furthermore, not only do they attend different schools from Whites, but schools that have fewer resources. The vast and persistent inequalities in K–12 education directly contribute to differential college attendance and graduation patterns for Black and Latino students as elementary and secondary education are the “pipeline” and serve as preparation for higher education. Thus, to understand the parameters of K–12 and college success, who thrives and who doesn’t, we must pay attention not only to resource gaps and macro level dynamics but also to meso- and micro-level dynamics—what happens everyday in schools, classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms, and schoolyards. Even when Black, Latino, and White students attend the same schools, they are often put in different classrooms and even within the same classrooms often have different experiences (Lewis 2003b; Tyson 2011).

Racial inequalities in school: micro-level processes Research on race and education shows that stereotyped racial ascription can shape placement in ability groups, presumptions about math or language proficiency, and even whether a student gets picked for a study group or a schoolyard basketball game (Lewis 2003a).1 Race serves as a kind of symbolic capital that distributes the educational advantages and disadvantages children will receive. This unequal distribution occurs even in places that are considered to be “good schools” and even if school personnel have the best intentions; the processes at work are not primarily conscious and deliberate, but rather unconscious and not explicitly intentional. A great deal of recent research has shown the multitude of ways that racial stereotypes are a part of everyday school life, negatively affecting students of color (Codjoe 2001; Diamond et al. 2004; Ferguson 1998; Ferguson 2000; Graybill 1997; Lewis 2003a; Monroe 2005).

K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students 29

The disadvantages experienced by Black and Latino children take many different forms, including but not limited to skewed performance expectations. Some studies demonstrate that teachers perceive students of color and low-income students to have lower academic capabilities and intelligence than White and high-SES (socio-economic-status) students (Diamond et al. 2004; Farkas 2003; Fordham 1996; Perry et al. 2003) and that teachers have lower expectations in general for Black and Latino students than for White students (Diamond et al. 2004; Roscigno and Ainsworth-Darnell 1999; Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007). Some scholars also argue that teachers make more positive referrals and offer more positive and neutral speech for White students than for Black and Latino students (Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007). Furthermore, research demonstrates that, in addition to affecting performance expectations, racial stereotypes penetrate deeply and can negatively impact student performance itself (Steele 1997; Steele and Aronson 1998). Research on teacher expectations of Black and Latino students highlights the way in which low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies as students make less effort in classes where they know that not much is expected of them (Diamond et al. 2004; Oakes 2005).

Meso-level processes: tracking, discipline, and disability Racial ascription, stereotyping, and other processes that lead to racial discrimination in schools can dramatically influence not only teacher–student interactions, but also school practices, the curriculum, overall instruction, and the assessment of students (Walker 2007). Negative stereotypes about Black and Latino students not only affect students by subjecting them to lower teacher expectations, but are also related to the kinds of educational resources and opportunities made available to these students, from the choice of textbooks, to whether their school offers advanced mathematics courses, to where students are tracked, to which teachers are assigned to certain groups of students (Walker 2007). Beyond simply examining teacher–student interaction as the basis for the development of certain expectations, some have argued for a closer look at the role of institutional and organizational factors in expectation development. For example, Diamond has found that when coupled with teachers’ expectations, the school organizational context becomes especially significant in low-income and Black schools. By focusing on students’ (perceived) deficits, teachers in these schools can claim less of a sense of responsibility for the students’ academic success (Diamond et al. 2004). The consequences of lower teacher expectations for Black and Latino students are just as obvious as they are detrimental.

Tracking Lowered expectations also take shape through tracking. Virtually every study of tracking in schools shows poor and Black and Latino students disproportionately

30

Lewis and Manno

placed in the lower classroom or school-wide groups or tracks. In addition, predominantly Black and Latino schools have fewer high-track classes, and even when they do, they are likely to be less rigorous and to be taught by less qualified instructors (Oakes 2005). Scholars sometimes refer to this underrepresentation of Black and Latino students in higher—and higher-quality—groups and tracks, and their overrepresentation in low and vocational tracks, as second-generation segregation (Ansalone 2006; Clotfelter 2004; Lucas 1999; Lucas and Berends 2007; Meier et al. 1989; Mickelson 2001; Oakes 2005). What evidence exists to support this implicit claim that race—or racism— affects educational tracking systems? Studies have found great potential for racial (and other types of) discrimination in student placements (Oakes 2005). For example, research shows that even high-scoring Black and Latino students are less likely to be in high-track classes (Lucas and Berends 2007; Mickelson 2003; Oakes and Guiton 1995). This work shows that race/ethnicity has been significant for predicting track placement over and above measured achievement, with Black and Latino students more likely to be placed in lower tracks than their similarly scoring White (and Asian) peers. Ethnographic work echoes these studies, raising a number of questions about how ability group placements are made (Lewis 2003a; Rist 1970). Research has also consistently found that different tracks use material and techniques of different qualities (Ansalone 2003, 2006; Oakes 2005; Wheelock 1992). Low-track classes tend to offer a more watered-down curriculum, less effective/challenging pedagogy, more focus on basic skills, less experienced teachers who are more often not certified in the specific area, have less preparation, and generally fewer opportunities to learn. Grouping students into tracks is driven by stereotyped expectations and exacerbates pre-existing inequalities (Condron 2007, 2008; Sorenson and Hallinan 1986). Tracking relies on and leads to different expectations for achievement. It also provides unequal access to content and subject matter, opportunities to learn, quality teaching, and educational resources. The outcome of these combined factors is that low-track students necessarily fall further behind their higher-tracked peers. And because tracking placement is affected by racial ascription and stereotyping, this system disproportionately affects Black and Latino students once again.

Special education The process of labeling students for special education due to a disability is similar to track placement. Just as Black and Latino children are disproportionately placed in lower tracks, they are also disproportionately placed in special education. Across all states, ethnic groups and categories of disability, Black students have the greatest risk of being labeled with a disability and are more likely to be overrepresented in “soft” disability categories such as mental retardation, emotional disturbance, and learning disabilities than in “hard” categories such as hearing or

K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students 31

visual impairment (Harry and Klingner 2006; Losen and Orfield 2002; Skiba et al. 2008). Placement in special education remains of high concern precisely because special education leaves so much to be desired (in most incarnations it remains far from “special”) and often results in poor academic achievement (Fierros and Conroy 2002; Gottlieb et al. 1994; Perez et al. 2008).

Discipline The rate of school discipline for Black and Latino students follows the same dramatic differential as tracking and special education (Ayers et al. 2001; Ferguson 2000; Johnson et al. 2001). Racial ascription and stereotyping—notably the criminalization of Black/Latino communities, especially young men—contributes to disproportionality in both the amount of discipline students receive but also in the processes whereby discipline is meted out. Students of low socio-economic status, male students, and students of color—particularly Black students—are subject to the greatest disciplinary action (Ferguson 2000; Skiba et al. 2002). While whites make up 61 percent of students enrolled in public schools nationally, they comprise only 15 percent of the suspensions. Conversely, Blacks and Latinos, who comprise 17 percent and 16 percent of those enrolled in public schools, make up 35 percent and 20 percent of suspensions, respectively (Reyes 2006).

Conclusion For the several decades following the Civil Rights Movement and the accompanying implementation of major new civil rights policies, gains were made in narrowing educational inequality. However this progress stopped altogether or was reversed as soon as these civil rights policies began to be rolled back or altogether abandoned. While de jure segregation and explicit structures to ensure unequal schooling have ended, they were not replaced by widespread and sustained efforts to truly integrate or equalize schooling. Instead the many mechanisms of structural racism—entrenched segregation in most areas of social and economic life, persistent gaps in income, profound inequalities in wealth and assets—continue with fewer policies left in place to try and mitigate their effects. Broad-scale inequities persist. As a number of authors have described, racial dynamics may be more subtle and implicit now than they were in the past but they are no less effective at reproducing an unequal status quo (Bobo et al. 1997; Bonilla-Silva and Lewis 1999; Forman and Lewis 2006; Lewis et al. 2004). This is as true in educational institutions as it is in the broader society (Kozol 2005; Lewis et al. 2004; Wells et al. 2009). In assessing macro-level resource distribution as well as evaluating meso-level data on school patterns and micro-level data on everyday practices in schools, it becomes clear that Black and Latino students are systematically disadvantaged in and by the K–12 educational system.

32

Lewis and Manno

How then do we understand those applying for admissions to colleges and universities? Any discussion of diversity in higher education—what we have, what it would take to get more, what challenges we face and what opportunities are available—needs to recognize that potential applicants are not abstract individuals each pursuing their futures with only their own merits and efforts to draw upon (even when they imagine themselves thus). They are, instead, young people variously striving to thrive and succeed within quite different contexts of constraint and/or advantage.

Note 1

Racial ascription is the process whereby you look at another person, make an assessment about his or her racial group membership, and then interact with the person in a way that is at least in part informed by that assessment (Lewis 2003a).

References Adams, David W. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Allen, Walter, Bonous-Hammarth and David Ternishi. 2002. Stony the Road We Trod . . . The Black Struggle for Higher Education in California. San Francisco, CA: James Irvine Foundation. Anderson, James D. 1988. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ansalone, George. 2003. Poverty, Tracking, and the Social Construction of Failure: International Perspectives on Tracking. Journal of Children and Poverty 9(1): 3–20. Ansalone, George. 2006. Receptions of Ability and Equity in the US and Japan: Understanding the Pervasiveness of Tracking. Radical Pedagogy 8(1). Retrieved January 28, 2009 (http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue8_1/ansalone.html). Ayers, William, Bernardine Dohrn and Rick Ayers. 2001. Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in our Schools. A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators, and Citizens. New York: New Press. Bobo, Lawrence, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith 1997. Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a “Kinder, Gentler” Anti-Black Ideology. In S. Tuch and J. Martin (Eds.), Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change. Westport, CT: Praeger. Pp. 15–42. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo and Amanda Lewis. 1999. The New Racism: Racial Structure in the United States, 1960s–1990s. In P. Wong (Ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the United States. Boulder, CO: Westview. Pp. 55–101. Chesler, Mark, Amanda Lewis and Jim Crowfoot. 2004. Challenging Racism and Promoting Multiculturalism in Higher Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Clotfelter, Charles. 2004. After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Codjoe, Henry M. 2001. Fighting a “Public Enemy” of Black Academic Achievement— the Persistence of Racism and the Schooling Experiences of Black Students in Canada. Race Ethnicity and Education 4(4): 343–75. Condron, Dennis J. 2007. Stratification and Educational Sorting: Explaining Ascriptive Inequalities in Early Childhood Reading Group Placement. Social Problems 54: 139–60. Condron, Dennis J. 2008. An Early Start: Skill Grouping and Unequal Reading Gains in the Elementary Years. The Sociological Quarterly 49: 363–94.

K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students 33

Darling-Hammond, Linda. 2003. Colorblind Education: Will It Help Us Leave No Child Behind? Presentation at Stanford University, Colorblind Racism: The Politics of Controlling Racial and Ethnic Data Conference. October 3, 2003, Palo Alto, CA. Diamond, John B., Antonia Randolph, and James P. Spillane. 2004. Teachers’ Expectations and Sense of Responsibility for Student Learning: The Importance of Race, Class, and Organizational Habitus. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 35: 75–98. Farkas, George. 2003. Racial Disparities and Discrimination in Education: What Do We Know, How Do We Know It, and What Do We Need to Know? Teachers College Record 105(6): 1119. Ferguson, Ann A. 2000. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ferguson, Ronald F. 1998. Teachers’ Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap. In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (Eds.), The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 273–317. Fierros, Edward G. and James W. Conroy. 2002. Double Jeopardy: An Exploration of Restrictiveness and Race in Special Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group. Fordham, Signithia. 1996. Racelessness as a Factor in Black Students’ School Success: Pragmatic Strategy or Pyrrhic Victory? In T. Beauboeuf-Lafontant and D. S. Augustine (Eds.), Facing Racism in Education (2nd Edition), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Review Reprint Series No. 28. Pp. 209–44. Forman, Tyrone A. and Amanda E. Lewis. 2006. Racial Apathy And Hurricane Katrina: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Du Bois Review 3(1): 175–202. Gottlieb, Jay, Mark Alter, Barbara W. Gottlieb, and Jerry Wishner. 1994. Special Education in America: It’s Not Justifiable for Many. The Journal of Special Education 27: 453–65. Graybill, Susan. 1997. Questions of Race and Culture: How they Relate to the Classroom for African American Students. Clearing House 70(6) (Jul.–Aug.): 311–18. Harry, Beth and Janette Klingner. 2006. Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? Understanding Race and Disability in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. 2004. Separate and Unequal 50 Years after Brown: California’s Racial Opportunity Gap. UCLA, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Johnson, Heather Beth. 2006. The American Dream and the Power of Wealth: Choosing Schools and Inheriting Inequality in the Land of Opportunity. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Tammy, Jennifer Emiko Boyden, and William Pittz. 2001. Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: How Zero Tolerance Policies and High Stakes Testing Subvert Academic Excellence and Racial Equity. Oakland, CA: Applied Research Center. Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities. New York: HarperPerennial. Kozol, Jonathan. 2005. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, B. (1995). Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education. Teachers College Record 97(1): 47–67. Lewis, Amanda. 2003a. Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lewis, Amanda E. 2003b. Everyday Race-Making: Navigating Racial Boundaries in Schools. American Behavioral Scientist 47(3): 283–305. Lewis, Amanda, Maria Krysan, Sharon M. Collins, Korie Edwards and Geoff Ward. 2004.

34

Lewis and Manno

Institutional Patterns and Transformations: Race and Ethnicity in Housing, Education, Labor Markets, Religion and Criminal Justice. In Marian Krysan and Amanda Lewis (Eds.), Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity, New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 67–119. Lewis, Amanda E., Carla O’Connor, and Jennifer Mueller. 2009. Discrimination, Culture or Capital?: The Challenges of Under-Conceptualizing Race in Educational Research. In B. Ayers, T. Quinn and D. Stovall (Eds.), Handbook on Social Justice in Education. New York: Routledge. Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Litwack, Leon (1998). Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books. Losen, Daniel and Gary Orfield. 2002. Racial Inequality in Special Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group. Lucas, Samuel R. 1999. Tracking Inequality: Stratification and Mobility in American High Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Lucas, Samuel R. and Mark Berends. 2007. Race and Track Location in U.S. Public Schools. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 25: 169–87. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meier, Kenneth J., Joseph Stewart, Jr., and Robert E. England. 1989. Race, Class and Education: The Politics of Second Generation Discrimination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Mickelson, Roslyn. 2001. Subverting Swann: First and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. American Educational Research Journal 38: 215–52. Mickelson, Roslyn. 2003. When are Racial Disparities in Education the Result of Racial Discrimination? A Social Science Perspective. Teachers College Record 105(6): 1052–86. Monroe, Carla. 2005. Why Are “Bad Boys” always Black?: Causes of Disproportionality in School Discipline and Recommendations for Change. The Clearing House 79: 45–50. Montejano, David. 1987. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Nettles, Michael T. and L. W. Perna. 1997. The African American Education Data Book. Fairfax, VA: Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute. Oakes, Jeannie. 2003. Presentation at Stanford University, Colorblind Racism: The Politics of Controlling Racial and Ethnic Data Conference. October 3, 2003, Palo Alto, CA. Oakes, Jeannie. 2005. Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (2nd Edition). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Oakes, Jeannie and Gretchen Guiton. 1995. Matchmaking: The Dynamics of High School Tracking Decisions. American Educational Research Journal 32(1): 3–33. Orfield, Gary and Chungmei Lee. 2005. Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality. The Civil Rights Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Orfield, Gary and Nora Gordon. 2001. Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation. The Civil Rights Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Perez, Becky, Russell J. Skiba, and Choong-Geun Chung. 2008. Latino Students and Disproportionality in Special Education. Education Policy Brief 6: 1–8. Perry, Teresa, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III. 2003. Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.

K–12 Pipeline for Black and Latino Students 35

Reyes, Augustina H. 2006. Discipline, Achievement, and Race: Is Zero Tolerance the Answer? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education. Rist, Ray C. 1970. Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education. Harvard Educational Review 40: 72–3. Roscigno, Vincent J. and James W. Ainsworth-Darnell. 1999. Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources: Persistent Inequalities and Achievement Returns. Sociology of Education 72: 158–78. Saporito, Salvatore and Annette Lareau. 1999. School Selection as a Process: The Multiple Dimensions of Race in Framing Educational Choice. Social Problems 46(3): 418–39. Shapiro, Thomas. 2004. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press. Skiba, Russell J., Robert S. Michael, Abra Carroll Nardo, and Reece L. Peterson. 2002. The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment. The Urban Review 34: 317–42. Skiba, Russell J., Ada B. Simmons, Shana Ritter, Ashley C. Gibb, M. Karega Rausch, Jason Cuadrado, and Choong-Geun Chung. 2008. Achieving Equity in Special Education: History, Status, and Current Challenges. Exceptional Children 74: 264–88. Sorenson, Aage B. and Maureen Hallinan. 1986. Effects of Ability Grouping on Growth in Academic Achievement. American Educational Research Journal 23(4): 519–42. Steele, Claude. 1997. A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance. American Psychologist 53: 680–1. Steele, Claude and Joshua Aronson. 1998. Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans. In C. Jenks and M. Phillips (Eds.), Black– White Test Score Gap. Brookings Institution Press. Takaki, Ronald T. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Tenenbaum, Harriet R. and Martin D. Ruck. 2007. Are Teachers’ Expectations Different for Racial Minority than for European American Students? A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology 99: 253–73. Tyson, Karolyn. 2011. Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown. New York: Oxford University Press. U.S. Census. 2001. Statistical Abstracts of the United States 2001. Washington: Government Printing Office. Available at: http//www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/02statab/educ. pdf (accessed June 18, 2004). Walker, Erica N. 2007. Why Aren’t More Minorities Taking Advanced Math? Educational Leadership 5: 3. Retrieved January 15, 2009 (http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/nov07/vol65/num03/Why_Arenpercent27t_More_Minorities_ Taking_Advanced_Math percent2b.aspx). Walters, Pamela Barnhouse. 2001. Educational Access and the State: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities in Racial Inequality in American Education. Sociology of Education Special Issue: 35–49. Weinberg, M. (1977). A Chance to Learn: The History of Race and Education in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wells, Amy Stuart, Jennifer Jellison Holme, Anita Tijerina Revilla, and Awo Korantemaa Atanda. 2009. Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s Graduates. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wheelock, Anne. 1992. Crossing the Tracks: How Untracking Can Save America’s Schools. New York: New Press.

3 TESTING, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, AND EDUCATIONAL EQUITY Linda Darling-Hammond

The United States is falling behind a growing number of nations in every aspect of educational achievement and attainment. High school graduation rates—once at the top of international rankings—have been stagnant at about 70 percent since the 1970s, while nations like Finland, Norway, Greece, Germany, Japan, and South Korea have surged ahead and now graduate more than 90 percent of their students (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2008). And, whereas the U.S. was an unchallenged 1st in the world in higher education participation for many decades, it had slipped to 16th by 2008 (OECD 2008). Although about 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates go off to college, only about half of these are well-enough prepared educationally and wellenough supported financially to graduate with a degree—far too few for the knowledge economy we now operate. In the end, about 38 percent of an age cohort in the U.S. gains a college degree, as compared to about 50 percent in European countries, and over 60 percent in South Korea (Douglass 2006; KEDI 2006). For students of color in the United States, the pipeline leaks more profusely at every juncture. Only about 17 percent of African American young people between the ages of 25 and 29—and only 11 percent of Hispanic youth—had earned a college degree in 2005, as compared to 34 percent of white youth in the same age bracket (U.S. Census Bureau 2005). Although these young people of color will be a majority of public school students by 2025, investments in their education remain highly unequal and inadequate to meet today’s demands for the kinds of learning needed in the labor market. The schools they attend are both more segregated than they were 25 years ago and less adequately resourced (Darling-Hammond 2010). International studies confirm that the U.S. educational system not only lags most other industrialized countries in academic

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 37

achievement by high school, it is also allocates more unequal inputs and produces more unequal outcomes than its peer nations (OECD 2007). The stark disparities in access to high-quality education at the elementary and secondary levels translate into unequal access to higher education for low-income and minority students. Meanwhile, recognition of the increasing importance of education to individual and societal well-being has spawned an education reform movement in the United States focused on the development of new standards for students and new assessments to test students’ knowledge. All states have created these new standards, and many have put in place accountability systems that attach rewards and sanctions to students’ scores on standardized tests. The hope is that these systems will close the achievement gap. The largest federal education law, reauthorized at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), reinforces these testbased accountability systems. It requires all states receiving funding to test students annually and to enforce penalties for schools that do not meet specific test score targets each year, both for students as a whole and for groups defined by race/ ethnicity, language, socio-economic status, and disability. This law is intended to rectify the inequalities that have plagued the American education system and that currently threaten the nation’s future. Yet, as I describe in this chapter, NCLB has produced mixed results, including a variety of unintended negative consequences for the students it was intended to help. Civil rights advocates initially welcomed NCLB’s emphasis on improving education for disadvantaged students, and, indeed, the law contains some major breakthroughs. First, by flagging differences in student performance by race and class, it shines a spotlight on long-standing inequalities and has triggered attention to the needs of students neglected in many schools. Second, by insisting that all students are entitled to qualified teachers, the law has stimulated some productive recruitment efforts in states where low-income and “minority” students have experienced a revolving door of inexperienced, untrained teachers. This first-time-ever recognition of students’ right to qualified teachers is historically significant. However, as I discuss in this chapter, the press for greater accountability through testing has proved to be a double-edged sword. The creation of state standards to guide student learning has clarified goals, and in cases where standards are well-designed, has usefully upgraded expectations for knowledge and skills. Where assessments have been thoughtfully constructed and where standardsbased reform has been implemented as intended—with greater investments in high-quality learning materials and teaching, education for under-served students has been helped to improve. However, where low-quality tests have driven a narrow curriculum disconnected from the higher-order skills needed in today’s world, educational quality has declined, especially for low income students whose education has come increasingly to resemble test preparation, instead of the skills they desperately need to succeed in college and careers.

38

Darling-Hammond

Furthermore, where high-stakes testing has occurred in lieu of investing, discouraged students and overwhelmed schools have produced higher dropout rates rather than higher standards, reducing the pipeline to higher education while growing the school-to-prison pipeline (Wald and Losen 2003). These unintended consequences have emerged in part because the Act layers onto a highly unequal school system a set of ultimately unmeetable test score targets that disproportionately penalize schools serving the neediest students and those with the most diverse school populations. I explore these complex dynamics below.

The prospects and pitfalls of standards-based reform Using standards for improvement The original theory of standards-based reform anticipated that learning standards and assessments for students would be tied to investments in higher-quality and better-aligned learning materials, better-prepared teachers, and stronger supports for struggling students (O’Day and Smith 1993). This has, in fact, occurred in some states, especially in the first wave of such reforms in the early 1990s. Studies found that teachers and principals became more focused on state standards (DeBard and Kubow 2002; Woody et al. 2004), and that, in many places, schools paid greater attention to students who need support to improve their performance and invested in increased professional development for teachers (Ladd and Zelli 2002). In some states, such as Connecticut, Kentucky, and Vermont, high-quality assessments have been used to help educators figure out what aspects of the curriculum need improvement and to direct resources toward those areas (Herman et al. 2000; see also reviews by Linn 2000; Shepard 2000). These states’ performance assessments asked students to analyze texts; write persuasive essays; find, evaluate, synthesize, and use information; conduct and present the results of scientific investigations; and solve complex mathematical problems in real-world settings, showing their solution strategies and explaining their reasoning States that developed performance assessments found that teachers assigned more writing and more complex mathematical problem solving, and that achievement on these higher-order skills improved (Darling-Hammond and Rustique-Forrester 2005).These results are consistent with the findings of a number of studies that have found achievement gains for students in classrooms offering a welltaught problem-oriented curriculum featuring performance assessments requiring research, writing, problem-solving, and defense of ideas (see, for example, Darling-Hammond et al. 2008; Newmann et al. 1995; Lee et al. 1995. These skills are the ones required in college and contemporary knowledge-based careers.

Challenges of contemporary test-based accountability Despite the positive outcomes of performance assessments, many initiatives of the 1990s were scaled back or abandoned with the passage of No Child Left Behind

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 39

in 2002. The law caused many states to revert to multiple-choice tests in order to comply with federal requirements for annual testing of every child at low cost and to meet the Education Department’s approval process, which frequently rejected performance-based assessments. Unfortunately, when used in high-stakes contexts, these more narrow tests have been found to exert strong pressures to reduce the curriculum to subjects and modes of performance that are tested, and to encourage less focus on complex reasoning and performance. (For a review, see Darling-Hammond and Rustique-Forrester 2005). Teachers often prepare students by spending substantial instructional time on exercises that look just like the test items, reverting to worksheets filled with multiple-choice questions and drill based on recall and recitation that they feel will prepare students for the tests. In the process, instructional strategies such as extended writing, research papers, investigations, and computer use are de-emphasized (Haney 2000; Jones and Egley 2004; Popham 1999). Untested subjects or topics are also neglected. Most teachers report less attention to subjects that are not on the state test (Education Week 2001). In 2007, a study by the Center on Education Policy found that nearly half of all elementary schools had reduced time for science, social studies, arts, music, and physical education in response to the emphasis on reading and mathematics tests under No Child Left Behind (Center on Education Policy 2007). This has the additional effect of failing to provide the content knowledge upon which more complex reading skills develop and the foundations for disciplinary studies in high schools that could prepare students for college. Teachers in high-stakes testing states have reported not only that they no longer teach science or social studies, but that that they do use computers, because the state test requires handwritten answers (Pedulla et al. 2003), impeding the acquisition of both writing skills and computer skills (Russell and Abrams 2004). Teachers in high-stakes testing states are also more likely to report that they feel pressured to use test formats in their instruction and to teach in ways that contradict their ideas of sound instructional practice (Pedulla et al. 2003). One Florida teacher observed: Before FCAT [the state test], I was a better teacher. I was exposing my children to a wide range of science and social studies experiences. I taught using themes that really immersed the children into learning about a topic using their reading, writing, math, and technology skills. Now I’m basically afraid to NOT teach to the test. I know that the way I was teaching was building a better foundation for my kids as well as a love of learning. Now each year I can’t wait until March is over so I can spend the last two and a half months of school teaching the way I want to teach, the way I know students will be excited about.

40

Darling-Hammond

Another Florida teacher added: I believe that the FCAT is pushing students and teachers to rush through curriculum much too quickly. Rather than focusing on getting students to understand a concept fully in math, we must rush through all the subjects so we are prepared to take the test in March. This creates a surface knowledge or many times very little knowledge in a lot of areas. I would rather spend a month on one concept and see my students studying in an in-depth manner. (Southeast Center for Teaching Quality 2003, p. 15) Ironically, while U.S. teachers feel pressured to rush through topics, covering them superficially, higher-scoring countries in mathematics and science teach fewer concepts than most schools in the U.S. do each year, but teach them more deeply (Schmidt et al. 2005). Furthermore, studies show that increases in test scores on rote-oriented tests do not stimulate increases on assessments that look for analytic thinking and application of knowledge (Amrein and Berliner 2002; Klein et al. 2000). As a Texas teacher noted in a survey: I have seen more students who can pass the TAAS but cannot apply those skills to anything if it’s not in the TAAS format. I have students who can do the test but can’t look up words in a dictionary and understand the different meanings. . . . As for higher quality teaching, I’m not sure I would call it that. Because of the pressure for passing scores, more and more time is spent practicing the test and putting everything in TAAS format. (Haney 2000, Part 6, p. 10) These adjustments of the curriculum to match the test happen most frequently and intensely in schools serving low-income and minority students (DarlingHammond and Rustique-Forrester 2005), where meeting test score targets is a greater struggle, leaving these students with the least access to a rich and thoughtful curriculum that will prepare them for the higher education and jobs they need for lifelong success.

Testing rather than investing An equally large problem is that, while NCLB has dramatically increased the amount of testing in schools, it has not addressed the profound educational inequalities poor children experience. International studies repeatedly find that the U.S. has one of the most inequitable education systems in the industrialized world, with a 3-to-1 ratio between high- and low-spending schools in most states, multiplied further by inequalities across states (Darling-Hammond 2010). Most high-achieving countries not only provide high-quality universal early

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 41

childhood care and health care for children, they also fund their schools centrally and equally, with additional funds to the neediest schools. Furthermore, they support a better-prepared teaching force, funding competitive salaries and highquality teacher education, mentoring, and ongoing professional development for all teachers—at the state’s expense (Darling-Hammond 2010). By contrast, NCLB’s small allocation—less than 10 percent of most schools’ budgets—does not substantially improve the under-resourced schools where many students currently struggle to learn. Furthermore, the law does not require that states demonstrate progress toward equitable and adequate funding or greater opportunities to learn. Although NCLB requires “highly qualified teachers,” the lack of a federal teacher supply policy makes this a hollow promise in many communities. School funding lawsuits brought in more than 40 states describe apartheid schools serving low-income students of color, with crumbling facilities, overcrowded classrooms, out-of-date textbooks, no science labs or art or music courses, and a revolving door of untrained teachers, while their suburban counterparts spend twice as much for students with fewer needs, offering expansive libraries, up-to-date labs and technology, small classes, well-qualified teachers, expert specialists, and luxurious facilities (Darling-Hammond 2010). As Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) has noted, the problem we face is not an “achievement gap” but an educational debt that has accumulated over centuries of denied access to education and employment and has been reinforced by deepening poverty and resource inequalities in schools. Ladson-Billings argues that until American society confronts the accumulated educational debt owed to these students and takes responsibility for the inferior resources they receive, children of color and of poverty will continue to be left behind.

The testing gauntlet: How diverse schools are penalized The biggest problem with NCLB is that it mistakes measuring schools for fixing them. NCLB’s complex regulations for showing “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) toward test score targets aimed at “100 percent proficiency” have created a bizarre situation. Projections indicate that more than 80 percent of the nation’s public schools will be labeled “failing” by 2014—even many that already score high and those that are steadily improving from year to year (Packer 2004; Wiley et al. 2005), most of them because they missed just one of the many targets set for test participation rates and scores on multiple tests. These targets include specific expectations for scores and participation rates on reading and math tests for each of up to eight different groups defined by race/ethnicity, language background, disability status, and income, resulting in as many as 30 or more separate targets a diverse school might have to achieve. As a result of the law’s design, the chances that a school will be designated as failing increase in proportion to the number of demographic groups served by the school. Ironically, this makes well-integrated schools more likely to be identified

42

Darling-Hammond

as failing than segregated ones that achieve at the same levels. Two separate studies (Novak and Fuller 2003; Sunderman and Kim 2004) have found that schools serving poor, minority, and limited-English proficient students and schools with a greater number of subgroups for which they are held accountable are disproportionately identified as “needing improvement” under NCLB. Worse still, there is an unwinnable Catch-22 for those serving English language learners and special needs students. In Alice in Wonderland fashion, the law assigns these students to special subgroups because they do not meet the proficiency standard, but for purposes of calculating AYP, they are removed from the subgroup as they become proficient, so it is impossible for the subgroup ever to become 100 percent proficient. Schools serving a significant share of these learners will inevitably be labeled failing, even if all of their students consistently make strong learning gains. Schools serving the nation’s neediest students are asked to show the greatest gains in the shortest time, typically with the fewest resources, and under rules that, if they serve new English language learners, for example, label them as failing no matter how much they improve. From that starting point, other consequences unfold.

Consequences for the neediest schools and students There is growing evidence that the law’s strategy for “improving” schools may, paradoxically, reduce access to education for the most vulnerable students. Research by Clotfelter, Ladd, and colleagues (2004) has found that labeling schools as failures makes it even harder for them to attract and keep qualified teachers. As one Florida principal queried, “Is anybody going to want to dedicate their lives to a school that has already been labeled a failure?” Second, schools that have been identified as not meeting AYP standards must use their federal funds to support choice and “supplementary services,” such as privately provided after-school tutoring, thus leaving even fewer resources to spend on improving their core instructional programs. Unfortunately, many of the private supplemental service providers have proved ineffective (Sunderman 2007), and transfers to higher-quality schools have been impossible in communities where such schools are unavailable or uninterested in serving students with low achievement, poor attendance, and other problems that might bring their own average test scores down. Thus, rather than expanding educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color, the law further reduces the quality of education in the schools these students must attend. Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students’ education. Paradoxically, NCLB’s requirement for disaggregating data by grade and other defined subgroup creates incentives to eliminate those at the bottom of each subgroup. A number of studies have found that systems that sanction schools based on average

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 43

student scores lead to schools retaining students in grade so that their grade-level scores will look better (even though these students ultimately do less well and drop out at higher rates), excluding low-scoring students from admissions, and encouraging such students to transfer or drop out (Darling-Hammond and Rustique-Forrester 2005). Recent research in New York, Texas, and Massachusetts shows how schools have raised test scores while “losing” large numbers of low-scoring students. In one large Texas city, which served as the model for NCLB, scores soared while tens of thousands of students—mostly African American or Latino—disappeared from school. Educators reported how exclusionary policies were used to hold back, suspend, expel, or counsel out students in order to boost test scores (Vasquez Heilig and Darling-Hammond 2008). Overall, fewer than 40 percent of African American and Latino students graduated. Indeed, in part because of high-stakes testing, graduation rates for African American and Latino students have returned to pre-1954 levels in a growing number of states.

What it would take to really leave no child behind Hundreds of proposals for tweaking various provisions of NCLB have been made, but a more substantial paradigm shift that directly confronts both educational quality and equality is required if the nation is to move from an inequitable and inadequate education system focused increasingly on compliance to a system that is organized to support powerful learning for all students. The Forum on Education and Accountability (2004), a group of over 100 education and civil rights organizations, has argued that “the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.” These organizations—which include the National Urban League, the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Aspira, the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Alliance of Black School Educators, and the Council for Exceptional Children, as well as the National School Boards Association, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators—offer proposals focused on teacher development, stronger curriculum, and supports for school improvement. How might this be done? Among other things, a new paradigm for national education policy should be guided by twin commitments to support learning on the part of students, teachers, and schools and to pay off the educational debt, making it possible for all students to profit from more productive schools.

Support student learning and school progress A new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) should evaluate schools on multiple measures, including such factors as student progress and continuation,

44

Darling-Hammond

graduation, and classroom performance on tasks beyond multiple choice tests. Gains should be assessed by how individual students improve over time, rather than school averages that can be influenced by changes in who is assessed. To eliminate the statistical gauntlet that penalizes schools serving the most diverse populations, the current punitive and confusing system of Adequate Yearly Progress should be replaced with a continuous improvement model. Such a model would judge schools on whether students make progress on an index that includes multiple measures of learning, including assessments that evaluate higher order thinking and performance, that ensure appropriate assessment for special education students and English language learners, and that include progress through school and graduation rates. Schools that are lagging should be helped to improve, through a diagnostic review by experts who can help guide useful improvements and direct resources to where they are needed. “Opportunity-tolearn standards” should provide benchmarks for the provision of adequate materials, facilities, and teachers, and should be guaranteed for schools that are in need.

Pay off the educational debt A new ESEA must finally address the deep and tenacious educational debt that holds our nation’s future in hock. Federal education funding to states should be increased and tied to each state’s movement toward equitable access to education resources. Furthermore, the obvious truth—that schools alone are not responsible for student achievement—should propel attention to programs that will provide adequate health care and nutrition, safe and secure housing, and healthy communities for children. Major investments must be made in the ability of schools to hire and support well-prepared teachers and leaders. While NCLB sets an expectation for hiring qualified teachers, it does not include policy supports to make this possible. Federal leadership in developing an adequate supply of well-qualified teachers is needed, just as it has been essential in providing an adequate supply of physicians for more than 40 years through investments in medical training for those who prepare in shortage specialties and locate in underserved areas. A focused and purposeful Marshall Plan for Teaching (see Darling-Hammond 2007) could ensure that all students are taught by well-qualified teachers within the next five years through a federal policy that (1) recruits new teachers using service scholarships that underwrite their preparation for high-need fields and locations and adds incentives for expert, veteran teachers to teach in high-need schools; (2) strengthens teachers’ preparation through incentive grants to schools of education and districts to create professional development schools, like teaching hospitals, which offer top-quality urban teacher residencies to candidates who will stay in high-need districts; and (3) improves teacher retention and effectiveness by ensuring that novices have mentoring support during their early years—a period during which 30 percent of them drop out.

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 45

For an annual cost of $3 billion, or less than one week in Iraq, the nation could underwrite the high-quality preparation of 40,000 teachers annually—enough to fill all the vacancies currently filled by unprepared teachers each year; seed 100 top quality urban teacher education programs and improve the capacity of all programs to prepare teachers who can teach diverse learners well; ensure mentors for every new teacher hired each year; and provide incentives to bring expert teachers into high-need schools through targeted improvements in salaries and working conditions. Students will not learn to higher levels unless they experience good teaching, a strong curriculum, and adequate resources. In fact, adopting tests and punitive sanctions, without making investments, does not create genuine accountability and increases the likelihood that the most vulnerable students will be more severely victimized by a system not organized to support their learning. A policy agenda that leverages equitable resources and invests strategically in high-quality teaching would support real accountability—that is, accountability to children and parents for providing the conditions in which students can acquire the skills they need to succeed in college and careers in the twenty-first century.

References Amrein, A. and D. Berliner. 2002. High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning. Educational Policy and Analysis Archives 10(8). Retrieved [November 21, 2003] from: http://www.epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18. Center on Education Policy 2007, July. Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era. Washington, DC: Author. Clotfelter, C. T., H. F. Ladd, J. L. Vigdor, and R. A. Diaz. 2004. Do School Accountability Systems Make It More Difficult for Low Performing Schools to Attract and Retain High Quality Teachers? Journal of Policy and Management 23(2): 251–72. Darling-Hammond, L. 2007. A Marshall Plan for Teaching: What It Will Really Take to Leave No Child Behind, Education Week Commentary 26(18) (January 10): 48, 28. Darling-Hammond, L. 2010. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. NY: Teachers College Press. Darling-Hammond, L. and E. Rustique-Forrester. 2005. The Consequences of Student Testing for Teaching and Teacher Quality. In Joan Herman and Edward Haertel (Eds.), The Uses and Misuses of Data in Accountability Testing. The 104th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. 289–319. Darling-Hammond, L., B. Barron, P. D. Pearson, A. Schoenfeld, E. K. Stage, T. D. Zimmerman, G. N. Cervetti, and J. L. Tilson. 2008. Powerful Learning: What We Know about Teaching for Understanding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. DeBard, R., and P. K. Kubow. 2002. From Compliance to Commitment: The Need for Constituent Discourse in Implementing Testing Policy. Education Policy 16(3): 387– 405. Douglass, J. A. 2006. The Waning of America’s Higher Education Advantage. Paper CSHE9-06. Berkeley, CA: Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley.

46

Darling-Hammond

Education Week. 2001. Quality Counts 2001: A Better Balance. Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education (11 January). Forum on Educational Accountability. 2004, as updated. Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind. http://www.edaccountability.org/Joint_Statement.html. Haney, W. 2000. The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education. Educational Policy Analysis Archives 8(41): http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/. Herman, J. L., R. S. Brown, and E. L. Balcer. 2000. Student Assessment and Student Achievement in the California Public School Systems. Retrieved [Novemeber 18, 2004] from: cresst96.cge.ucla.edu/CRESST/Reports/TECHS19.pdf. Jones, B. D. and R. J. Egley. 2004. Voices from the Frontlines: Teachers’ Perceptions of High-Stakes Testing. Education Policy Analysis Archives 12(39). Retrieved [August 10, 2004] from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v12n39/. Klein, S. P., L. S. Hamilton, D. F. McCaffrey, and B. M. Stetcher. 2000. What Do Test Scores in Texas Tell Us? Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation. Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI) 2006. Statistical Yearbook of Education, 2006. Seoul: KEDI. Ladd, H. F. and A. Zelli. 2002. School-Based Accountability in North Carolina: The Responses of School Principals. Educational Administration Quarterly 38(4): 494–529. Ladson-Billings, G. 2006. From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools. Educational Researcher 35(10): 3–12. Lee, V. E., J. B. Smith, and R. G. Croninger. 1995. Another Look at High School Restructuring: More Evidence that It Improves Student Achievement and More Insight into Why. Issues in Restructuring Schools. Issue report no. 9 (Fall), Madison, WI: Center on the Organization and Restructuring of Schools, University of Wisconsin. Pp. 1–9. Linn, R. L. 2000. Assessments and Accountability. Educational Researcher 29(2): 4–16. Newmann, F. M., H. M. Marks, and A. Gamoran. 1995. Authentic Pedagogy: Standards that Boost Performance. American Journal of Education 104(4): 280–312. Novak, J. and B. Fuller. 2003. Penalizing Diverse Schools? Similar Test Scores but Different Students Bring Federal Sanctions (December). Berkeley, CA: Policy Analysis for California Education. O’Day, Jennifer A. and Marshall S. Smith. 1993. Systemic School Reform and Educational Opportunity. In Susan Fuhrman (Ed.), Designing Coherent Education Policy: Improving the System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2007. Programme for International Student Assessment 2006: Science competencies for tomorrow’s world. Paris: OECD. Accessed at: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/index.asp. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2008. Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, 2007. Paris: OECD. Packer, J. 2004, July 28. No Child Left Behind and Adequate Yearly Progress Fundamental Flaws: A Forecast for Failure. Paper presented at the Center for Education Policy Forum on Ideas to Improve the Accountability Provisions. Washington, DC. Pedulla, J. J., L. M. Abrams, G. F. Madaus, M. K. Russell, M. A. Ramos, and J. Miao. 2003. Perceived Effects of State-Mandated Testing Programs on Teaching and Learning: Findings from a National Survey of Teachers. Boston: National Board on Testing and Public Policy, Boston College. Popham, W. J. 1999. Why Standardized Test Scores Don’t Measure Educational Quality. Educational Leadership 56(6): 8–15.

Testing, No Child Left Behind, and Equity 47

Russell, M. and L. Abrams. 2004. Instructional Uses of Computers for Writing: The Impact of State Testing Programs. Teachers College Record 106(6): 1332–57. Schmidt, W. H., H. C. Wang, and C. McKnight. 2005. Curriculum Coherence: An Examination of US Mathematics and Science Content Standards from an International Perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies 37(5): 525–59. Shepard, L. A. 2000. The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture. Educational Researcher 29(7): 4–14. Southeast Center for Teaching Quality. 2003, December 3–5. Teacher Leaders Network Conversation: No Child Left Behind. Retrieved July 25, 2007, from http://www.teacherleaders.org/old_site/Conversations/NCLB_chat_full.pdf. Sunderman, G. 2007. Supplemental Educational Services under NCLB: Charting Implementation. Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project, UCLA. Sunderman, G. and J. Kim. 2004. Inspiring Vision, Disappointing Results: Four Studies on Implementing the No Child Left Behind Act. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2005. Current Population Reports, Series P-20; Current Population Survey, March 1990 through March 2005. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. Vasquez Heilig, J. and L. Darling-Hammond. 2008. Accountability Texas Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 30: 75–110. http://epa.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/30/2/75. Wald, M. and D. Losen. 2003. Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Wiley, E. W., W. J. Mathis, and D. R. Garcia. 2005. The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal “No Child Left Behind” Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region. Tempe, AZ: Educational Policy Studies Laboratory, Arizona State University. Woody, E. L., M. Buttles, J. Kafka, S. Park, and J. Russell. 2004, February. Voices from the Field: Educators Respond to Accountability. Retrieved [November 19, 2004] from: pace. berkeley.edu/ERAP_Report-WEB.pdf.

SECTION II

The Diversity Imperative: Postsecondary Institutional and Legal Ramifications

4 A LONG VIEW ON “DIVERSITY” A century of American college admissions debates Lisa M. Stulberg and Anthony S. Chen

Introduction When we think of “diversity” in higher education now, we typically think of race and the heated debate about race-based affirmative action. We think of the 1978 Supreme Court decision in the Bakke case, which declared it constitutional for colleges and universities to create a diverse student body by using race as a “plus” factor in admissions decisions. We think of the last half of the twentieth century and the legacy of the civil rights movement and landmark rulings like Brown or Bakke. Yet the concept of “diversity” in higher education pre-dates Bakke, pre-dates the civil rights movement, and pre-dates the American focus on racial inequality in higher education. In this chapter, we draw on the existing literature and original archival research to demonstrate some of the ways that “diversity” as a concept has formed a part of debates about elite institutions of higher education since the first quarter of the twentieth century.1 Building on foundational studies in the field, we argue that diversity debates of the past century have been intimately connected to broader conversations about what constitutes a qualified college applicant as well as broader conversations about the culture, character, and mission of American higher education (Karabel 2005; Lemann 1999; Wechsler 1977). College admissions over the past century has never been fully—even largely—about academic qualifications, and today’s diversity debates are the latest installment in a long-standing conversation about the non-academic qualities that factor into college admissions decisions and how they relate to the fundamental purposes of higher education. “Diversity” has meant different things at different times in the history of higher education. In the first half of the twentieth century, college administrators at elite

52

Stulberg and Chen

institutions often used the concept of “diversity” to exclude groups of students that they believed threatened their campus culture and traditions. By the 1940s, “diversity” began to imply an opening up of college campuses, to a range of ideas and people. This view continued through the early 1960s, as college administrators envisioned that their campuses would be filled with students with varied interests and backgrounds—not only students with the strongest grades and test scores but also students who would contribute to campus life and culture in other ways. And, since the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, “diversity” in college admissions has come to connote the inclusion of historically excluded or marginalized groups (Karabel 2005). While we often associate the “diversity rationale” with Bakke, a commitment to “diversity” in some form has been part of admissions practice at elite institutions since at least the early twentieth century.

College admissions before World War I and in the interwar years At the beginning of the twentieth century, going to college was almost wholly the province of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) men hailing from the uppermost reaches of the class structure; and the process by which these men were admitted to college was far from selective. Certain college preparatory schools enjoyed close ties with certain colleges, and there was a minimal need to exercise selectivity. As David O. Levine (1986) writes: Before World War I, institutions of higher learning matriculated essentially all interested young people. A potential student’s parents or principal—or, more commonly, his headmaster—simply wrote the president or dean of a college about the student; the boy arrived at the college in September, took the school’s entrance examination, and enrolled. The student inquired about only one college; there was no admissions office, no formal application process. (p. 137) Even students who did not pass the entrance exams could be admitted conditionally (Wechsler 1977, p. 4) or could retake the tests until they received passing marks (Karabel 2005, p. 22). This cozy arrangement began to shift somewhat during the early interwar years, as growing numbers of Americans began to view higher education as “a critical avenue of economic and social mobility” (Levine 1986, p. 148) and as an expanding pool of applicants began to meet admissions criteria. Among the most successful of the new applicants were Jews, a development that met with more than a little chagrin at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The growing influx of Jews into prestigious colleges led to concern that their presence was fundamentally altering the college experience. There were worries that the focus

A Long View on “Diversity” 53

on grades and test scores in the admissions process would attract students who were too concerned with schoolwork, and not focused enough on football or social clubs—students who were anti-social “grinds, introverts and cranks” (1936 comment on University of Chicago, quoted in Wechsler 1977, p. 230). Many associated this type of student with Jews. As a 1930 critic averred about Columbia University undergraduates: one is struck by the complete lack of a Gentile undergraduate atmosphere about any group of them. Singularly absent is the grace, the swagger, the tall attractive sleekness. . . . Seen quickly, there is even a certain grubbiness about them. One somehow expects them all to be Jews, for it is usually the Jewish members of such a group who lower the communal easy handsomeness. (quoted in Wechsler 1977, p. 174) To resolve their newfound “Jewish problem,” many elite colleges responded by considering, debating, and ultimately imposing both formal and informal quotas on Jewish admissions. Elite schools also developed a veiled mechanism to keep the number of Jews down in the years after World War I: they established new admissions criteria that had the effect of handicapping Jewish applicants. More specifically, admissions officers redefined merit—that is, the qualities deemed necessary for admission. High grades and test scores were no longer enough. Now applicants had to demonstrate that they had “character,” “leadership” potential, and a balance between academic and extracurricular interests (Karabel 2005; Wechsler 1977).2 They had to demonstrate that they fulfilled the “ideal of the all-around man” (Karabel 2005, p. 132). This shift was particularly apparent at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. According to sociologist Jerome Karabel (2005), the “Anglo-Saxon gentlemen who presided over the Big Three” understood that “a system of selection focused solely on scholastic performance would lead to the admission of increasing numbers of Jewish students.” They responded by devising an “entirely new system of admissions” that had no precedent or counterpart. “The centerpiece of the new policy,” writes Karabel, “would be ‘character’—a quality thought to be in short supply among Jews but present in abundance among high-status Protestants” (pp. 1–2). It was hence during the 1920s that elite schools first became “selective,” in the sense they admitted only a portion of the applicants who met their admissions requirements rather than automatically admitting all who qualified (Karabel 2005; Wechsler 1977). It was also when elite schools expanded their admissions staff and established free-standing admissions offices (Karabel 2005). Neither step had been necessary in earlier decades, but once schools redefined their admissions criteria to include “character,” they needed people who could take the time to discern the character of potential students, through careful readings of files and applicant interviews. Both changes were a direct outgrowth of the desire to limit

54

Stulberg and Chen

the number of Jewish students on their campuses (Karabel 2005, p. 129; Wechsler 1977, pp. 133, 150). By the outbreak of World War II, college admissions had become selective in a manner that would be familiar to most contemporary observers. The major impetus for the transformation had been the influx of Jewish students, which schools sought to contain by redefining what it meant to be qualified for admission. In place of academic ability, elite schools began to stress intangible qualities such as character, leadership, and extracurricular experience.

Rethinking college admission qualifications again: Post-World War II American higher education was transformed by World War II. The GI Bill substantially increased college diversity by making higher education an attainable goal for many working- and middle-class men—for the first time in American history. Their enrollment, followed shortly by that of their baby boomer children and the significant expansion of federal student aid for higher education, caused a massive expansion of higher education (Duffy and Goldberg 1998). A gradual slackening of anti-Semitism made it possible for Jews to enroll in elite colleges and universities in greater numbers, and subsequent decades witnessed the growing inclusion of women and students of color as well. During the postwar period, elite colleges again grappled with their definition of merit, of what it meant to be a qualified college applicant. Non-academic factors continued to factor heavily in admissions decisions. The postwar definition of a qualified student echoed pre-war preferences for well-rounded students who were neither too studious nor too removed from campus social life (Karabel 2005). Some Harvard administrators, for instance, worried that it was a “place only for grinds . . . a big-city college full of muckers and public-school boys and meatballs” rather than “virile, masculine, red-blooded he-men” (quoted in Karabel 2005, p. 205).3 However, Sputnik’s launch in 1957 and the deepening of Cold War competition with the Soviets spurred elite colleges to admit more students with superior academic qualifications (Karabel 2005). Elite college administrators began to rely more heavily on grades and test scores, and the academic quality of admitted students rose substantially (Duffy and Goldberg 1998, pp. 35–43, 82).

Taking “risks” before race: Admissions experiments, 1962 The post-Sputnik return to academic criteria was short-lived. As schools increasingly relied on standardized measures like grades and SAT scores to make admissions decisions (Crossland 1974), college administrators again worried about the kind of student they would attract. Yale’s dean of admissions, for example, said in 1960: “Sometimes I lie awake nights worrying about whether we’ve been

A Long View on “Diversity” 55

kidding ourselves into taking a lot of brainy kids who are too egocentric ever to contribute much to society” (quoted in Lemann 1999, p. 146). By 1962, Brown University admissions officials worried that using grades and test scores as the sole bases of student admission was problematic, writing: one of the most unfortunate outgrowths of increasing admission competition is the rise of the “sleeve plucker”: the self-centered student whose concern for his own advancement makes him haggle over grades and drives him into just enough activities to give the appearance of contribution without real enthusiasm either for learning or for the well-being of the community. (Brown University 1962b, p. 2) Williams College leaders worried that a sole focus on grades and test scores was dangerously narrowing the college’s applicant pool (Duffy and Goldberg 1998, p. 44) and excluding “an important part of the potential diverse leadership of a coming generation” (quoted in Ferrer 1962, p. A7; Sawyer 1961, p. 12). Brown and Williams provided two notable responses to the early-1960s conversations about applicant character and qualification. They began experiments to redefine merit and to increase student diversity, but without the tinges of anti-Semitism and without even an implicit goal to defend WASP dominance on their campuses. Instead, these two schools sought systematically to identify non-academic qualities and test their effects, in order to “improve the criteria for admission to college” (Ford Foundation 1962, p. 1). They were motivated by a concern about an over-reliance on grades and test scores as criteria for admission and by a genuine interest in understanding their own admissions choices and the impact these had on student outcomes and campus culture. Williams and Brown sought and received multi-year grants from the Ford Foundation, in 1962, to test alternative definitions of merit by admitting “risk” or “sleeper” students to comprise 10 percent of each class (Ferrer 1962; Hechinger 1963; Turpin 1965). Both programs included a strong evaluative component: both schools conducted studies of which kinds of “risky” applicants fared best on their campuses and in their post-college lives. Brown officials wrote, in their proposal to Ford, that their goal was to rigorously catalogue non-academic qualities, test their impact on student outcomes, and then use these results to inform future admissions decisions (Brown University 1962a, p. 1). At Williams, the experiment was the brainchild of its new president, economist Jack E. Sawyer. He outlined his plan in his 1961 inaugural presidential address, noting of his admissions proposal: we would also be seeking the individual with a flair, a forte, a strength of character that would enrich the student population and the College; the individual of whom one can sometimes say with conviction, “there is going

56

Stulberg and Chen

to be an interesting person;” the young man whose promise of leadership or notable contribution to diverse fields has stirred the respect and enthusiasm of someone whose judgment we have learned to trust. We will be seeking excellence but in more forms than one. (Sawyer 1961, p. 13. Emphasis is original) Williams’ admissions officers categorized the kinds of “risks” that it took in admissions and closely assessed which seemed to be successful and which were not. They also kept close tabs on the approximately 30 students admitted through the program each year, often writing about them individually in internal reports. Neither the Williams experiment nor the Brown experiment—particularly in their early years—was focused on racial diversity. As a final report on the Williams program would assert, it was “not conceived as a device to admit” more students of color (Williams College 1974, p. 21). However, both colleges were concerned with increasing student diversity and redefining merit. A Williams report on the first group of experimental admits noted “the diversity of the group” but also found that the group was relatively privileged, in that a sizable proportion of the parents of these admits had at least some college education and were employed as professionals (1963 Ford Study Group (Class of 1967) n.d., pp. 1–2). Boasting about diversity—but with a culturally conservative tone—an early internal report of the program found: The range and vitality of the contributions which this first group has made to the campus activities has been good. A glance at the Berkshire Symphony, the athletic rosters, lists of Sunday School teachers and dormitory councils would show more than ordinary representation from this group. Also, for what it is worth, there have been two Beatle Haircuts, but no beards among the group. (Smith n.d., p. 3)

“Diversity” before race As the “risk” experiments of Williams and Brown suggest, student “diversity” formed a crucial consideration for elite colleges during the early 1960s as they contemplated what constituted a qualified applicant, what kinds of students they wanted on their campuses, and what their role was and should be in training and grooming American leaders. Indeed, long before it was linked to race, “diversity” was invoked in a number of different senses. In the 1920s, for instance, many elite schools began to use the concept of “geographic diversity” to control the number of east coast, urban, public school admits, many of whom were Jewish.4 Schools like Harvard and Columbia began actively recruiting and giving preference to applicants from Idaho or Georgia or rural Indiana, applicants who added geographic diversity to their student body and allowed them to fill some slots

A Long View on “Diversity” 57

from outside the urban centers near their campuses (Karabel 2005, pp. 175, 364; Wechsler 1977, p. 152). During the 1940s, some elite schools articulated an admissions philosophy that seemed to value broad diversity for the educational and social benefits it could bring to all students on campus. Karabel notes, for instance, that Harvard focused on the goal of a “balanced” class after World War II. A 1946 report envisioned a college in which “rich men’s sons and poor, serious scholars and frivolous wasters, saints and sinners, Puritans and papists, Jews and Gentiles will meet in her Houses, her Yard, and her athletic fields, rubbing off each other’s angularities and learning from friendly contact what cannot be learned from books” (quoted in Karabel 2005, p. 184). During the early 1960s, elite schools again explicitly stressed the importance of diversity of the student body. A 1961 New York Times article on the college admissions process quoted an annual report that the director of admissions of Columbia College circulated to high schools, which articulated Columbia’s commitment to diversity of student interests, talents, and backgrounds. “Because of the importance of students learning from each other,” read the report, “the college is stressing diversity of geographical and socio-economic background as well as of academic fields of interest” (quoted in “Selecting College Freshman” 1961, p. E9). Harvard, as well, stressed the academic and social benefit to all students of student diversity on campus. As dean of admissions Wilbur J. Bender wrote: [M]y prejudice is for a Harvard College with a certain range and mixture and diversity in its student body . . . . Won’t even our top-one-per-cent [sic] be better men and better scholars for being part of such a college? (Quoted in Puttkammer 1962, pp. 18–19; on Harvard also see Karabel 2005, p. 276) Yale, too, began to focus, by the mid-1960s, on a building a “‘well-rounded’ class” (Karabel 2005, p. 367), as the pioneering new dean of admissions worried that Yale admitted safe but boring WASPy candidates—“the well-rounded, pleasant, jovial, athlete type” from New England prep schools, rather than “the abrasive kid,” “the scientist,” “the egghead” or “the oddball” (Karabel 2005, pp. 349–350).

Racial diversity and the beginning of affirmative action in college admissions In the early 1960s, some schools extended their conception of “diversity” to students of color, particularly African Americans. The decisive years were 1963 and 1964, when the “classic phase” (Bayard Rustin quoted in Hall 2005, p. 1233) of the civil rights movement was reaching a zenith. In the summer of 1964, a New York Times article on college programming proclaimed that “[t]he emphasis

58

Stulberg and Chen

this year on the Negro appears to have reached a new high” (Currivan 1964, p. E7). Many schools began recruiting efforts for African American students (Duffy and Goldberg 1998, pp. 138–139). By the mid-1960s, there were a few active national programs that helped with this process as well. First, the independent National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students (NSSFNS), which was founded in 1948, sponsored a new program in the 1960s called the College Assistance Program. This effort worked to recruit high school students from around the country to substantially increase African American college enrollment (Gordon and Wilkerson 1966, p. 137). Second, the Cooperative Program for Educational Opportunity (CPEO) was a recruitment program organized in 1962 by the eight Ivy League schools, joined a year later by the Seven Sisters, and funded by the Carnegie Corporation in 1964 to improve outreach to Black students (Yale University, Brewster Records, February 5, 1964, p. 1). A number of colleges and universities—like Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale, among the Ivies—began their own summer programs for similar purposes (Duffy and Goldberg 1998, p. 139; Gordon and Wilkerson 1966, pp. 140–141). The president of Dartmouth, John Sloan Dickey, noted in the New York Times in the summer of 1964, that the programs had a compensatory purpose, to determine “whether an intensive and highly individualized effort on a campus of higher education can help remedy the academic and cultural deprivation which stands between a promising potential and its educational fulfillment” (quoted in Currivan 1964, p. E7). Often, when college administrators talked about “deprivation” or “disadvantaged” students during this time, they were talking in coded language about African Americans. Many of these early racial diversity efforts were primarily recruiting programs, designed to expand the pool of qualified applicants. But some of them were racebased affirmative action programs that took race into consideration at the point of admission. The earliest of such programs were launched in the first few years of the 1960s, by schools such as the University of Michigan and the University of California at Los Angeles as well as Cornell, Wesleyan, and Swarthmore (Stulberg and Chen 2008). These early-adopting schools were led by administrators who were inspired by the civil rights movement and who were unconstrained in their ability to establish programmatic initiatives. Other schools soon followed suit later in the decade, including a set that initially adopted race-based affirmative action after the Watts riots and another set that did so after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Stulberg and Chen 2008). Indeed, through the mid- and late-1960s, elite colleges became more and more heavily invested in increasing racial diversity on campus. For instance, in 1966, Hampshire College founders observed that “[d]iversity of student population has become one of the ten commandments of the admission policy of most private colleges” (quoted in Duffy and Goldberg 1998, p. 181). In 1967, a New York Times article implied that there was essentially a de facto “student diversity” goal shared by the Ivies:

A Long View on “Diversity” 59

Yesterday, when the schools sent out their 12,354 highly prized letters of acceptance, one, undoubtedly, went to the archetypal Episcopalian from Greenwich and another to the farmer’s son from Montana, for balance. But, increasingly, letters also are going to the promising Negro from Newark and to the public high school student from the Bronx. (Borders 1967, p. 1) Competition for a small pool of students of color that were deemed qualified grew especially intense. Having racial minority students on campus quite nearly became a marker of status. In 1967, Eugene Wilson, Amherst’s admissions director, explicitly pointed out this dynamic in a Time article entitled “Courting the Negro”: “Admissions people used to talk about what the average College Board score of their entering class was. . . . Now the status symbol is how many Negroes you get” (“Courting the Negro” 1967, n.p.). The connection between race and diversity would grow deeply controversial in subsequent decades—so much so that it would obscure the much longer history of diversity in college admissions. But taking personal qualities and social/ family background characteristics into account was, in fact, something that college administrators had long done—at least since the 1920s, when they worked aggressively to limit the number of Jews on campus. By the late 1960s, when the civil rights movement had prompted many admissions officials to take race-based affirmative action, elite schools were simply applying a rationale that they had been relying on for decades.5 As Karabel argues on this point: “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had never been pure academic meritocracies, and each of them had long given considerable weight to nonacademic qualities in admissions decisions.” He notes, however, that the difference with giving weight to students of color at the point of admission was that this particular non-academic quality did not favor the WASP elite. “In this specific sense,” Karabel continues, “the institutionalization of preferential treatment for African Americans alongside other privileged categories was a genuinely historic change, for it marked a shift away from the logic of ‘social closure’ toward one of social inclusion” (Karabel 2005, p. 407).

Conclusion Over the past century, selective American colleges have actively debated and redefined merit, sometimes for the purposes of social exclusion, sometimes for inclusion, sometimes for both. The notion of “diversity”—which we now associate so closely with race—is not a new concept or a new value for admissions officers, though, of course, its meaning has changed over time. By the time the civil rights movement presented itself to admissions officers, there was already an apparatus in place institutionally and a way of thinking about diversity in admissions that debates about race could join. These debates were part of a trajectory

60

Stulberg and Chen

in admissions, not a break from tradition or a new set of questions for admissions officers. In the notion of racial diversity—of the role that racial background should play in admissions decisions—we see one more form of “diversity” and one more concern for what it means to be a qualified applicant. Those who are interested in diversity issues in higher education now would do well to take a longer view of college admissions and admissions politics, to acknowledge the extensive and complex history of the notion of “diversity.” This acknowledgment frees us up to recognize that the connection between diversity and race is a historically specific one, to think about diversity with respect to other identities and social locations, like gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, economic background, and disability status, for instance. It also allows us to at least partially disentangle diversity concerns from the contentious politics of affirmative action: to recognize that “diversity” is not a concept that was simply invented to justify affirmative action. It allows us to bring historical insights and lessons to bear on the heated debates around diversity that mark the present, to understand the ways in which current diversity concerns are intimately connected to high-stakes questions—questions that reflect concerns that have been around for at least a century—about who is qualified to go to college and what college culture should look like in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

This chapter focuses almost exclusively on elite institutions of higher education because of their central role in driving policy-making and debate and also because questions of access have been most pronounced there. Nicholas Lemann (1999) writes that the concept of “leadership” was “code for, roughly: It isn’t going to be all grinds from Stuyvesant High School who want to be professors when they grow up” (p. 151). The role that gender and sexuality played in admissions is fascinating here and deserves further study. In particular, a specific kind of masculinity and (hetero)sexuality was certainly affirmed in this period through the admissions process in places like Harvard. As Karabel (2005) includes this quote, he notes of the dean of admissions: “Homosexuals, in particular, had long been a preoccupation of Bender’s” (p. 253). As Karabel (2005) writes, for instance: “Yale’s historic emphasis on ‘geographical diversity’ had been rooted in no small part in its desire to limit the number of Jewish students” (p. 364). Increasing racial diversity on campus to provide educational and social benefits for all students was just one of a number of rationales for race-based affirmative action that emerged during the 1960s. Other rationales included a remedial rationale, based on the idea that affirmative action was necessary to compensate for historical discrimination of racial minority groups, and a form of the diversity rationale that focused primarily on the need to diversify the professions for which colleges and universities were training their students. (This last justification may have emerged slightly later than the others.) For a discussion of the rationales offered to justify the legitimacy of affirmative action during the 1970s, see Wilkinson (1979, chapter 10, especially pp. 274–289).

A Long View on “Diversity” 61

References Borders, W. 1967. Ivy League Shifts Admission Goals. New York Times. April 17. P. 1. Brown University. 1962a. A Program to Develop Criteria for the Selection and Admission of Academic Risks and a Program of Admission Based on Such Criteria. Funding proposal to the Ford Foundation. PA 063-0065, Ford Foundation Archives. September. Brown University. 1962b. Report to Secondary Schools: Class of 1966. PA 063-0065, Ford Foundation Archives. October. Courting the Negro. 1967. Time Magazine. April 28. n.p. Retrieved July 5, 2007 from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,843675,00.html. Crossland, F. E. 1974. Final Grant Evaluation: Williams College. PA 620-0155, Ford Foundation Archives. November 27. Currivan, G. 1964. The Disadvantaged: New Programs Prepare Students for Advanced Schooling. New York Times. August 16. P. E7. Duffy, E. A., and Goldberg. A. 1998. Crafting a Class: College Admissions and Financial Aid, 1955–1994. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferrer, T. 1962. Universities Appraising Admissions Procedures. The Washington Post, Times Herald. December 2. P. A7. Ford Foundation. 1962. Letter to President John E. Sawyer. PA 620-0155, Ford Foundation Archives. March 1. Gordon, E. W., and Wilkerson, D. A. 1966. Compensatory Education for the Disadvantaged. Programs and Practices: Preschool through College. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. Hall, J. D. 2005. The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past. Journal of American History 91: 1233–63. Hechinger, F. M. 1963. Brown to Study Academic “Risks.” New York Times. January 22. P. 7. Karabel, J. 2005. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Lemann, N. 1999. The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Levine, David O. 1986. The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Puttkammer, C. 1962. Negroes in the Ivy League. ERIC Database: 150924. Sawyer, J. E. 1961. Induction Address. PA 620-0155, Ford Foundation Archives. October 8. Selecting College Freshman. 1961. New York Times. January 8. P. E9. Smith, P. F. n.d. 10% Group Report—Mid Year 1964–1965. PA 620-0155, Ford Foundation Archives. Stulberg, L. M. and Chen, A. S. 2008. Beyond Disruption: The Forgotten Origins of Affirmative Action in College and University Admissions, 1961–1969. Working Paper 2007-001, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. http://www. fordschool.umich.edu/research/pdf/chen-stulberg.pdf. Turpin, D. 1965. “Sleeper” Students Called Talent Pool. Los Angeles Times. November 4. P. A1. Wechsler, H. S. 1977. The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Wilkinson, III, J. H. 1979. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration. New York: Oxford University Press.

62

Stulberg and Chen

Williams College. 1974. Final Report: Ford Admissions Study on Admissions Criteria. PA 6200155, Ford Foundation Archives. August. Yale University. Brewster Records. 1964. Box 71, File: 15. Press Release from Yale University News Bureau. February 5. 1963 Ford Study Group (Class of 1967). n.d. PA 620-0155, Ford Foundation Archives.

5 THE DIVERSITY IMPERATIVE IN ELITE ADMISSIONS Mitchell L. Stevens and Josipa Roksa

The endurance of racial affirmative action in selective college admissions is a puzzle. Public sentiment about racial affirmative action, here defined as the explicit and positive consideration of minority racial status in the evaluation of applicants, has shifted in recent years from ambivalence to hostility. Ballot measures and court rulings outlawing consideration of race in admissions at public universities in California, Michigan, Texas, and Washington demonstrate widespread disapproval of the practice, yet racial affirmative action enjoys strong support among academic elites (Gross and Simmons 2007; Zimmerman 2003). Many of the most selective private institutions in the country evaluate African American and Hispanic applicants preferentially relative to Whites and Asians (Espenshade and Radford 2009). Why does affirmative action persist at elite colleges and universities? This chapter provides a synoptic explanation. Drawing on insights of several strands of sociological theorizing and recent empirical inquiries into the organizational mechanics of selective admissions, we argue that the survival of racial affirmative action is best understood in the context of U.S. higher education’s metrical status system. Within this system, quantitative measures describing supposedly objective characteristics of schools and their student populations largely determine organizational quality. Minority enrollments were integrated into this metrical status system beginning in the 1970s when, in their efforts to participate in the national debate about race and social opportunity, academic leaders explicitly sought to recruit and enroll greater numbers of non-white students. In the process they created a new dimension of organizational excellence—“diversity”—as well as its numerical proxy: the percentage of undergraduates who are non-white U.S. citizens. The contemporary expectation that academically excellent schools also be racially heterogeneous sustains elite academic support for racial affirmative action in selective college admission. We call this expectation the diversity imperative.

64

Stevens and Roksa

Status by numbers “Diversity,” as it is currently defined by most admissions offices, endures because a racially heterogeneous student body is a marker of high organizational status in U.S. higher education. Status is the amount and kind of prestige individuals, groups, or organizations enjoy in comparison to others. The mechanisms people develop to accrue and maintain status tend to be crucial to the overall machinery of modern societies. Max Weber was the first sociologist to explain this in detail. Put most simply, Weber’s (1946) contention was that people care not only about how much money and influence they have, but also about how they are regarded by others. People who have wealth and clout want others to believe that they have it deservedly. An obdurate fact about status for anyone wishing to have it is that someone else has to confer it. People cannot award the prize of status to themselves. To get around this problem, status-seekers need mechanisms for conferring status that function more or less independently of the parties who want it. Sociologist Michael Sauder (2005, 2006) calls these mechanisms status systems—rules for the distribution of status that obtain within some community of persons, groups, or organizations, and that have some autonomy (though not necessarily complete independence) from all of the parties seeking prizes in a particular status game. As many others have pointed out, higher education is important because it is a pivotal status system in contemporary American society. Within this system, status is conferred to individuals, by schools, through the awarding of degrees (Collins 1979; Labaree 2010). The amount of status a particular school can confer depends on the status it enjoys, and today this status is measured in part by the amount of diversity any particular school can claim to possess. The numerical system that U.S. schools now use to demonstrate their diversity has a long history, in which—ironically—the sheer number of institutions plays a significant role. From the earliest days of the republic, U.S. higher education has been a crowded organizational field. First hundreds and now thousands of schools vie with one another for relative prestige. There are several reasons for this large population of schools: the decision by the early U.S. federal government to not establish a national university; religious pluralism in general and Protestant denominationalism in particular, which abetted the founding of schools to train many cadres of religious leaders; competition for Eastern capital on the Western frontier, which encouraged new municipalities to found colleges in order to mark their cosmopolitanism; and a federated system of government in which jurisdiction over schooling is largely the purview of states (Hall 1984; Rudolph 1962). An important consequence of this organizational fecundity is that colleges and universities have long sought to distinguish themselves from one another in a usually fierce competition for students. In the American educational status system, a college degree confers some status all by itself, but the crowded field means that schools also have a strong incentive to create status distinctions among one

Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions 65

another. Unlike in most European nations, in which central governments define which universities are the most elite, or in England, in which two ancient universities long conferred top status honors without rivals, U.S. colleges and universities historically have been obliged to work out novel mechanisms for distributing prestige among a vast and varied organizational population. As social scientists of higher education have variably explained (Avery et al. 2003; Schudson 1972; Wechsler 1977), a key mechanism schools have developed for adjudicating inter-organizational status is admissions statistics. To wit: numbers describing the competitiveness and composition of undergraduate enrollments mark organizational prestige. Metrics describing the academic caliber of entering students have become a convenient, universal means of comparing schools. The proportion of applicants who are admitted each year, their geographical dispersal (how many U.S. states are represented? how many foreign countries?), admitted students’ average SAT scores and class rank—all are used as a kind of a shorthand with which schools and their clients describe and compare relative status. Racial affirmative action became integrated into this numerical prestige system in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the mid-twentieth-century rights movements. Statistics describing the racial composition of entering classes came to serve as a proxy for the officially important but amorphous organizational trait of “diversity.” As benign and transparent as this status system may appear, it has been very consequential for the role of race in admissions evaluation at selective schools. Expressing status numerically does not merely convey information. It also affects our perceptions of what “counts” as worth taking into consideration. Things that can be counted tend to be regarded as more important than things that are hard to quantify (Desrosières 2002; Espeland and Stevens 1998, 2008; Weber 1978).

The rise of diversity at an elite college How was diversity converted into a numerical measure in practice? Mitchell Stevens’ (2007) historical and ethnographic account of admissions practices at the College, a liberal arts institution in the Northeastern U.S., provides a portrait of how the goal of diversity became a prominent one in elite higher education and how the number of non-white U.S. citizens in any particular student population came to serve as diversity’s proxy. While the history of one school can hardly be called definitive of the whole, findings from this study are quite consonant both with general histories of higher education (Rudolph 1962; Thelin 2004) and large-scale quantitative studies of racial preferences in selective admissions (Bowen and Bok 1998; Espenshade and Radford 2009; Grodsky 2007; Karen 1990). The College’s archives suggest that the education of non-whites was not a serious institutional concern in the early stages of the school’s history. Only six black students attended the College in the first century of its existence. These few did not have an easy time. A letter addressed to a College trustee and signed by

66

Stevens and Roksa

several black students in November 1921 complained of the use of racial epithets at College athletic competitions and the invocation of negative racial stereotypes in a glee club performance. The trustee responded promptly. “I hope that I should be among the first to deplore any conduct on the part of the student body . . . that seemed calculated to humiliate or provoke you or your friends because of your race . . .” he wrote. But he discounted the extent of institutional responsibility for the untoward events. Perhaps the racial slurs were “isolated instances,” the products of the “thoughtlessness and insufficient experience of youth,” he suggested. “What you must consider is whether the College as a whole has treated you with the politeness and kindness with which . . . you undoubtedly deserve to be treated.”1 It would be almost fifty years before the archives included evidence of more proactive institutional efforts on behalf of black students. Priorities changed in the 1960s, during what political sociologist John Skrentny (2002) has called “the minority rights revolution,” a broad swath of grassroots protest, cultural change, and institutional adaptation that made America a more officially diverse place during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Though it was far removed from major urban centers and generally a conservative place, the College participated in the political and racial turbulence that was transforming the rest of the country. A memo to trustees from the College’s president in 1969 included an assurance that: [E]specially in light of the disrupting and often violent tactics which characterize the behavior of students on many campuses, it should be a source of great pride to us all that [our] students, black and white, have expressed themselves. . . . in an orderly, rational, and civilized way on issues on which they feel just as deeply and strongly as students on other campuses. Race fairly quickly became officially important at the College during the years of the minority rights revolution. Not a single black face appeared in the photoladen viewbook of 1964. Testimony to the marginal place of race in institutional priorities, annual admission reports did not even distinguish minority applications and enrollments at the time. Though there is record of an organized black student presence on campus by the late 1960s, the actual number of black students was small—by one account, only seventeen. By the end of that same decade, however, the College was paying considerable official attention to race. In a speech to the campus in the spring of 1969 the president announced plans for an “African-American Cultural Center,” a new facility “where the black perspective can be presented through discussions, lectures, art exhibits, and similar educational, cultural, and social events.” He said the decision had been prompted by discussions with the College’s Black Union, and also by the “tragic fact . . . that our educational programs in this country largely ignore the history and culture of the 11 percent of the population who belong to the Negro race.” Additionally the president promised that the College would “actively seek out black candidates

Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions 67

who might qualify for administrative openings” and develop teacher-exchange programs with predominantly black colleges and universities. The alumni magazine’s coverage of that speech reported that black enrollment was expected to double the following year. From this point onward the archives indicate a sustained effort to enroll greater numbers of black students. In 1970 the local town newspaper reported that the College’s black student organization had scheduled “a Sub-Freshman Weekend for prospective black students,” to which some 200 had been invited and 50 to 100 were expected to attend. The weekend’s events included interviews with admissions officers, panel discussions, and an afternoon lecture by black activist and intellectual Franklin Williams. Publicity got at least as far as New York City, where the story was given a few column inches in a prominent Harlem newspaper. The next admissions viewbook, published in 1973, featured photographs of black students. Viewbooks later in the 1970s made proud reference to campus visitors such as Alex Haley and Shirley Chisholm, and the facility announced by the president in 1969, later renamed the Afro-Latin Cultural Center, was described as a vital, even historically significant, campus organization. The 1987 viewbook listed full academic programs in African American, Asian, and women’s studies. A memorial to the College’s first black graduate was unveiled in 1990.

Diversity by numbers As many have investigated in some detail, including several of the authors in this volume, “diversity” came to be an official ideal of educational excellence at selective colleges and universities during and after the years of the minority rights revolution (Grodsky 2007; Karabel 2005; Lemann 1999). But how were schools, their clients, and their competitors to know if particular schools were meeting the diversity ideal? In keeping with the longstanding tradition of using admissions statistics as proxies for institutional quality, diversity was rendered numerical. Particular schools came to be regarded as more or less “diverse” on the basis of the extent to which the racial demographics of their student populations mirrored those of the wider society (Bowen and Bok 1998). And “race” came to be rather precisely (some would say narrowly [Guinier 2003]) defined as racial self-identification within a five-category scheme: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. Once diversity acquired this metric—the percentage of non-white U.S. citizens enrolled—the metric itself became an organizational aspiration. Over the last quarter century, growing the diversity number became a virtually universal goal in selective college and university admissions. The College’s admission officers are acutely aware that the official measure of diversity is a metric of organizational prestige. As one of them noted: I’d say that the College wants to encourage diversity but even if they didn’t want to they’d have to do it anyway, so they would. They want to but they

68

Stevens and Roksa

also have to, because that’s what’s expected of a school of a certain caliber. It has to be diverse. These words suggest just how powerful the pressure for diversity in elite higher education can be. Racial pluralism in an undergraduate student body is “expected.” It is widely regarded as what all schools of a certain caliber do; schools now try to best one another not only on measures of their students’ academic excellence but also on their racial composition. While higher education has increased the admission and enrollments of minority students overall, their greater presence at selective institutions has been particularly notable (Roksa et al. 2007). Between 1967 and 1976, the proportion of black students at Ivy League schools grew from 2.3 to 6.3 percent, and at another sample of selective schools from 1.7 to 4.8 percent (Karen 1991b). Selective schools continue to enroll especially high percentages of black and Hispanic students, relative to measures of their academic performance and relative to their proportionate representation in applicant pools (Espenshade and Radford 2009). Schools persist in their commitment to increasing diversity numbers, even though it can cost colleges on another metric: standardized test scores, which are often used as an index of colleges’ overall academic caliber.2 Yet even while making some concessions on academic metrics, institutions admitting high proportions of racial minority students gain points on another important measure of excellence: diversity. The proportion of undergraduate students who are members of official U.S. minority groups is a widely used proxy for a school’s diversity and, by extension, one measure of its overall excellence (Espeland and Sauder 2009; Stevens 2007; Urciouli 2003). That diversity statistics measure an important organizational attribute is suggested by their prominence in schools’ own promotional literature, as well as in college guides, which routinely list statistics describing the racial composition of entering cohorts alongside measures of academic performance. Colleges and universities exist in a competitive organizational field, and official minority applicants have become an important axis of the competition. Because there are only a limited number of official minorities in each year’s applicant pool to selective colleges, schools vie with one another to admit a share of the same small pool. As the admission officer quoted above explained: There is this idea out there [on campus] that we’re just not doing enough, or we’re not going to the right [high] schools and getting the right kids. But what they don’t know is that the kids we want, the kids we are considering for the College, also have lots of other options. A kid that we take with 1200 boards might be comparing us with Harvard, Stanford. . . . I was talking with an administrator here the other day, and she [said] that we should take kids. . . . who have SAT scores 150 points below our class average. Well if our class average is [about 1350] now, that means kids with 1200

Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions 69

boards. Well these kids with 1200 boards have lots of other options, and they’ll look at them and they’ll go to the place with the most prestige. Just like any other kid. The exasperation of admission officials about these minority statistics is a consequence of the fact that “the numbers” can be used to evaluate individual as well as organizational performance. As the admission officer explained: One of the reasons the numbers matter is that you can point to the percentage multicultural as something we’ve accomplished. Something we’ve done. So I can say that when I got to the College seven years ago the multicultural number was seven percent, and now it’s fourteen percent. I can point to that. But have other things on campus changed? Has the culture of the campus changed? Does it feel different now to students of color? Those things are harder to pin down. But the numbers of students is something we can point to. If diversity did not have this numerical proxy, there would be no definitive way for skeptics to confirm organizations’ claims of being “diverse.” The quantification of diversity creates shared terms through which organizations and their audiences can evaluate diversity claims in a standardized fashion. Compared to the array of creative means by which schools might talk about diversity, there are relatively fewer ways for them to be creative in counting the number of students in an entering class who are U.S. citizens and who report a race other than white. And should the count ever err in the direction of the fantastic, it is a fairly simple matter for a second counter to set the record straight.

The uncertain future of the diversity imperative The amorphous goal of diversity, widely and conscientiously adopted by elite institutions during the years of the minority rights revolution, was integrated into the numerical status system of U.S. higher education in the form of statistics describing the racial composition of admitted and enrolled students. These statistics became markers of organizational excellence. Once this occurred, admission officers faced strong incentives to explicitly consider race in their evaluation of applicants. The current expectation that schools of a certain caliber be racially heterogeneous exerts pressure on elite schools to practice racial affirmative action, even though this pressure lacks the force of law (Espeland and Sauder 2009; Sauder and Espeland 2009). While racial affirmative action is now part of general understandings of what it means to be an elite institution, as well as in the organizational routines of many schools, its survival in selective admissions is uncertain. It has been challenged in numerous state referenda and in the U.S. Supreme Court (Grutter v. Bollinger,

70

Stevens and Roksa

Grutter v. Gratz) , and is illegal in several of the nation’s most prestigious public university systems. Sociological scholarship has consistently shown that practices regarded as legitimate can persist long after the original impetus for their creation fades away (Dobbin and Sutton 1998; Selznick 1957). However, legitimacy, like status, cannot be declared. It must be conferred. Racial affirmative action is widely regarded as legitimate by faculty and administrators at elite schools, but at the same time its legitimacy has been challenged in the legal and judicial arenas and in much popular discussion. So today’s higher education leaders work at a peculiar historical moment in which their peers encourage an admissions practice whose public legitimacy is suspect. To be sure, most colleges and universities continuing to practice racial affirmative action have the legal room to do so. Court rulings and laws often do not provide clear direction for compliance, and their interpretation and enactment tend to evolve over time (Dobbin 2009). The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in the Michigan cases, for example, supported the ideal of racial diversity (Grutter) even while they outlawed the practice of giving applicants standardized scores on the basis of their race (Gratz). The Grutter decision allowed for the consideration of race in admissions decisions as long as this consideration is part of what the court called an “individualized, holistic review.” Although particular approaches to achieving diversity have come under serious scrutiny, the overall legitimacy of diversity as an academic ideal remains secure. Still, higher education leaders probably will be obliged to develop new strategies for pursuing diversity in a shifting legal and cultural climate. Any strategy will be controversial during the present era of higher education restructuring, in which public resources for higher education grow ever more scarce (Gumport 2000). Diminished resources invariably mean more competition for what remains. And contemporary social science provides ammunition for those seeking to further undermine the legitimacy of racial affirmative action. Recently published research shows that while African American and Hispanic applicants receive a significant advantage in admissions considerations at many selective schools, Asian applicants are disadvantaged in admissions selection, relative to their high academic performance in high school and on standardized tests (Espenshade and Radford 2010). Moreover, recent trends showing that women comprise the majority of college graduates (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006), and the common practice of affirmative action for football players (Shulman and Bowen 2003), make the appropriate relationship between diversity as a general academic ideal and particular admissions practices harder to discern. Yet academic leaders continue to tinker with their conceptions of diversity and their practices for achieving it. One alternative strategy for defining and measuring diversity that has received much recent attention is class-based affirmative action. Elite schools have long sought to admit and sponsor a few academically gifted but economically disadvantaged students. More recently, they have engaged in highly public and occasionally systematic efforts to admit greater

Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions 71

numbers of young people from poor and middle-class households (Bowen et al. 2005). American ideals about equality of opportunity seem to generate broad support for such practices. Conveniently, diversity in the form of social class is amenable to quantification. Whether expressed as the percentage of students who receive government aid, or institutional scholarships, or the percentage of students coming from families below a certain income threshold, economic diversity can be communicated with numbers—and thus potentially easily integrated into U.S. higher education’s metrical status system. Nevertheless, there are a number of countervailing realities. Class-based affirmative action is no substitute for race-based affirmative action if an institution’s goal is to admit greater numbers of African Americans and Hispanics (Bowen et al. 2005; Kane 1998). Moreover, economic discrimination has never had the political clout or mobilizing capacity that race has had in American educational history (Karen 1991a, 1991b). And admitting students who cannot pay full tuition is likely to be more susceptible to economic cycles, as evidenced by retrenchment from no-loan policies at some schools during the current recession (Jaschik 2010). The likelihood of a diversity imperative based on class (or any other social characteristic) with the same pervasiveness and endurance as the one for race is hard to predict, as is the future of affirmative action in U.S. higher education generally. However one thing is certain: colleges will continue to seek marks of distinction, and to favor clear measures of relative prestige. If diversity remains an academic ideal, the imperative to quantify it will remain as well.

Notes 1 2

Emphasis in the original. This and all historical documents specific to the College presented in this chapter are drawn from College archives, via one of the authors’ own research and collection of Xerox reproductions. This trade-off occurs because test scores of African American and Hispanic applicants tend to be substantially lower than those of whites (Bowen and Bok 1998; Massey et al. 2003; see also Jencks and Philips 1998).

References Avery, Christopher, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser. 2003. The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowen, William G. and Derek Bok. 1998. The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bowen, William G., Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin. 2005. Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Buchmann, Claudia, and Thomas DiPrete. 2006. The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Family Background and Academic Achievement. American Sociological Review 71: 515–41. Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society. New York: Academic Press.

72

Stevens and Roksa

Desrosières, Alain (trans. Camille Naish). 2002. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dobbin, Frank. 2009. Inventing Equal Opportunity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dobbin, Frank, and John R. Sutton. 1998. The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resource Management Divisions. American Journal of Sociology 104: 441–76. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Michael Sauder. 2009. How Rankings Affect Diversity. The Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 18: 587–610. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 1998. Commensuration as a Social Process. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 313–43. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 2008. A Sociology of Quantification. European Journal of Sociology 49: 401–36. Espenshade, Thomas J., and Alexandria Walton Radford. 2009. No Longer Separate Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Guinier, Lani. 2003. Admissions Rituals as Political Acts: Guardians at the Gates of Our Democratic Ideals. Harvard Law Review 117: 114–224. Gumport, Patricia J. 2000. Academic Restructuring: Organizational and Institutional Imperatives. Higher Education 39: 67–91. Grodsky, Eric. 2007. Compensatory Sponsorship in Higher Education. American Journal of Sociology 112: 1662–712. Gross, Neil, and Solon Simmons. 2007. The Social and Political Attitudes of American Professors. Working paper, Harvard University, Department of Sociology. Hall, Peter Dobkin. 1984. The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900. New York: New York University Press. Jaschik, Scott. 2010. Dartmouth Drops “No Loans”. Inside Higher Ed, February 9, available at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/09/dartmouth. Jencks, Christopher, and Meredith Phillips. 1998. The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Kane, Thomas. 1998. Racial and Ethnic Preferences in College Admissions. In C. Jencks and M. Phillips (Eds.), The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 431–56. Karabel, Jerome. 2005. The Chosen. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Karen, David. 1990. Toward a Political-Organizational Model of Gatekeeping: The Case of Elite Colleges. Sociology of Education 63: 227–40. Karen, David. 1991a. Achievement and Ascription in Admission to an Elite College—a Political Organizational Analysis. Sociological Forum 6: 349–80. Karen, David. 1991b. The Politics of Race, Class, and Gender: Access to Higher Education in the United States 1960–1986. American Journal of Education 99: 208–37. Labaree, David F. 2010. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of American Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lemann, Nicholas. 1999. The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux. Massey, Douglas S., Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy, and Mary J. Fischer. 2003. The Source of the River: The Social Origins of America’s Selective Colleges and Universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roksa, Josipa, Eric Grodsky, Richard Arum, and Adam Gamoran. 2007. Changes in Higher Education and Social Stratification in the United States. In Y. Shavit, R. Arum,

Diversity Imperative in Elite Admissions 73

and A. Gamoran (Eds.), Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pp. 165–91. Rudolph, Frederick. 1962. The American College and University: A History. New York: Knopf. Sauder, Michael. 2005. Symbols and Contexts: An Interactionist Approach to the Study of Social Status. The Sociological Quarterly 46: 279–98. Sauder, Michael. 2006. Third Parties and Status Position: How the Characteristics of Status Systems Matter. Theory and Society 35: 299–321. Sauder, Michael, and Wendy Nelson Espeland. 2009. The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change. American Sociological Review 74: 63–82. Schudson, Michael. S. 1972. Organizing the “Meritocracy”: A History of the College Entrance Examination Board. Harvard Educational Review 42: 34–69. Selznick, Philip. 1957. Leadership in Administration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shulman, James L., and William G. Bowen. 2003. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Skrentny, John David. 2002. The Minority Rights Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard University Press. Stevens, Mitchell L. 2007. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thelin, John R. 2004. A History of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2003. Excellence, Leadership, Skills, Diversity: Marketing Liberal Arts Education. Language and Communication 23: 385–408. Weber, Max. 1946. Class, Status, Party. In H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 180–95. Weber, Max (trans. Quenther Roth and Claus Wittich). 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wechsler, Harold. 1977. The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Zimmerman, Jonathan. 2003. Universities Too United on U-M Diversity Cases. Detroit Free Press, 20 June.

Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 244 (2003). Grutter v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

6 THE DIVERSITY RATIONALE Its limitations for educational practice Mitchell J. Chang and María C. Ledesma

In December 1997, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor became the site for the latest high profile political struggle over the fate of race-conscious affirmative action policies in higher education. Close to six years later in June 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on two distinct but interrelated cases from Michigan. In Michigan’s law school case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court’s majority not only upheld the use of race in university admissions, the Justices also reaffirmed Justice Lewis Powell’s diversity rationale, putting an end to speculations that his opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) represented his sole dissenting voice. Upholding Justice Powell’s diversity rationale by a slim 5 to 4 margin, the Supreme Court in Grutter declared that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions” (2003, p. 330). After the highest court in our nation revisited and ruled on race-conscious admissions practices, we discussed in a 2005 article, titled “Beyond magical thinking: Doing the real work of diversifying our institutions,” whether Justice Powell’s claim and reasoning about diversity, particularly as they relate to race and U.S. higher education, serve more than a legal purpose and can actually help guide educational practice. We revisited that article for this book because in recent years, we have seen an increasingly more superficial use of Powell’s reasoning or what we refer to as the diversity rationale, such as in college recruitment materials to market unique features of campus life. In our 2005 article, we argued that this superficial use of Powell’s diversity rationale is a problematic trend because it obfuscates the important structural and policy changes that campuses must undertake in order to realize the educational benefits associated with racial diversity. For this chapter, we build upon our 2005 article to offer a deeper understanding of the diversity rationale and to more closely examine its educational limitations.

The Diversity Rationale 75

Although we draw from some of the text in that article, especially to cover the legal background, we also reworked both the background information and central arguments. In our 2005 article, we mainly focused on evaluating the usefulness of the legal logic undergirding the diversity rationale in guiding educational policy and practice. For this chapter, we also point to how the diversity rationale can easily become an empty slogan that undermines a more intentional course of action geared toward maximizing the benefits associated with racial diversity.

The diversity rationale Before the University of Michigan’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger cases, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) stood as the seminal affirmative action case in higher education. In this case, Allan Bakke, a white male, brought suit against the University of California at Davis Medical School. Bakke sought legal action after being denied admission for two consecutive years in 1973 and 1974. Despite the fact that there were many differences that distinguished Bakke from his fellow applicants, such as the fact that he was a Vietnam veteran, Bakke contended that U.C. Davis’ practice of designating 16 of its 100 admission slots for traditionally under-represented students, including African American, Chicano/Latino, and American Indian students, represented an illegal special admissions program. In the end the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the California Circuit Court’s earlier decision that U.C. Davis’ separate special admissions program, which set hard and fast numbers, was essentially a quota-based practice and therefore unlawful. However, the Supreme Court overruled the California Court’s decision that race could not be taken into account in making admissions decisions and upheld the use of race-conscious practices as a “plus” factor in university admissions. The manner by which the Court arrived at this decision remains controversial to this day. Part of the controversy rested on the fact that the Bakke case produced six written opinions that generated two different camps of thought. Four justices, including Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun, wrote in favor of the medical school’s admissions practices. Justice Stevens (joined by Justices Stewart, Burger, and Rehnquist) rejected U.C. Davis’ admissions practices and also wrote in support of banning the use of race altogether. And then there was Justice Powell’s opinion, which has long been regarded as the “swing vote” that helped to uphold race-conscious admissions practices. In his own opinion, Powell rejected three of the four arguments that legal counsel of the medical school put forth to defend their admissions program – more on this later. Essentially, Powell only agreed with the claim that race could be used as one of many factors to achieve the educational benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body. Since Powell both rejected U.C. Davis’ admissions practice and upheld the use of race, he thus sided with neither camp and his reasoning became regarded as “Powell’s diversity compromise” or “Powell’s diversity rationale.”

76

Chang and Ledesma

Powell argued that the attainment of a diverse student body broadens the range of viewpoints collectively held by those students and subsequently allows an institution to provide an atmosphere that is “conducive to speculation, experiment and creation – so essential to the quality of higher education” (p. 312). This type of atmosphere, Powell believed, enhances the training of the student body and better equips the institution’s graduates for civic engagement. Calling on Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), Powell explained, “The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this nation of many peoples” (p. 312). In Powell’s mind, not only should the student body resemble the society from which it is drawn, but it must be intimately connected with it. In reference to the medical school, Powell wrote: Physicians serve a heterogeneous population . . . . [A] qualified medical student with a particular background – whether it be ethnic, geographic, culturally advantaged or disadvantaged – may bring to a professional school of medicine experiences, outlooks, and ideas that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates to render with understanding their vital service to humanity. (p. 314) Because such goals are essential to the nation’s future and are protected under the First Amendment, Powell concluded that race-conscious admissions practices, when narrowly tailored to meet these goals, serve a compelling state interest. Powell may have found support and inspiration for his argument from the friend-of-the-court (amicus) brief submitted jointly by Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania, more commonly referred to as the Ivy brief. Of the 58 amicus briefs that were submitted to the Court in Bakke, the Ivy brief was the only one cited by Powell, and much of his language on diversity mirrors what was written in that brief as well as what was previously written by other influential educators. For example, in making the case that learning must not occur in an “academic vacuum,” Powell employed the words written in 1977 by William Bowen, then president of Princeton University, to explain that when individuals are exposed to differences in others, they are “stimulate[d] . . . to reexamine even their most deeply held assumptions about themselves and their world” (p. 45). Borrowing from this idea, Powell concluded that it is in this reexamination process that indifference is shed and truth and shared values are discovered. Of the six Supreme Court opinions in Bakke, only Powell’s advanced an educational justification for race-conscious admissions practices, a rationale uncontested by his fellow justices. Today, Powell’s opinion has seemingly gained widespread support among educators. Many of the more than one hundred amicus briefs submitted by universities, corporations, scholarly organizations, military leaders,

The Diversity Rationale 77

and others in support of the University of Michigan in Grutter and Gratz praised Powell’s rationale and underscored the importance of diversity. Of the 70 plus amicus briefs filed in support of the University of Michigan, and in support of race-conscious policies, 36 briefs were filed in joint support of both cases, and 34 briefs were filed specifically in support of Michigan’s Law School. In their 2003 decision on Grutter, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed the diversity rationale, albeit by a narrow margin. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who led the majority opinion on Grutter, wrote: Public and private universities across the Nation have modeled their own admissions programs on Justice Powell’s views. Courts, however have struggled to discern whether Justice Powell’s diversity rationale is binding precedent. The Court finds it unnecessary to decide this issue because the Court endorses Justice Powell’s view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest in the context of university admissions. (p. 323) The Court’s affirmation of Powell’s diversity rationale elevated it from the margins as a single opinion, and proclaimed it to be a Supreme Court edict. Unlike Powell’s opinion, Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion also highlighted the Court’s acceptance of and reliance on social science research. Citing several recent studies, O’Connor concluded: The Law School’s claim of a compelling interest is further bolstered by its amici, who point to the educational benefits that flow from diversity. In addition to the expert studies and reports entered into evidence at trial, numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and “better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.” (p. 330) The Supreme Court’s ruling in Grutter is poised to ensure that Powell’s reasoning in Bakke will continue to have a lasting impact and legacy on how colleges and universities craft and implement race-conscious admissions policies. Even though most of the social science evidence supports Powell’s claims, the same body of empirical research also suggests that his reasoning is incomplete and if taken only at face value, can even blunt the benefits associated with diversity (see for example the review by Milem et al. 2005). In our 2005 article, “Beyond magical thinking,” we evaluated the usefulness of the legal logic undergirding the diversity rationale in guiding educational policy and practice. In the next section, we consider how Powell’s diversity rationale makes it possible to evacuate a course of action that will maximize educational benefits.

78

Chang and Ledesma

Downgrading remedial interests Although the diversity rationale is now widely embraced by educational leaders and is regularly parroted in college catalogs and websites to promote unique campus features, the rationale does little to help educators achieve the added benefits that emerge from being a student on a campus that enrolls a racially diverse student population. After all, the rationale was designed to serve a legal purpose and not necessarily an educational one. Powell himself left the practical details of applying the diversity rationale to educators in his opinion on Bakke. As far as he was concerned, it was up to individual campuses to design educationally meaningful opportunities to maximize the benefits associated with diversity. Ironically, in arguing that providing educational benefits associated with a diverse student body is a permissible basis for the consideration of race in admissions practices, Powell ruled out a central mechanism for realizing those benefits. In our article (Chang et al. 2005), we argued that when it comes to guiding educators, the central problem with the diversity rationale is that it is strategically decoupled from any interest in remedying the present effects of past discrimination. To appreciate how the downgrading of remedial interests affects educational practice, it is instructive to re-examine Bakke. Given the deep divide among Supreme Court Justices concerning affirmative action, Justice Powell’s compromise was driven largely by his intent to dissociate his educational justification, the diversity rationale, from a justification for race-conscious admissions practices based on remedying present effects of past discrimination. Although in Bakke the University of California presented four justifications for its medical school’s use of a separate admissions process for minority students – (1) reducing the historical deficit of minorities in medical schools and in the medical professions, (2) countering the effects of societal discrimination, (3) increasing the number of physicians who practice in underserved communities, and (4) obtaining the educational benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body – Powell rejected all but the last argument. Because Powell recognized only an educational justification, he effectively undermined the legality of remedial or historical reasons for instituting race-conscious admissions policies. Additionally, he further weakened the remedial link by emphasizing the notion of diversity rather than race. In his discussion of diversity, he conceptualized what he termed genuine diversity as consisting of more than just race and included other student characteristics, such as geographic background and special talents. Powell explained, “The diversity that furthers a compelling state interest encompasses a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element. Petitioner’s special admission program, focused solely on ethnic diversity, would hinder rather than further attainment of genuine diversity” (p. 315). A major problem with downgrading racial reasoning and considering racial diversity on a par with other forms of diversity is that this approach is ahistoric and

The Diversity Rationale 79

ignores the unique challenges associated with achieving each form of diversity. The barriers to obtaining some forms, such as geographic diversity, are arguably quite different from the barriers to obtaining racial diversity. Justice Ruth Ginsburg commented on the uniqueness of race, noting in her dissenting opinion in Gratz that “we are not far distant from an overtly discriminatory past, and the effects of centuries of law-sanctioned inequality remain painfully evident in our communities and schools” (p. 299). In Bakke, the brief for the petitioner, the University of California, is exacting on this point, stating that students of color have been subject to “inferior education, denial of economic opportunity, cultural isolation and the deadening effect of the absence of visible evidence of opportunities for advancement through the channels open to the dominant whites” (p. 9). Since educators should not expect legal doctrine to guide educational practice, it is important to recognize how the diversity rationale transformed the prevailing civil rights defense of race-conscious policies and with it, the forms of legitimate interventions and practices, because these shifts have profound educational implications. By embracing the diversity rationale at face value either in superficial ways or in more serious discourse, educators may unintentionally undermine the educational outcomes that the rationale promises. Given that the diversity rationale shifted the justification of race-conscious admissions practices from a remedial to an educational argument and also shifted the focus away from race to a broader notion of diversity, it obfuscates what campuses should be doing to achieve the benefits associated with diversity. In the next section, we further discuss how these shifts compromise both the internal logic of the diversity rationale and the necessary course of action to realize the proclaimed educational benefits.

Magical thinking Because the diversity rationale was designed mainly to resolve legal debate, it provides no guidance or urgency to assemble the appropriate means to maximize the benefits of diversity or to employ the methods necessary to facilitate the educational process to achieve those benefits. Rather, when it comes to achieving the intended outcomes, we argued (Chang et al. 2005) that the internal logic of this rationale resembles a logic described as “magical thinking.” This is a term used by developmental psychologists to describe a stage in a child’s intellectual development that is characterized by a lack of realistic relationship between cause and effect. A child in this stage, for example, believes that what he or she wishes or expects can affect what really happens. Similarly, those who embrace the diversity rationale at face value may have an intuitive grasp of the benefits of diversity, but cannot provide a realistic account of how institutions can create environments that are conducive to realizing those benefits. We identify below two examples of magical thinking inherent in embracing the diversity rationale at only face value, which correspond with the legal move away from a remedial justification toward

80

Chang and Ledesma

an educational one – a move that in effect demoted race and elevated the concept of diversity. The first example of magical thinking is what we called a naïve expectation that if you will it, students from underrepresented groups will actually enroll. This assumption dismisses what selective campuses actually do to get adequate numbers of underrepresented students to qualify for, apply to, or eventually enroll in their respective institutions. Those campuses often employ multiple methods, including but not limited to outreach, minority scholarships, and articulation agreements with two-year colleges. To the extent that these efforts address the persistent racial inequities that exist in K–12 education, they can be considered remedial and attentive to racial differences. By assuming that institutions are passive recipients of the types of student body they desire and that students have unlimited choices in higher education because the playing field is level, we submit to magical thinking in our understanding of how selective campuses actually enroll a racially diverse student body. As the Ivy brief succinctly summarizes, to suggest that there are viable alternative steps for university admission is illusory. The second example of magical thinking associated with the diversity rationale is what we called a naïve expectation that when more underrepresented students enroll, all students will benefit. Powell’s description of how campuses might facilitate the benefits of diversity once the composition of the student body is obtained is a good illustration of this shortcoming. Borrowing from the Harvard Admission Plan, Powell posits, “There is some relationship between numbers [of minority students on campus] and achieving the benefits to be derived from a diverse student body, and between numbers and providing a reasonable environment for those students admitted” (p. 324, italics added). Citing William Bowen, Powell reasoned that “unplanned, casual encounters” within a diverse student body can lead to “improved understanding and personal growth” (p. 313). While Powell acknowledged the power of informal learning and casual contact, he did not further explain how to achieve those benefits. Instead, he seemed to be mystified, suggesting that the process exists only at an unplanned, casual level. Citing Bowen again, Powell stated that “it is hard to know how, and when and even if, this informal ‘learning through diversity’ actually occurs” (p. 313). This statement is particularly troublesome because Powell’s apparent lack of confidence in the processes related to diversity weakens his justification for race-conscious admissions practices. The Court that decided the Michigan cases was much more reassured about the benefits that flow from a diverse student body. For example, in the Grutter majority opinion, Justice O’Connor declared: “These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints” (p. 330; emphasis added). The Grutter Court’s confidence in extolling diversity was undoubtedly informed by a robust and growing body of research and scholarship on the merits

The Diversity Rationale 81

of diversity within public higher education, public employment, and public contracting since Bakke. For example, those who stepped forward to testify in favor of diversity in the Michigan cases included representatives of hundreds of the nation’s most prestigious Fortune 500 corporations, high-ranking retired military personnel, scholarly organizations, educators, and others. Even the solicitor general of the United States, who filed amicus briefs in support of petitioners Barbara Grutter and Jennifer Gratz, acknowledged the value of diversity. However, despite their confidence in diversity, the Grutter court did not address the process of achieving benefits through diversity and thereby missed an opportunity to improve the logic of the diversity rationale beyond magical thinking. Yet by failing to be more specific about an institution’s role in the benefits equation, ironically the justices left the diversity rationale much more vulnerable to reproach. Justice Clarence Thomas, who disagreed and dissented with the majority’s opinion in Grutter, seemed to recognize this magical thinking about diversity. In his dissenting opinion he remarked: . . . attaining “diversity,” whatever it means, is the mechanism by which the Law School obtains educational benefits, not an end of itself. The Law School, however, apparently believes that only a racially mixed student body can lead to the educational benefits it seeks. How, then, is the Law School’s interest in these allegedly unique educational “benefits” not simply the forbidden interest in “racial balancing,” ante, at 17, that the majority expressly rejects? (p. 355; emphasis in original) In line with Powell, the Court’s majority made deference to colleges and universities to figure out for themselves how best to achieve the benefits associated with diversity. Invoking the principles of academic freedom, Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion in Grutter stated: “We have long recognized that, given the important purpose of public education and the expansive freedoms of speech and thought associated with the university environment, universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition” (p. 329). Clearly, the courts have left it to individual campuses to fill in the logic gaps in the diversity rationale, which will enable each to uniquely realize the benefits associated with diversity. Those who fail to take on this challenge but accept the diversity rationale at face value will come to realize that the educational benefits associated with diversity will not magically nor organically happen. As other chapters in this book suggest, institutional commitment, planning, and intervention are essential parts of the benefits equation and some institutions are well aware of this and have yielded measurable success. We will add to this point in the following section and also consider what are perhaps some unintended consequences associated with the diversity rationale.

82

Chang and Ledesma

Beyond magical thinking In his dissenting opinion in Grutter, Justice Thomas equated diversity “[as] more a fashionable catchphrase than it is a useful term” and at best, diversity describes an “aesthetic,” or “a certain appearance, from the shape of the desks and tables in . . . classrooms to the color of the students sitting in them” (p. 354). Absent from Thomas’ opinion is any reference to the abundant body of case-law that stands as testament to an enduring struggle for equal educational opportunities. Although Justice Powell recognized that racial diversity is more than a “fashionable catchphrase,” we believe that the invalidation of remedial interests in his opinion contributes to Thomas’ skepticism about the educational benefits associated with diversity. According to Palmer (2001), Powell ultimately believed that race-sensitive admissions practices should be forward-looking tools that serve a nonremedial interest of providing a broader educational environment for future students, as opposed to the remedial interest of overcoming the present effects of past discrimination. Palmer argued that Powell did not view diversity for the sake of diversity as a value in its own right but saw the potential of diversity to promote the educational development of all students as the more legitimate interest. This view departs sharply from Justice William Brennan’s opinion regarding Bakke, which concluded that remedying past societal discrimination was “sufficiently important to justify the use of race-conscious admissions programs” (p. 362). In short, because the diversity rationale as conceived by Powell and reaffirmed by O’Connor in Grutter is not remedial in nature, Kirkelie (2002) contended that it considers invalid remedial programs intended to benefit only a limited group of students such as racial minorities and justifies affirmative action based mostly on its future benefits for all students. Indeed, even the Law School’s own reasoning to explain its admissions strongly adheres to the non-remedial frame. As cited by O’Connor in the Grutter majority opinion, the Law School proclaims: “The hallmark of that [admissions] policy is its focus on academic ability coupled with a flexible assessment of applicant’s talents, experiences, and potential to contribute to the learning of those around them” (p. 315). It turns out, however, that remedying the present effects of past racial discrimination is necessary to create environments conducive to realization of the benefits of diversity and to facilitate the educational process to achieve those benefits. For example, in addition to admitting underrepresented students, more selective campuses often have to actively recruit them, provide them with financial support, and compensate for inequities in their K–12 education just to yield a critical mass of underrepresented students to admit. Moreover, the work of diversity does not end with student admission and enrollment. Campuses must walk their diversity talk beyond admissions and hiring. In order to facilitate the educational process needed to maximize the benefits associated with a racially diverse student body, Milem et al. (2005) concluded in their review of the research literature that all

The Diversity Rationale 83

campuses, including those with open enrollment, must be proactive and intentional in finding ways to engage underrepresented students both academically and socially, as well as to provide more opportunities for all students to interact freely, wisely, and responsibly with one another in formal and informal settings. Establishing a campus culture that facilitates this student engagement and interaction, they argued, typically begins with interventions, supported by top-level administrators, which effectively address the vestiges of racism. While the diversity rationale may appeal to one’s intuitive appreciation for the benefits of diversity, its reasoning is incomplete. Although the Court that considered the Michigan cases did not fully explore the benefits process, Justice O’Connor substantiated the diversity rationale and acknowledged that there is generally broad support for diversity in colleges and universities. Perhaps the courts have been reluctant to specify how institutions might actually realize the benefits associated with diversity because the remedial arguments offered to support race-conscious admissions were rejected in Bakke. As it stands, the Court views race-conscious practices fundamentally as a First Amendment issue and, perhaps appropriately, leave to educators the responsibility of deciding both what is important for the mission of education and how to achieve that mission. Should the Court provide more forceful and explicit guidance to universities? Putting aside the First Amendment issue and their rejection of remedial arguments, there is certainly a delicate balance between timely implementation of policy recommendations and a laissez-faire attitude. Consider the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which stands as one of the most celebrated civil rights cases of the last century. Ironically, today, in the shadow of Brown, many students of color, especially African American and Latino students, attend segregated schools at higher levels than pre-Brown (Orfield and Lee 2007). According to Morales (2006): We should ultimately interpret the meagerness of [race-conscious] affirmative action as a symptom of how little power blacks, Latinos, and other racial minorities actually have. Given that limited power, the [Supreme] Court is the only institution that can effectively steer the political discourse in a way that allows minorities to retain their foothold in the meritocracy. (p. 204–205) Within the realm of higher education this means acknowledging and confronting the enduring role of race, racism, and discrimination in the quest for educational equity. If the Court does not provide more sufficient guidance, we should at least recognize that the diversity rationale’s indifference to addressing the historical legacy of racism also makes it possible for educators and their colleges and universities to only pay lip service to diversity without actually addressing prejudice and discrimination. Accordingly, the central interest can readily shift away from improving

84

Chang and Ledesma

educational opportunities for underrepresented students of color toward providing additional educational benefits for majority students. When this happens, the spotlight shifts to white and Asian students who stand to benefit from the presence of more underrepresented students, which can subsequently compromise efforts to address the present effects of past discrimination. As Chang (2002) argues, by not attending to the historical meaning behind underrepresentation, the diversity rationale does not hold colleges and universities accountable for developing a more intentional course of action beyond preserving a modest admissions policy, and fails to amplify efforts to improve students’ chances of succeeding academically and thriving socially on campus. Ironically the diversity rationale, according to Chang, can be exploited to undergird a long-term agenda that maintains the status quo rather than advance an agenda that seeks a broader and deeper transformation of higher education that aims to prepare students for an increasingly more diverse and complex society.

Conclusion Since the Court has seemingly left it to educators to decide the fate of diversity on campus, we must recognize and overcome magical thinking and not take the diversity rationale at face value. To strengthen both the internal logic and the educational efficacy of the diversity rationale, our actions as educators must acknowledge more centrally the fact that a campus’s capacity to remedy the present effects of past discrimination is instrumental in maximizing the educational benefits associated with a racially diverse student body. Failure to intervene at the basic remedial level not only reduces the chances of realizing the benefits associated with a racially diverse student population but also can fuel racial alienation, antipathy, higher rates of departure, and students’ dissatisfaction with their overall college experience. Although strategically decoupling the diversity rationale from remedial interests may have been an effective compromise to overcome a deeply divided court, as was the case with Bakke, this legacy may well leave education practitioners with nothing more than a “fashionable slogan” as Justice Thomas charged, unless they are intentional about realizing the benefits associated with diversity.

References Bowen, W. 1977, Sept. 26. Admissions and the Relevance of Race. Princeton Alumni Weekly. Pp. 7, 9. Brief of Columbia University, Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania as amici curiae in support of petitioner. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Chang, M. J. 2002. Preservation or Transformation: Where’s the Real Educational Discourse on Diversity? The Review of Higher Education 25(2): 125–40.

The Diversity Rationale 85

Chang, M. J., J. Chang, and M. C. Ledesma. 2005. Beyond Magical Thinking: Doing the Real Work of Diversifying Our Institutions. About Campus 10(2): 9–16. Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003). Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967). Kirkelie, S. M. 2002. Higher Education Admissions and Diversity. Willamette Law Review, 38: 615–47. Milem, J. F., M. J. Chang, and A. L. Antonio. 2005. Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research-Based Perspective. Washington DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities. Morales, D. I. 2006. A Matter of Rhetoric: The Diversity Rationale in Political Context. Chapman Law Review 10: 187–234. Orfield, G. and C. Lee. 2007. Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, the Need for New Integration Strategies. A Report of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, University of California, Los Angeles. Palmer, S. R. 2001. Diversity and Affirmative Action: Evolving Principles and Continuing Legal Battles. In G. Orfield and M. Kurlaender (Eds.), Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group. Pp. 49–80. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265.

7 THE OFFICIAL ORGANIZATION OF DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION A retreat from race? anthony lising antonio and Chris Gonzalez Clarke

The topic of diversity in higher education almost certainly engenders thoughts about racial equality and the numbers that signify racial progress: 6.4 million students from minority backgrounds currently comprise over a third of all college enrollments (Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac 2009). Just as certainly, however, the topic also engenders a broader conception of diversity, one that goes beyond race and a concern for equitable educational access. Statements on diversity endorsed by three universities provide examples of the broad range of definitions in play: Diversity is the foundation of the academic enterprise. Exposure to a broad range of perspectives, views and outlooks is key to fostering both breadth and depth in intellectual knowledge. Diversity policies and programs at Brown are designed to: (1) redress historical patterns of exclusion and (2) foster opportunities to embrace the greatest mix of ideas, opinions, and beliefs so important to the achievement of academic excellence. (Brown University n.d.) Clemson University aspires to create a diverse community that welcomes people of different races, cultures, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions, socioeconomic levels, political perspectives, abilities, opinions, values and experiences. (Clemson University 2010) Diversity matters at the University of Kansas. It matters because diversity enriches our ability to solve problems and create new knowledge. It is our goal to have the richest possible mix of perspectives, life-experiences, interests, world-views and cultures in our campus community. (University of Kansas 2009)

The Official Organization of Diversity 87

As official endorsements, these statements on diversity convey organizational beliefs, values, and objectives, and together they encompass a considerable range of meaning. Brown’s statement reflects a remedial conception that ties the value of diversity to access and equity as well as an educational conception that views diversity as a foundational instrument for achieving academic excellence. The statement goes on to reveal a broad and open-ended list of human characteristics included in the definition of diversity that includes race, religion, sex and thirteen other categories. Clemson’s statement likewise includes race among a wide range of backgrounds and human characteristics, but does not include racial disparity or representation as an aspect of diversity, adopting instead a conception of open acceptance in the broadest of terms. The statement from Kansas is exclusively education-focused, describing diversity as pedagogically valuable, while excluding race from a list of student characteristics valued for their role in furthering the university’s academic mission. The range of meanings ascribed to diversity as reflected by these statements raises questions regarding the place that race and racial equity occupy within contemporary organizational missions and practices. The underrepresentation of African Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans continues to signify serious racial equity issues in higher education. Aware of this fact, we ask: Is an emphasis on equity—including access—waning? Do contemporary conceptions of diversity signal a retreat from race in higher education? Alternatively, does contemporary diversity discourse provide strategic cover for continued efforts at achieving racial equity in the face of pressures to eradicate them? In this chapter, we explore these questions through an examination of published institutional rationales for the position of Chief Diversity Officer (CDO). As a growing phenomenon, the establishment of the CDO represents an institutionalization of diversity discourse that provides an opportunity to understand more precisely how race is currently conceptualized in higher education.

Diversity in higher education: A retreat from race? Prior to 1978, diversity was not in the popular discourse on higher education nor racial policy in general. Racial policy in education centered on school desegregation in the K–12 sector and race-based affirmative action in admissions in the higher education sector. The discourse on these policies reflected the legal justification for such policies: remediation of racially discriminatory practices (Liu 1998). Diversity entered racial policy discourse in the 1978 Bakke Supreme Court case, wherein Justice Powell introduced what has become known as the diversity rationale supporting race-based affirmative action in college admissions (Chang et al. 2005). In effect, Powell made the remedial rationale for the use of race in admission policy obsolete, writing that the validity of race in admissions lay primarily in its educational value.1 In Powell’s words, racial diversity of the student body is of vital interest because “. . . the nation’s future depends upon leaders

88

antonio and Clarke

trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples” (Regents 1978, p. 2760). The Bakke decision essentially redefined state interest away from remediation and toward an educational bottom-line: racial diversity became an instrument solely for enhancing educational outcomes. Scholars have argued that Powell’s diversity rationale effectively skewed discourse and practice away from issues of racial equity in higher education. In what she calls, “the retreat from race,” Takagi (1992) describes changes in American public discourse and social policy that occurred broadly in the 1980s. In particular, she illustrates how claims of racial discrimination made by Asian American applicants to the most selective universities eventually put higher education’s admissions policies on the path toward the diminution of race and the embrace of diversity as an educational tool. In other words, she suggests that the emergence of diversity as a central concern in higher education came at the expense of concerns for racial equity. This trajectory, Takagi argues, was the result of a broader political struggle over the use of explicitly racial solutions to address contemporary racial problems and higher education was one site among many wherein extensive political struggle over the use and meaning of race in society ensued. Powell’s diversity rationale, with its attendant discourse skewed away from a remedial objective, may have a consequential, if possibly unintended impact on both the recasting of existing policies and practices and the creation of new ones within the diversity framework. It “. . . can have very serious consequences for actual program implementation and for how the program plays out in advancing civil rights and social justice” (Moses and Chang 2006, p. 10). The apparent absence of concern for racial equality and justice in the diversity statements of Kansas and Clemson above underscores Moses and Chang’s cautionary conclusion: Does the embrace of the Powellian diversity rationale displace earlier institutional efforts toward racial equity and justice? Two distinct paths of inquiry emerge from this overarching question as it relates to campuses that have implemented diversity-related programs. First, we characterize official organizational rationales for a particular diversity-related program office in terms of whether it reflects primarily educational (i.e., the Powellian diversity rationale) or remedial/equity aims, or both. Second, we examine whether the campus embrace of the remedial and/or educational rationale for this diversity-related program drives organizational practice, especially in ways that threaten equity objectives.2

An official rationale for diversity: The Chief Diversity Officer The establishment of the Chief Diversity Officer or CDO generally has been characterized as higher education’s isomorphic response to an established corporate trend (Gose 2006). Williams and Wade-Golden (2006) reported the creation of about 30 such offices, a relatively new phenomenon, from 2001 to 2006. By 2009,

The Official Organization of Diversity 89

the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) listed 107 colleges and universities as charter members. Notably, the steep growth trajectory of this new office occurred after 2003, the year in which the Supreme Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger ruling re-affirmed the legal validity of the diversity rationale while strongly suggesting a 25-year sunset for its applicability (Milem et al. 2005). The growth of CDOs suggests an emerging trend in the organization of diversity-related efforts at colleges and universities in a post-Grutter era, organizationally codified by the first NADOHE conference in 2007. As representative of the legitimate expression of diversity discourse on college campuses, the CDO office presents an opportunity to examine the use of contending remedial and educational/diversity rationales in higher education. Through an analysis of official documents of NADOHE member campuses, we examine the culture and organization of diversity on campuses that officially support the value of diversity in higher education. Our data are derived from the 107 campus members of NADOHE identified on the national website as of July 2009. Colleges and universities claiming membership in NADOHE include 75 public and 32 private campuses. The NADOHE population, relative to the overall population of U.S. colleges and universities, is more elite, selective, research-oriented and almost exclusively four-year in character. Using campus websites, we gathered information about the rationales driving each office as well as its organizational practices and structures. Campus websites provide official and public displays of organizational discourse including messages about values, goals, and practices. While we are conscious of the ability of organizations to decouple discourse from practice,3 we argue that the websites are useful indicators of the contemporary official discourse and organization of diversity on these campuses. Such official information, the product of organizational decision making, suggests to internal and external constituents a rational consideration of alternatives, integration with organizational values and intentionality (Feldman and March 1981) related to diversity efforts. Thus, official communications including mission, vision, and goal statements were treated as indicators of organizational purpose and as windows into the rationales driving the policies and practice of the particular office. Organizational practices and structures were also coded using information obtained from the office/officer website.4 Typical sources for this information included organizational charts, staff directories, and descriptions of programs and services.

Characterizing CDO rationales The rationales associated with each office/officer were coded as remedial, educational, or mixed. Offices with statements that exclusively referenced equity aims as the basis for diversity programs were coded as “remedial”; those that exclusively referenced educational and competitive advantages were coded as

90

antonio and Clarke

“educational”; and those that included both remedial and educational aims were coded as “mixed.” The rationales reflected in CDO statements differ along four dimensions, described below and summarized in Table 7.1.

Philosophical grounding Moses and Chang (2006) describe the differing legal and philosophical roots of Powell’s educational/diversity rationale and contrast it with the principles grounding a remedial rationale for educational practice and policy. We find similar differences among rationales employed by CDOs. The remedial rationale is grounded in principles of justice and equity and a view of higher education as the appropriate vehicle for ameliorating existing and historic patterns of discrimination in society. In contrast, the educational rationale is rooted in an Aristotelian view of democracy such that the university becomes a marketplace of ideas that benefits from the free exchange of diverse and sometimes opposing viewpoints.

Orientation toward individuals and identities The educational rationale emphasizes the uniqueness of individuals who are evaluated along a broad set of dimensions of human difference. Individuals are treated as the complex sum of their attitudes, beliefs, attributes, and experiences, each with varying potential to contribute to the educational process of other students and to the excellence of the institution. The remedial rationale treats individuals as members of collective social categories with different histories of exclusion from higher education. Membership in designated categories provides the promise of protection of essential rights (freedom from discrimination, harassment, etc.) and the basis for claims in the event that such rights are violated. Both the remedial and educational rationales most commonly reference human differences based on race, gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, and sexual orientation, while less commonly referencing socio-economic status, worldview, lifestyle, age, marital status, etc.

Who benefits The educational rationale claims to derive benefits to the organization and all its members through ensuring representation of a vast range of human differences. In contrast, the remedial rationale explicitly acknowledges that programs serve the interests of targeted beneficiaries who are often defined by membership in underrepresented or disadvantaged populations. Efforts under the remedial rationale are less frequently framed as providing broad organizational benefits, yet are often linked with societal imperatives.

The Official Organization of Diversity 91

Relationship to mission Finally, the rationales connect in distinct ways with the traditional mission of higher education and reflect the ongoing tension between the competing aims of access and excellence. The remedial rationale clearly supports the access mission. CDO activities are primarily portrayed as expanding access for deserving students, faculty, and staff in an effort to fulfill the higher education’s role in creating good citizens and enhancing opportunity. The educational rationale, on the other hand, is conceived as advancing organizational excellence by providing students with resources for a superior educational experience. Overall, we find that the educational rationale has not displaced a remedial rationale in the NADOHE member organizations. In fact, a greater number of offices express an exclusively remedial (n = 19) than an exclusively educational (n = 11) rationale. The vast majority of campus CDOs (n = 72) express a mixed

TABLE 7.1 Characteristics of Dominant Rationales for CDO Programs and Policies in

Higher Education Remedial (n = 19)

Educational (n = 11)

Mixed (n = 72)

Philosophical Grounding

Justice and Equity

Marketplace of ideas; Aristotelian vision of democracy

Justice and equity; market ideology

Identity: individual vs. collective orientation

Emphasis on collective identity; individuals treated as members of broad social categories; leading to rights claims based on collective identities

Uniqueness of individuals; individual traits (attitudes, beliefs, experiences, attributes) evaluated as potential organizational assets that contribute to the educational process

Source of rights and organizational asset

Who benefits

Primarily members of historically underrepresented groups including racial and ethnic minorities and women; also society and the college/university

The organization and all its members

Organization and all its members as well as underrepresented communities and individuals

Relationship to Mission

Primarily supports the access function; also enhances excellence

Enhancing quality, excellence of higher education

Access and excellence

92

antonio and Clarke

rationale, suggesting that the predominant rationale is multidimensional. Below we use our data to elaborate on and provide evidence for the defining characteristics of each of the three rationales.

The remedial rationale On campuses that exclusively employ the remedial rationale, the CDO is presented as advancing democratic ideals of higher education with explicit appeals to advancing social justice and broadening access. The mission statement at Oklahoma State University provides an example of this characteristic: [Oklahoma State strives to] . . . acknowledge the momentum and indisputable logic of civil rights legislation and social change initially focused on AfricanAmericans which has quickly broadened to include gender, other races, ethnicity, national ancestry, religion, sexual orientation and ability in a larger call for social justice. (Oklahoma State University n.d.) The concern with justice and equity, as articulated above, drives a focus on historically underrepresented members of society. Campuses that officially employ the remedial rationale often cast their activities in terms of representational rights, supporting full participation, and enhancing access to organizational resources for minorities. Colorado State University provides a clear example of this aspect of the remedial rationale: Given the historic and legal discrimination that has existed in American society, particular emphasis needs to be placed on the inclusion of individuals who are members of groups that have been excluded, i.e., racial/ethnic minorities, women in non-traditional areas and persons with disabilities. The University strives to foster for its members recognition of their role as citizens in the global community with greater understanding of cultures and perspectives different from their own. (Colorado State University 2005) The remedial framework provides explicit basic rights claims, and the promise of organizational action to guarantee such rights, particularly for members of protected classes. The diversity statement at Embry-Riddle University provides an example of an individual rights orientation based on collective identities and history: Embry-Riddle values diversity. We respect the rights and properties of all individuals, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, physical disability, economic background, sexual orientation /identity,

The Official Organization of Diversity 93

or religious belief. We believe in a community where all members are welcome, and individuals or groups are free from harassment. (Embry-Riddle University 2007) Under the remedial rationale, the significance of diversity is constructed as the basis for individual rights claims based on officially recognized collective identities and histories. These rights supported by the CDO for members of specific groups include, for example, freedom from negative consequences such as harassment, and are also connected with representational concerns. The rights emphasis of the remedial rationale suggests that primary beneficiaries of CDO programs and policies include members of groups who have been historically excluded or suffer from discrimination and harassment. The University of Wisconsin System, “Plan 2008,” demonstrates how the remedial rationale also supports an excellence mission. Efforts to “Close the gap in educational achievement, by bringing retention and graduation rates for students of color in line with those of the student body as a whole,” for example, are portrayed as enhancing overall organizational excellence in themselves, while presumably improving the overall average of output statistics (University of Wisconsin System 2007). A final characteristic of the remedial rationale is a concern with compliance with state and federal law, which is portrayed as either requiring or constraining CDO action related to diversity. These rationales, for example, reference compliance with federal law that mandates equal opportunity and/or a mission to create and maintain an environment free of discrimination and harassment. A diversity mission statement from Southern Methodist University is illustrative: To affirm, assure and acknowledge the law and regulations; to promote access, opportunity, and diversity in the student population and employment; to maintain a consistent and equitable set of practices to assure nondiscrimination against any employee or applicant for admission or employment; and to assist in the initiation of specific efforts to overcome under-utilization or under-representation of women, minorities, disabled, and Vietnam Era Veterans in employment and education. (Southern Methodist University n.d.) Implicit in this rationale is the need for colleges and universities to act concertedly to reduce the threat of legal action by the state on the behalf of individuals who are not effectively protected from discrimination by the college. Other comments more directly negotiate constraints placed on activity by the state. The CDO website at Colorado State University typifies this posture: In developing the goals of the Diversity Plan, careful attention was paid to the need to comply with the most recent Supreme Court Decision in the

94

antonio and Clarke

case of Grutter v. Bollinger et al. [. . .] In no way are the goals of the plan quotas, but rather are attempts to further the University mission through appropriate good faith efforts. (Colorado State University 2005) Here we see the responsiveness of the remedial rationale to the legal environment: CDO activities under the remedial rationale are explicitly characterized as conforming to federal law prohibiting the use of racial quotas in affirmative action policies. Overall, the remedial rationale embraced by 19 NADOHE members extends claims to rights based on group identities and historical legacies. The rationale is philosophically grounded in concerns for equity and justice, and mediated by federal law that constrains specific actions (e.g., developing quota systems) and legitimizes concerns related to representation, access, and freedom from discrimination and harassment. In large part, the group of colleges and universities that employ the remedial rationale conceives of CDOs as vehicles to advance the interests of groups that are disadvantaged by historical legacies of underrepresentation or that are vulnerable to negative actions such as harassment and discrimination. However, the remedial rationale also supports the claims of enhancing the college’s overall excellence through, for example, efforts to narrow achievement gaps and developing cross-cultural competencies.

The educational rationale The educational rationale forwards a vision of higher education as a marketplace of ideas. The availability of alternative perspectives enhances the experience of students and benefits the institution. This perspective is reflected in the following statements from East Carolina University and Grand Valley State University: East Carolina University is committed to enriching the lives of students, faculty, and staff by providing a diverse academic community where the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and perspectives is an active part of living and learning. (East Carolina University n.d.) A range of thoughtful perspectives is necessary for open inquiry, liberal education, and a healthy community. (Grand Valley State University 2009) The liberal education principle that learning benefits derive from the exchange of alternative viewpoints, while seemingly obvious, also carries with it potential costs. Dissensus and debate in a community carries with it the possibility of hardening differences and closing individuals off to alternative perspectives. The diversity statement at the College of the Holy Cross provides an example of this risk:

The Official Organization of Diversity 95

Holy Cross is a learning community based on Jesuit principles. In this environment, it is essential to understand ourselves fully and truly engage with others. This process is not always easy, because at Holy Cross we seek to advance beyond mere tolerance of difference to an active appreciation of what each person brings to our community. The rewards are great, enriching both your education and your life. (College of the Holy Cross n.d.) While acknowledging the potential costs of living and learning in an environment characterized by a wide range of views and experiences, the educational rationale argues for the ultimate educational value of such an environment for both individuals and communities. Drawing on the liberal education ideal of a free marketplace of ideas, the educational rationale positions human diversity in its many forms, but most commonly in terms of race, gender, disability, religion, and sexual orientation, as an organizational value. In contrast with the rights orientation of the remedial rationale, diversity is construed as a source of viewpoints and perspectives that are associated with various dimensions of human difference. While race and ethnicity are frequently cited as important dimensions of diversity, here their importance lies in their ability to serve as proxies for uniqueness and novel perspectives. The discourse is devoid of the concern with historical legacies and equity that is characteristic of the remedial rationale. At Appalachian State University, diversity is connected directly with the marketplace of ideas: Diversity is valued because it generates a multiplicity of ideas and viewpoints, leads to more creative and efficient problem solving, fosters an understanding and acceptance of individuals from different backgrounds, and recognizes the contributions that a variety of individuals and groups can make. (Appalachian State University 2007) At Holy Cross, the NADOHE-affiliated office provides activities that leverage diversity as an organizational asset that provides advantages to the college, its faculty and students. Through various types of education, outreach, and programming, we help you develop the skills that will enable you to become a better citizen—and leader—in our community and in global society. (College of the Holy Cross n.d.) In contrast with a remedial rationale that invokes the promotion of justice and equity and responsiveness to the legal environment, the educational rationale,

96

antonio and Clarke

once again, aligns directly with higher education’s historic mission of cultivating excellence. Offices that embrace the educational rationale for diversity, for example, are positioned as contributing to organizational vitality and innovation, preparing students for a future in a globalized society, and enhancing the research enterprise. From St. Thomas University: Diversity is an indispensable component of academic excellence and holistic development [. . .] As we harness the power of diversity, we will provide students, faculty, and staff a university experience rich in perspectives and opportunities to learn from each other. (University of St. Thomas 2009) The alignment of diversity efforts with core functions of teaching and learning provides a basis for broad claims of who benefits from diversity-related activities. In contrast with the remedial rationale which constructs policy and programs as benefiting targeted subpopulations, the policies and programs guided by the educational rationale are thought to benefit the entire population of students, staff, and faculty through enhanced learning opportunities, climate, and interpersonal relationships. Similarly, while the remedial rationale focuses on rights claims that are based on group membership and historical legacies, the educational rationale forwards an asset framework for thinking about difference. Individual uniqueness characterized by each person’s set of attributes and experiences are valued as assets that hold the potential to provide benefits to the entire college or university. The diversity statement of Wheaton College reflects the focus on uniqueness as an organizational asset: At Wheaton College we recognize that individuals have complex identities formed by biology, society, history and choice. These varied facets shape who we are, form our uniqueness, and contribute to the rich educational community that is Wheaton College. The Marshall Center exists to affirm these unique identities, to build a community that draws from them and to cultivate leaders who will introduce to the world the value of human diversity. (Wheaton College 2008) Overall, the educationally focused diversity rationale is characterized by the construction of difference as an asset that is tied to the mix of unique individual attributes. Philosophically, it appeals to an imagery of the university as a marketplace of ideas; its actions are positioned to ensure the widest range of viewpoints and an environment that fosters principled debate and exposure to novel information leading to deeper levels of reasoning.

The Official Organization of Diversity 97

The mixed rationale Campuses that invoke a mixed rationale position their offices as enhancing university excellence and the educational experience of students, while also acknowledging a need to promote justice, equity, equal access, and opportunity. Diversity is characterized as both a source of individual rights claims based on group identities and an organizational asset. The mixed rationale also constructs diversity as an asset that holds value for all members of the university. The University of Louisville’s diversity statement provides an example of these distinct dimensions: Diversity embraces all human differences while building on the commonalities that bind us together. It serves to eliminate discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion based on race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, disability, religion, national origin or military status. (University of Louisville n.d.) We commit ourselves to building an exemplary educational community that offers a nurturing and challenging intellectual climate, a respect for the spectrum of human diversity, and a genuine understanding of the many differences-including race, ethnicity, gender, age, socio-economic status, national origin, sexual orientation, disability and religion-that enrich a vibrant metropolitan research university. (University of Louisville n.d.) The mixed rationale supports organizational efforts to uphold rights that are based on membership in collective identities, as is the case with the exclusively remedial rationale, while the educational component of the rationale supports efforts to extend benefits to all members of the university community. Thus, targeted beneficiaries of programs and policies guided by the mixed rationale simultaneously include members of recognized groups as well as all members of campus. The mixed rationale draws philosophical support from a justice and equity framework that is mediated by the legal environment as well as the marketplace of ideas: Participation in a dynamic and culturally rich community is an important part of Auburn University’s commitment to preparing students to be productive, successful members of the global community [. . .] The University’s development of the Strategic Diversity Plan was also important in bringing to a conclusion the longstanding litigation concerning discrimination in higher education. (Auburn University 2007)

98

antonio and Clarke

While compliance provides an explicit base of support for the mixed rationale at Auburn, equity and justice are implicitly acknowledged alongside the marketplace grounding, as illustrated in a statement by the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign’s Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs: Diversity in our faculty, staff and student populations, and in our scholarship, are fundamental to the excellence of our institution and critical to our agenda as one of the top public research universities in the nation. By bringing together people from different backgrounds whose views of the world may differ, we enhance our understanding of societal challenges and, more importantly, we bring together the perspectives, skills and knowledge necessary to move beyond challenge to opportunity . . . Diversity, as we define it, is more than diverse ideas—it includes representation of individuals from all backgrounds and perspectives, in terms of race, ethnicity, disability, gender, gender identity, sexuality, socio-economics, nationality, and spirituality. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2008) In this statement, the two aspects of diversity as incorporated by the remedial and educational rationales—as an asset and a source of individual rights claims based on group identities—are simultaneously embraced. The former formulation of diversity is consistent with the university’s excellence mission while the latter conception advances concerns with access, equity, justice and racial representation.

Insights into the official organization of diversity We now turn to the official organization of diversity efforts on the NADOHE member campuses, as the rationales described above have the potential to become the driving force for distinct patterns of activity and organizational structures in higher education. Our analysis reveals a distinction between offices that appear to be strictly advisory and those with direct administrative authority over other units. A large number of the CDOs (n = 24) operate as special advisors or assistants to presidents or provosts (see Figure 7.1). Such positions are often explicitly presented as strictly advisory or consultative in nature. Advisory CDOs are portrayed as exclusively involved in campus-wide committees charged with developing or coordinating implementation of a campus diversity plan. For advisory CDOs, the effort to define and advance diversity-related initiatives is described as contingent upon developing collaborative relationships with departments and other units that are responsible for setting and attaining goals. Websites describe typical activities that include information collection and centralization by the office and sharing with higher levels of the organization. Such offices are portrayed as flat, and many appear to be staffed by a single person: the CDO.

The Official Organization of Diversity 99

In contrast, CDOs with apparent administrative authority and reporting lines (n = 83) are depicted as supervising units with staff involved in a wide range of monitoring, reporting, service delivery, and strategic planning activities. Such non-advisory diversity offices contain subunits or have staff members that are involved in one or more of the following three functional areas: employmentrelated activities typical of traditional Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity (AA/EEO) offices; student affairs; and efforts to impact teaching, curricula, and research. AA/EEO activities include employment-related efforts such as assisting staff and faculty search and recruitment processes, ensuring compliance with reporting and planning mandates, and facilitating employee reports of discrimination and harassment. Many such offices also offer accessibility resources, or a separate division that is dedicated to issues related to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In a number of instances, the CDO incorporates AA/EEO units as part of a broader range of activities. In other cases (n = 18), the diversity office and AA/EEO are one in the same. Student affairs-related activities displayed on CDO websites include activities in one or more areas such as: student recruitment and outreach, campus climate, student organization and community support, academic services to targeted populations, and co-curricular programs. Several diversity offices are essentially student affairs programs (n = 13) while others include student affairs programming as a component of a broader effort. Finally, a number of colleges and universities are involved in efforts to impact curricula and research agendas (n = 26), though none do so exclusively.

26 24 21 18 13

4 1 Advisory Only

FIGURE 7.1

AA/EEO

AA/EEO+C&R SA+AA/EEO

SA

Functional Areas of CDO Offices

AA/EEO: Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Office C&R: Curriculum and research SA: Student Affairs

SA+C&R

Elaborate (all)

100

antonio and Clarke

AA/EEO and student affairs are the most common functional areas served by the CDO, with representation in 66 and 64 offices, respectively. Nearly onefifth (n = 21) of the CDO offices are fully elaborated offices that serve all three functional areas described. The predominant concatenation of functional areas links AA/EEO with student affairs functions. As the category of fully elaborated offices also includes these two functions, nearly half of all CDO offices (n = 47) perform this combination of activities. Admissions appears to be strikingly absent from the activities and purview of the CDO. While the subject of diversity in higher education is commonly associated with controversy related to affirmative action in admissions, the activities of the NADOHE-affiliated CDO on the campuses in our study appear to operate on the periphery of this centrally important function. Though enhancing the diversity of the student body is an often-stated goal of the CDO, they are officially disconnected from processes that control student admission. We view the arenas under the authority of the CDO as relatively marginal activities of colleges and universities, relative to the central purposes of teaching and research. Student affairs and affirmative action in hiring, for example, are activities that have been managed by non-academic personnel and, increasingly, professional managers. The evidence of involvement in faculty-governed arenas of curricula and research activities is scant, and the involvement relatively passive; many offices, for example, offer only incentives for optional, faculty-initiated projects. Admissions, on the other hand, remains under the ultimate purview of faculty and governing boards and outside the influence of the CDO. The apparent lack of participation by CDOs in the admission process suggests their relatively constrained role as organizational actors in higher eduation.

Diversity, the CDO, and organizational change The vast majority of the universities in our population (n = 72) attempt to creatively integrate a conception of diversity that is rooted in a market philosophy with an equity framework, and a significant number of campuses (n = 19) express conceptions of diversity that are exclusively rooted in the remedial rationale. A small number of campuses (n = 11) embrace the educational rationale exclusively as a foundation for CDO activities. In light of the concerns of higher education scholars about the decoupling of equity from the affirmative action rationale, we think the persistence and predominance of a remedial rationale in the culture and organization of diversity in NADOHE member campuses is significant. Nevertheless, these concerns remain important. As Chang notes: the higher education community has a fortuitous window of opportunity to advance a more authentic and comprehensive discourse of diversity . . . If advocates seize this opportunity to advance a discourse that has, as a core

The Official Organization of Diversity 101

interest, the democratic transformation of higher education, they can make clearer to institutional leaders how best to conceptualize campus diversity and to maximize the educational benefits associated with it. (Chang 2002, p. 136) Although attention to affirmative action has lessened in the Post-Grutter era, our analysis suggests that Chang’s observation remains relevant as colleges and universities sort out the meaning of diversity and its role in institutional missions and practices. Our effort to characterize the culture and organization of diversity in higher education stems from the concern of scholars that the education focused diversity rationale displaced an equity-focused rationale as a basis for policies and programs, and that this could serve to undercut an unfinished equity agenda. What we found, however, was that the vast majority of campuses in our study profess ongoing concerns for racial equity and justice and that many do so while simultaneously embracing a market-oriented conception of diversity as an educational tool. Since our data do not permit us to study practices directly, it remains unclear how strongly tied these rationales are to organizational practice. If higher education increasingly behaves like the corporate sector as some have suggested (e.g., Gumport 2000), then it is possible that race-related practices have been relatively unaffected by the emergence of the CDO and the introduction of the diversity rationale. This is precisely what Kelly and Dobbin (1998) found in their study of AA/EEO offices in the corporate sector. If a parallel process has occurred in higher education, we would expect CDOs to carry on with the work of their predecessors instead of retreating from race. While we are cautious about drawing definitive conclusions, our cross-sectional data suggest that a different dynamic may be taking place in higher education. Rather than discarding the old (remedial) rationale in favor of a new (Powellian diversity) rationale, the NADOHE member organizations appear to have maintained a broad conceptualization of diversity, one that embraces both a remedial rationale as well as an educational, market-oriented rationale alongside it. Recalling that a large majority of the offices maintain a mission grounded to some degree on racial justice and equity, the persistence of the remedial rationale suggests the continued influence of a social charter informed by a communitarian view of the public good (Kezar 2004), or a social institution logic of higher education (Gumport 2000). Indeed, as Clarke (2007) discovered, CDOs appear to embrace the educational rationale as a launching pad for new activities at the same time as they express their commitment to an unfinished racial equity agenda. While it is too early to forecast the ultimate effects that the advent of the CDO will have on higher education, the CDO phenomenon suggests that higher education leaders have attempted to forge a more comprehensive diversity discourse by combining democratic concerns with a diversity paradigm that has been legitimated in market terms.

102

antonio and Clarke

Notes 1 2

3

4

Powell does preserve the use of race as a remedy against discrimination, but argued that the university (UC Davis) failed to meet the legal hurdle of strict scrutiny (discussed in Liu 1998). Our study is conceptually anchored in neo-institutional theory. Following Kelly and Dobbin (1998), we assume that the law is an important source of institutionalized organizational behavior, and thus expect the legal distinctions between the diversity and remedial rationales to be reflected in higher education discourse. Official representations of organizational structures may be symbolic and largely decoupled from actual practice; less reflective of organizational goals and activity than informal organizational structures; or primarily serve as signaling devices. (See Feldman and March 1981). Nearly all diversity offices and officers had an explicit online presence. Those lacking such information (n = 5) were coded as missing.

References Appalachian State University. 2007. Diversity. Retrieved February 27, 2007, from http:// edc.appstate.edu/diversity/. Auburn University. 2007. Office of the President. Diversity, 8 February. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from https://fp.auburn.edu/diversity/about.aspx. Brown University. n.d. Philosophy of the Office of Institutional Diversity. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.brown.edu/Administration/diversity/. Chang, M. J. 2002. Preservation or Transformation: Where’s the Real Educational Discourse on Diversity? Review of Higher Education 25(2): 125–40. Chang, M. J., J. Chang and M. C. Ledesma. 2005. Beyond Magical Thinking: Doing the Real Work of Diversifying Our Institutions. About Campus 10(2): 9–16. Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac. 2009. College Enrollment by Racial and Ethnic Group, Selected Years. Retrieved July 15, 2009, from http://chronicle. com/article/College-Enrollment-by-Racial/48038/. Clarke, C. G. 2007. Chief Diversity Officers in Higher Education: Structural and Personal Sources of Power. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University. Clemson University. 2010. President’s Council on Community and Diversity. Retrieved 25 March 2010, from http://www.clemson.edu/ccd. College of the Holy Cross. n.d. Office of Multicultural Education. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://www.holycross.edu/multicultural_education/. Colorado State University. 2005. University Diversity Plan (revised June 2). Retrieved 29 October 2009, from http://diversity.colostate.edu/plan.aspx. East Carolina University. n.d. University Diversity Goal. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://www.ecu.edu/ecudiversity/OfficeOfInstitutionalDiversity.cfm. Embry-Riddle University. 2007. Office of Diversity Initiatives. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.erau.edu/administration/diversity.html. Feldman, M. S. and J. G. March 1981. Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol. Administrative Science Quarterly 26(2): 171–86. Gose, B. 2006. The Rise of the Chief Diversity Officer. The Chronicle of Higher Education: B-1–B-5. Grand Valley State University. 2009. A GVSU Value—Diversity and Community. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://www.gvsu.edu/affirmative/index.

The Official Organization of Diversity 103

Gumport, Patricia J. 2000. Academic Restructuring: Organizational Change and Institutional Imperatives. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning 39: 67–91. Kelly, E. and F. Dobbin. 1998. How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management: Employer Response to Antidiscrimination Law, 1961 to 1996. American Behavioral Scientist 41(7): 960–25. Kezar, A. 2004. Obtaining Integrity? Reviewing and Examining the Charter between Higher Education and Society. The Review of Higher Education 27(4): 429–59. Liu, G. (1998). Affirmative Action in Higher Education: The Diversity Rationale and the Compelling Interest Test. Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 33: 381–442. Milem, J. F., M. J. Chang, and A. L. Antonio. 2005. Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research-Based Perspective. Washington DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities. Moses, M. S. and M. J. Chang. 2006. Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Diversity Rationale. Educational Researcher 35(1): 6–11. Oklahoma State University. n.d. Mission Statement, Vice President for Institutional Diversity. Retrieved March 1, 2007, from http://avpma.okstate.edu/missionStatement. html. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. 2d 750 (1978). Southern Methodist University. n.d. Office of Institutional Access and Equity Mission Statement. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://smu.edu/aao/. Takagi, D. Y. 1992. The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2008. Diversity Statements. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://diversity.illinois.edu/statements.html. University of Kansas. 2009. Provost’s Statement on Diversity. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.diversity.ku.edu/provost.shtml. University of Louisville. n.d. Operational Definition of Diversity; Diversity Vision Statement. Web July 28, 2009. http://louisville.edu/diversity/. University of St. Thomas. 2009. Our Commitment to Diversity. Retrieved September 2009 from http://www.stthomas.edu/diversity/default.html. University of Wisconsin System. 2007. Plan 2008: Educational Quality through Racial and Ethnic Diversity. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.uwsa.edu/edi/ plan/index.htm. Wheaton College. 2008. Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/multi/. Williams, D. A. and K. C. Wade-Golden. 2006. What Is a Chief Diversity Officer? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved August 20, 2009, from http://www.insidehighered. com/workplace/2006/04/18/.

SECTION III

Understanding Progress and Continuing Challenges in American Higher Education

8 TRENDS IN THE EDUCATION OF UNDERREPRESENTED RACIAL MINORITY STUDENTS Peter Teitelbaum

Introduction Higher education often has the profound ability to increase social and economic capital and serve as a tool of social mobility. Moreover, many studies find that Americans need an advanced degree to enter high-paying and/or prestigious occupations in the twenty-first century (Bowen and Bok 2002; Day and Newburger 2002; Swail 2000; Vernez et al. 1999). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, average earnings in 2000 ranged from $18,900 for high school dropouts to $25,900 for high school graduates. College graduates earned an average of $45,400, while those with professional degrees (M.D., J.D. , D.D.S., or D.V.M.) earned $99,300. Over a lifetime, the projected variation in earnings by educational attainment ranged from $1.2 million for high school graduates to $2.1 million for college graduates and $4.4 million for those with professional degrees (Day and Newburger 2002). Underrepresented minorities have made tremendous gains in educational attainment over the past seventy years. But the educational gap between Whites and underrepresented minorities, particularly between Whites and Latinos, remains wide. For example, 94 percent of Whites and 88 percent of African Americans who are between the ages of 25 and 29 had graduated from high school by 2007, compared to only 65 percent of Latinos. For four-year college graduation rates, the gap between White students and both Black and Latino students remains substantial. In 2007, 35.5 percent of Whites, 19.5 percent of African Americans and only 11.6 percent of Latinos between the ages of 25 and 29 had a bachelor’s degree (U.S. Department of Education 2008, table 8) These educational disparities also affect workforce participation and earnings. On average, African American and Latino families earn less than two-thirds

108

Teitelbaum

of what their White counterparts earn (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). As a result, underrepresented minority families have less disposable income to save and invest in their own or their children’s personal development. This chapter will examine underrepresented minorities’ experiences in higher education between 1940 and 2007 as well as their ability to earn advanced degrees and to obtain high-paying occupations.1

Historical context of underrepresented minorities’ educational experiences In the 1940s, most African Americans were poor, lived in rural communities in the South, and received a far inferior education than Whites. According to Card and Krueger (1992), African American children attended schools that served predominately African Americans, and these schools afforded substandard academic opportunities compared to schools that were predominately White. For example, African American teachers earned less than half of the salaries of their White counterparts, the school year was shorter, and the average class size was larger. As a result, in 1940, among Americans who were 25 to 29 years old, Whites were more than three times more likely to graduate from high school or earn a bachelor’s degree than African Americans. That is, in 1940, the percentages of 25- to 29-year-old Whites completing high school and college were 24.2 and 5.9 respectively, compared to only 6.9 and 1.4 percent of African Americans. (U.S. Department of Education 2008, table 8). (Between 1940 and 1975, no information regarding the educational attainment or earnings of Latinos was collected by the U.S. Departments of Census or Education; therefore, this chapter will only address the educational and labor market experiences of Whites and African Americans before 1975.) In the mid 1940s, World War II initiated an unprecedented demand for factory labor, resulting in a migration of African Americans to the North. The economy continued to grow through the 1950s, and the educational conditions for African Americans improved substantially. In fact, the average teachers’ pay and the length of the school year among secondary schools that served primarily African American students became similar to those schools serving predominately White students, and the disparity in average class size declined over this 20-year period (Card and Krueger 1992). Similarly, the difference in the likelihood that Whites and African Americans would earn high school and bachelor’s degrees decreased between 1940 and 1960. The percent of 25- to 29-year-old Whites and African Americans who graduated from high school increased to 63.7 and 38.6 percent respectively (from 24.2 and 6.9 percent in 1940), while 11.8 percent of Whites and 5.4 percent of African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 years old had earned bachelor’s degrees in 1960 (from 5.9 and 1.4 percent in 1940) (U.S. Department of Education 2008). In 1960, 25- to 29-year-old Whites were only twice as likely as African Americans to have earned bachelor’s degrees, compared to four times as likely in 1940.

Underrepresented Racial Minority Students 109

40.0 35.0 30.0

Whites

25.0

AfricanAmricans

20.0

Lantinos

15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0 1940

FIGURE 8.1

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2007

The Percentage of 25- to 29-Year-Old Whites, African Americans and Latinos Who Earned a Bachelor’s Degree between 1940 and 2007

Source: U.S. Department of Education 2008, table 8.

The Civil Rights Movement intensified during the 1960s and 1970s and contributed substantially to the improved access to higher education for racial minorities. In 1961, freedom riders from the North took buses to the deep South to protest segregation in schools. A federal judge ordered the University of Mississippi to admit an African American student in 1962, and, in the following year, Governor George Wallace incited a riot as he attempted to prohibit two African American students from attending the last all-White state university, the University of Alabama. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, formally engaging the federal government to dismantle segregation. Moreover, President Johnson called for schools to move beyond nondiscrimination and promote affirmative action in his 1965 commencement speech at Howard University in which he stated: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” (Rainwater and Yancey 1967). In the 1960s and early 1970s, most leading selective colleges developed programs to increase the number of underrepresented minority students on their campuses, taking race into account in the admissions process. This impacted college-going rates for students of color. By 1975, the percent of 25- to 29-yearold Whites, African Americans and Latinos who earned a bachelor’s degree was reported to be 23.8, 10.5 and 8.8 percent respectively (U.S. Department of Education 2008). The 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Bakke proscribed the use of race in admissions but affirmed that admissions officers could “take race into account” as one of

110

Teitelbaum

several factors in evaluating the merits of minority applicants compared to other candidates as a means to secure the benefits of a student body of diverse backgrounds and experiences (438 U.S. 265, 1978). After the Supreme Court ruling, and through the mid-1990s, most selective colleges continued to consider race in admitting students, sometimes adjusting their policies and practices to comply with the Court’s decision. Between 1960 and 1995, the percent of 25- to 29year-old African Americans who earned a bachelor’s degree increased by almost three-fold, from 5.4 percent to 15.4 percent. Surprisingly, there were almost no gains in the percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Latinos who earned a bachelor’s degree between 1975—the earliest year for which the U.S. Department of Education collected educational attainment data for Latinos—and 1995 (from 8.8 to 8.9 percent over that 20-year span). In the mid-1990s, a major court decision in Texas and Proposition 209 in California signaled a shift in attitudes against affirmative action admissions policies. In the summer of 1995, the Regents of the University of California University System announced that the state system would no longer be permitted to take race into account in admitting students. A year later, California voters approved Proposition 209 which effectively outlawed affirmative action in California. In that same year, 1996, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard the case of Hopwood v. Texas. The Court ruled that the University of Texas Law School could not take race into consideration in admitting students unless such action was necessary to remedy past discrimination by the school itself (78 F.3d 932). At the University of California at Berkeley, the freshman class of 1998 was the first to feel the impact of Proposition 209. The number of Black freshmen who enrolled at the school dropped by over 50 percent in just one year, from 258 in 1997 to 126 students in 1998, and the number of Latino freshmen declined from 476 to 272 students. In 1997, 20.5 percent of the freshman class at the University of California at Berkeley was African American or Latino. In 1998, this figure was just 10.7 percent (University of California 2008). At the University of Texas at Austin, the freshman class of 1997 was the first to experience the influence of the Hopwood decision. The percentage of the freshman class at the University of Texas

30 25 20 Universityof TexasatAustin

15 10

Universityof Californiaat Berkeley

5 0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

FIGURE 8.2

The Percentage of the Freshman Class That Was African American, Latino or Native American at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Berkeley between 1996 and 2008

Underrepresented Racial Minority Students 111

at Austin that was African American dropped from 4.1 to 2.7 percent from 1996 to 1997—a 34 percent decrease. Latino students were less affected by the Hopwood case; the percentage of the freshman class that was Latino dropped 13 percent, from 14.5 to 12.6 percent between 1996 and 1997 (University of Texas 2008). Legal and political decisions regarding race and admissions have had varying influences on minority enrollment. While the Hopwood case did adversely affect the racial/ethnic composition of the freshman class at University of Texas at Austin for several years, the Texas 10 percent rule—which was implemented in 1999 and states that students who graduated among the top 10 percent of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas—helped the University recruit qualified underrepresented minorities. According to Long and Tienda (2008), minority enrollment was increased due to the new policy. For example, Latinos and African Americans account for 19.9 and 5.6 percent respectively of the 2008 freshman class at the University of Texas at Austin—higher percentages than in 1996 (University of Texas 2008). At the University of California at Berkeley, Latino students have experienced large enrollment gains since 1997; nevertheless, their enrollment rates are still lower than before Proposition 209 took effect (13.3 percent of the freshman class in 1996, 7.3 percent in 1997, and 10.9 percent in 2008). In contrast, the African American enrollment rate for the freshman class at the University of California at Berkeley has not changed since the Proposition took effect in 1997and remains at 3.4 percent in 2008 (University of California 2008).

Student persistence in college Affirmative action politics tends to target admissions, and, where race-sensitive admissions programs have been in place, there has been an increase in the proportion of underrepresented minorities that have enrolled in college over the past half century. However, once underrepresented minority students are on college campuses, it is also important to ensure that they remain in college and earn a degree. The evidence regarding postsecondary persistence for underrepresented minorities is mixed. Although graduation rates have increased for all racial/ethnic groups between 1997 and 2001, attrition rates still vary substantially by race. Among the students who enrolled in four-year institutions as freshmen during the 2001–02 academic year, only 57.3 percent earned a bachelor’s degree within six years (NCES 2009). A breakdown of the graduation data by race reveals that more than 3 out of every 5 Asian (66.5 percent) or White (60.3 percent) students graduated within six years, compared to less than half of Latino (48.3 percent) and African American (41.5 percent) students. While the graduation rates for Latinos increased by 5 percent between 1997 and 2001, the graduation rates for African Americans increased by only 3 percent. Attrition can have long-term consequences for both students and institutions. The two most important benefits of earning a college degree are (1) the

112

Teitelbaum

70 60

57.3

63

60.3

50 38.5

40

41.5

43.5

66.5

48.3 1997 2001

30 20 10 0 White

FIGURE 8.3

AfricanAmerican

Latino

Asian

The Percentage of Students Who Enrolled as Freshman in four-year, Title IV Institutions in the 1997 and 2001 Academic Years and Graduated within Six Years, by Race

Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2005 and 2009).

opportunity for economic and social mobility and (2) the ability to pursue an advanced degree. Students who leave school without a degree—particularly socioeconomically disadvantaged students who are disproportionately likely to be underrepresented minorities—often depart with substantial debt. Not only does this adversely affecting their credit rating (Swail 2003), but the lack of a bachelor’s degree also results in poorer employment prospects. Among students who enrolled in college, those who failed to complete any degree earn on average about $32,000 a year, compared to $33,000 for students who obtained an associate’s degree and $45,400 for students with a bachelor’s degree (Day and Newburger 2002). According to Bowen (1980), Pascarella and Terenzini (1991), Adelman (1999) and Bowen and Bok (2002), students who persist in college are more likely to have intellectually stimulating experiences as well as participate in social and cultural events than those who leave. Moreover, the long-term benefits of completing a bachelor’s degree include higher lifetime earnings, a better work environment, improved access to professional development and a lower probability of unemployment. Finally, only students with a bachelor’s degree will have the opportunity to enroll in advanced degree programs that may allow them to obtain a prestigious and high-paying occupation.

Advanced degrees and high-paying occupations Although underrepresented minorities made large gains in terms of the percentage of people who have earned high school and college degrees since 1940, the representation of African Americans and Latinos in higher education declines as the degree level increases. For example, while African Americans earned 8.1 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 1996–97, they only earned 6.8 percent of all master’s degrees, 6.7 percent of all first-professional degrees, and 4.1 percent

Underrepresented Racial Minority Students 113

of all doctorate degrees received that year. Similarly, Latinos earned 5.3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, but only 3.7 percent of all master’s degrees, 4.6 percent of all first-professional degrees, and 2.4 percent of all doctoral degrees awarded in 1997 (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). Although African Americans and Latinos made substantial gains between 1981 and 1997, they still only represent a small fraction of the students who earn master’s, doctoral or first-professional degrees. Although Whites generally earn substantially more than African Americans and Latinos at all levels of education, possession of an advanced degree allows access to higher-paying occupations, regardless of race. Day and Newburger (2002) projected work-life earnings estimates for full-time, year-round workers, by level of education and race. Over a lifetime, the authors predict that African Americans with advanced degrees will earn $800,000 more than their counterparts with bachelor’s degrees and $1.5 million more than African American high school graduates. Similarly, the authors estimate that Latinos with advanced degrees will earn $700,000 more than their counterparts with bachelor’s degrees and $1.5 million more than their peers whose highest degree is a high school diploma. The most sought-after professional fields in the United States include law, medicine, and academia—all of which require advanced degrees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Whites, Latinos, and African Americans accounted for 63, 15 and 14 percent of the U.S. population in 2008 respectively. However, 91.7 percent of all lawyers were White in 2000, while only 3.9 and 3.2 percent of lawyers were African American and Latino respectively. Among all American physicians and surgeons in 2000, 5.1 percent were Latino and 4.5 percent were African American (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). Finally, African Americans and Latinos accounted for only 6.1 and 4.2 percent respectively of all tenured 16 14 Bachelor's

12 10

Master's

8 6

Doctor's

4 FirstͲ Professional Degree

2 0 1981 FIGURE 8.4

1985

1990

1995

1997

The Percentage of all Bachelor’s, Master’s, First-Professional, and Doctor Degrees Earned by African American and Latino Students between 1981 and 1997

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000. Table No. 318. Note: First-professional degrees include: M.D., J.D. , D.D.S., and D.V.M.

114

Teitelbaum

7 6 5 4

AfricanAmericans

3

Latinos

2 1 0 Lawyers

FIGURE 8.5

Doctors

TenuredProfessors

The Percentage of Lawyers, Doctors and Tenured Professors Who Were African American and Latinos in 2000 and 20012

Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2000: Lawyers and Doctors; Weinberg (2008): Tenured Professors in 2001

professors at American universities in 2001 (Weinberg 2008). Whites, and increasingly Asians, dominate the most highly sought-after occupations in the United States and will continue to do so until a higher percentage of underrepresented minorities obtain advanced degrees.

Conclusion This chapter helped answer the question: how much progress has been made with regard to educating underrepresented minorities? Unfortunately, a second and perhaps more important question—how much further do we have to go?—is much harder to answer. In Grutter, the 2003 affirmative action Supreme Court decision, Justice O’Connor wrote in the majority decision that race-conscious admissions policies in higher education should be used for only a limited time and will hopefully be unnecessary within 25 years. Justice Thomas, who authored the dissenting argument, noted that race-sensitive admissions policies are unconstitutional now and will continue to be so in 25 years (539 U.S. 306). In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Latinos and African Americans accounted for 15 and 14 percent of the U.S. population respectively; however, Latinos and African Americans account for less than 12 percent of all students who received a first-professional degree in 1997, and less than 10 percent of all U.S. lawyers and doctors in 2000 were Latino or African American (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). By 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that Latinos and African Americans will constitute 30 and 15 percent of the American population respectively, compared to 46 percent for Whites. Although this chapter has demonstrated that underrepresented minorities have made substantial gains with regard to educational attainment over the past 70 years, more progress needs to be accomplished before anyone can reasonably state that African Americans and Latinos are well represented in advanced degree programs in American universities or in the prestigious occupations in the U.S. economy. The question that

Underrepresented Racial Minority Students 115

the Supreme Court did not address and remains to be studied is: when (or by what measures) will we know that race-sensitive admissions policies are no longer needed?

Notes 1 2

This study focuses on the differences in educational attainment and earnings by race. Another compelling study would examine the extent to which educational attainment and labor market experiences vary by gender. The U.S. Department of Census has not collected comparable information regarding the percentages of lawyers and doctors by race over time.

References Adelman, C. 1999. Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance patterns, and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment. Jessup, MD: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement. Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). Bowen, H. R. 1980. Adult Learning, Higher Education, and the Economics of Unused Capacity. Direction Papers in Lifelong Learning. Princeton, NJ: The College Board. Bowen, W. and D. Bok. 2002. The Shape of the River. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Card, D. and A. Krueger. 1992. Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States. Journal of Political Economy 100(1): 1–40. Day, J. and E. Newburger. 2002. The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings. Washington, DC: The U.S. Census Bureau. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996). Long, Mark C. and Marta Tienda. 2008. Winners and Losers: Changes in Texas University Admissions Post-Hopwood, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 30(3): 255–280. National Center for Education Statistics. 2005. Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2003; Graduation Rates 1997 and 2000 cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2003. Washington DC: The U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 2009. Enrollment in Postsecondary Institution, Fall 2007; Graduation Rates 2001 and 2004 cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2007. Washington DC: The U.S. Department of Education. Pascarella, E. and P. Terenzini. 1991. How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rainwater, Lee and William Yancey. 1967.The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Swail, W. S. 2000. Preparing America’s Disadvantaged for College: Programs that Increase College Opportunity. In A. F. Cabrera and La Nasa (Eds.), Understanding the College Choice of Disadvantaged Student. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Swail, W. S. 2003. Retaining Minority Students in Higher Education. Washington, DC: Educational Policy Institute. University of California. 2008. Policy and Planning Website. University of California

116

Teitelbaum

at Berkeley Archival Enrollment Data. http://opa.berkeley.edu/institutionaldata/ archiveenroll.htm. University of Texas. 2008. Office of Institutional Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Statistical Handbooks. http://www.utexas.edu/academic/oir/. U.S. Census Bureau. 2000. Statistical Abstract of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. U.S. Department of Education. 2008. Digest of Education Statistics 2008. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Vernez, G., Krop, R. A., and C. P. Rydell. 1999. Closing the Education Gap: Benefits and Costs. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Weinberg, S. 2008. Monitoring Faculty Diversity: The Need for a More Granular Approach. The Journal of Higher Education 79(4) (July/August 2008): 365–89.

9 GENDER EQUITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION1 Claudia Buchmann and Thomas A. DiPrete

Trends in college enrollments and degree completion show the extraordinary progress of women in higher education over the past several decades. This chapter critically reviews these trends and provides a comprehensive assessment of the status of women and men in various aspects of higher education, with a focus on undergraduates. It attends to differences in the status of women and men by racial/ethnic group and socioeconomic status, as well as across major fields and institutional types. The chapter also summarizes what is known from research about reasons for observed gender differences and concludes by offering recommendations for future research.

The transition from high school to college In the United States, completing high school is the first step to gaining access to college. Many youth are excluded from the pool of eligible college students because they have not completed high school. The status dropout rate2 of males has been higher than that of females for the past several decades. Dropout rates vary substantially by ethnic group, but the male disadvantage holds for all major groups. In 2008, male dropout rates for whites, blacks, and Hispanics were 6 percent, 12 percent, and 26 percent, respectively, compared with 5 percent, 9 percent, and 18 percent, for females of the same groups (Snyder and Dillow 2007). Among high school graduates, more males than females acquire a GED, which is an indicator of a lower level of college preparedness than a high school diploma. Students who enroll in college directly after high school have higher rates of college enrollment and graduation (Bozick and DeLuca 2005; Horn and Premo 1995). Although men used to be more likely than women to enroll in college directly after high school, today women are slightly more likely than men to do

118

Buchmann and DiPrete

so (King 2010). These female advantages in high school completion and immediate college play a role in the female advantage in college enrollment. Today, 57 percent of students enrolled in colleges and universities are women.

College experiences and persistence to degree Types of institutions and fields of study Historically, men and women have attended very different postsecondary institutions. Many of the most prestigious universities and colleges in the U.S. only began to admit women in the late 1960s (Jacobs 1999). Women gained greater access to elite schools in the decades that followed, but by the mid-1990s, women were still more likely to attend less prestigious schools than men (Jacobs 1996, 1999). Jacobs (1999) attributes the small but persistent gender gap in institutional prestige to the relative scarcity of women in schools with large engineering programs. At any rate, today the degree of gender segregation across types of institutions attended is smaller than the degree of gender segregation that exists across fields of study. Not long ago women college students were concentrated in a narrow range of fields of study. In the 1960s, more than 70 percent of female undergraduates majored in only six fields: education, English, fine arts, nursing, history, and home economics (Jacobs 1996). Gender segregation across majors is measured by the dissimilarity index which captures the percentage of women who would have to change majors for there to be parity for men and women in the distributions; 100 percent indicates complete segregation and 0 percent indicates identical distributions (Jacobs 1995). In 1965, the dissimilarity index calculated across all fields of study indicated that 40 percent of women would have had to change major fields in order to achieve gender parity; by 1995 the dissimilarity index declined to 19 percent (Turner and Bowen 1999). Declines in the gender segregation of major fields were most dramatic during the 1970s and slowed from the mid-1980s onward. A substantial movement of women out of education coupled with a large influx of women into business programs accounted for much of this reduction in the total dissimilarity index (Turner and Bowen 1999). Gender desegregation in the fields of science and engineering has been less dramatic, but with some noteworthy changes. The number of women undergraduates majoring in science and engineering has increased consistently since 1966; women have earned slightly more than half of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the science and engineering since the year 2000 (National Science Foundation 2009). Inspection of specific fields within this broad category of science and engineering reveals great variation. Women now comprise the majority of students in the biological sciences, the agricultural sciences and the social sciences, with the exception of economics. They are approaching parity in chemistry but remain the minority in nearly all other sciences. Their underrepresentation in all fields within engineering and computer science is particularly striking.

Gender Equity in Higher Education 119

In an assessment of the causes for women’s underrepresentation in science, Xie and Shauman (2003) found that it is not due to gender differences in math ability or girls’ lower participation in high school math and science coursework, as these gaps have closed. Male high school students are twice as likely as female students to expect to major in science and engineering in college; however, once in college, women are more likely than men to change to a science major after beginning a non-science major. Xie and Shauman concluded that gender segregation within the sciences (e.g., biology versus physics) and the difficulty of combining careers in science with familial roles are the key barriers to women’s successful career trajectories in science and engineering. Other research attempting to understand the reasons for gender differences in major choices has focused on differences in skill, such as academic performance, or differences in preferences and socialization. Turner and Bowen (1999) examined the degree to which gender differences in students’ college major choices are associated with differences in pre-college math performance as measured by math SAT scores. They found that differences in SAT scores account for less than half of the total gender gap in major. Rather, other forces “including differences in preferences, labor market expectations, gender-specific effects of college experience and unmeasured aspects of academic preparation account for the main part of today’s gender gaps in choice of academic major” (309).

Persistence to degree Trend statistics in the United States demonstrate a striking reversal of a gender gap in college completion that once favored males. In 1960, 65 percent of all bachelor degrees were awarded to men, but women reached parity in 1982. From then onward, the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women continued to climb; by 2000 women received 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees (Snyder and Dillow 2010) and this gap has remained stable to the present. The female advantage in bachelor degree receipt exists for all racial groups, but there are important variations by race and ethnicity in the size of the gap: In 2008, women earned 66 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to Blacks; the figures are 61 percent for Hispanics, 61 percent for Native Americans, 55 percent for Asians, and 56 percent for Whites (Snyder and Dillow 2010, Table 285). Note that among Blacks, women have held a consistent advantage in college completion over men for more than 70 years (McDaniel et al. forthcoming). When the Census Bureau began tracking bachelor’s degrees by race and gender in 1974, women earned 57 percent of all degrees awarded to Blacks (Cohen and Nee 2000). In every year since 2000, no less than 66 percent of Black college degree recipients are women (Snyder and Dillow 2010: Table 285). One major reason that women earn more bachelor degrees than men is their lower rate of college dropout (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006). Women also earn their degrees more quickly. Freeman (2004) found that 66 percent of women

120

Buchmann and DiPrete

who enrolled in college in 1995–1996 had completed a bachelor’s degree by 2001, compared with only 59 percent of men. Whereas 50 percent of Black and Hispanic women had completed a bachelor’s degree in this period, only 37 percent of Black men and 43 percent of Hispanic men had done so. Women have also made substantial gains in earning graduate and professional degrees. In 1970, women earned 40 percent of master’s degrees and a mere 14 percent of doctoral degrees. Currently, women are more likely than men to attend graduate school; they earned 61 percent of all master’s degrees and 51 percent of doctoral degrees in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Similar trends have occurred within professional degrees. In 1970, women earned 5 percent of law degrees, 8 percent of medical degrees, and 1 percent of dentistry degrees (Freeman 2004). In 2008, women earned 47 percent of law degrees, 49 percent of medical degrees, and 45 percent of dentistry degrees (Snyder and Dillow 2010).

Explaining gender gaps in higher education The reversal from a male advantage to a female one in college enrollment and completion is an important topic of study both in its own right and because of its potential impacts on labor markets, family formation, and other arenas. Clearly, understanding the causes and consequences of the changing gender gaps in higher education is an important task for researchers. There are both individual and institutional explanations for the rising female advantage in higher education. Some explanations have been established by research in this emerging area, other plausible explanations have not been assessed empirically to date but have been topics of speculation in the popular press.

Individual-level factors Family resources Research in sociology, much of it in the status attainment tradition (Blau and Duncan 1967; Jencks 1972) and economics (Becker 1991; Leibowitz 1977) demonstrates the importance of parental education and other family-related resources for an individual’s educational attainment. Resources related to family background exert their influence at each level of educational attainment, partly through academic performance and partly through educational transitions, given performance. Financial capital; social capital; access to role models, mentors, and information; individual attitudes (especially aspirations); and prior academic performance are also important determinants of inequalities in educational attainment. These resources, which are amassed from family, neighborhood, and school environments, explain in part ethnic and racial differences in educational attainment; children of different races and ethnicities come from families,

Gender Equity in Higher Education 121

neighborhoods, and schools with different levels of resources. Girls and boys, however, are not segregated by family or neighborhood, and in the United States they are generally not segregated by school. Resources may be an important part of the explanation for the historical male advantage in educational attainment, but that explanation concerns the process by which environmentally available resources differentially flow to one gender or another. Moreover, with gender inequality changing so rapidly, it is likely that gender-specific flows of resources have changed considerably over the past 50 years; therefore, we must treat the results of published research in this area as historically contingent. Even when girls and boys share the same household, family resources need not be equally distributed across sons and daughters. For example, socialization arguments emphasize the importance of role modeling, such that children model their parents as they form their own educational and occupational aspirations and attainment. Some scholars argue that role modeling is sex specific; girls look more to their mothers and boys more to their fathers as they develop their educational and occupational. According to this perspective, after controlling for the overall educational level of the parents, daughters should fare better in households with a better-educated mother than in households with a better-educated father, and sons should be affected more negatively than daughters by the absence of a father in the home. Buchmann and DiPrete (2006) find that the relationship between family background and college completion has changed for men and women over the second half of the twentieth century. In cohorts born before the mid-1960s, the gender gap favored males, and daughters were able to reach parity with sons only in the minority of families with two college-educated parents. Parents with a high school education or less appeared to favor sons over daughters, and the gender gap in college completion favoring males was largest among these less-educated families. For cohorts born after the mid-1960s, the male advantage declined and even reversed in households with less-educated parents or those with an absent father. Thus the female advantage emerged first among families with absent or less-educated fathers. It remains largest among these families, but has gradually extended to all family types. Buchmann and DiPrete (2006) argue that the pattern reflects a growing vulnerability of sons of less-educated or absent fathers.

Academic performance The gender differences in academic performance and behaviors during high school discussed above are likely related to the female advantage in college enrollment and completion, but research has not sorted out all the mechanisms that link performance in high school with college outcomes. Perhaps females’ higher aspirations to attend college explain, in part, their greater performance in high school. In 1980, more male than female high school seniors (60 percent versus 54 percent) expected to graduate from a four-year college, but by 2001 the trend

122

Buchmann and DiPrete

had reversed, with 82 percent of female high school seniors expecting a four-year degree, compared with 76 percent of male high school seniors (Freeman 2004, p. 66). The reversal of the gender gap in educational expectations from one favoring males to one favoring females is not limited to the United States; in nearly all industrialized societies, young women are more likely to expect to attend college than are their male counterparts (McDaniel 2010). Rising educational expectations of women are related to their rising rates of educational attainment. At the same time, females’ rising educational expectations and higher college graduation rates relative to those of males likely stem from the female advantage in academic performance that develops over the educational career. Some research finds that the female-favorable gap in postsecondary enrollment is due in part to young women’s better grades and tests scores and the greater number of math and science courses they take in high school (Cho 2007; Goldin et al. 2006) as well as their tendency to spend more time on homework and avoid disciplinary problems (Jacob 2002) relative to their male counterparts. Gender differences in high school behaviors also lay the foundation for women’s better academic performance in college, which in turn plays a large role in producing the female advantage in college completion (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006).

Incentives and returns to college Individuals’ knowledge of the returns to a college degree also play an important role in their decisions regarding how much education to acquire. One plausible reason for the rising rates of women’s college enrollment and completion is that the returns to college have risen more for women than for men. Research finds that women’s wage returns to a college degree have indeed increased, but male wage returns to a college degree have increased even more rapidly, as the opportunities for men with only a high school diploma to earn high wages in the manufacturing sector have declined over time (Averett and Burton 1996; Charles and Luoh 2003). For this reason, wage returns alone cannot explain why women complete more college degrees than men. DiPrete and Buchmann (2006) assess whether the growing female advantage in college completion is related to changes in the non-wage returns to higher education for women and men. Via a trend analysis of the value of college degree for each of these outcomes measured against the baseline value of a high school diploma, they find that some non-wage returns to a college degree (e.g., standard-of-living and insurance-against-poverty returns) have risen faster for women than for men. Thus, it is plausible that the female-favorable trend in college completion may derive at least in part from responses to gender-specific changes in the returns to higher education. DiPrete and Buchmann (2006) also show that the non-wage returns to a college degree have risen for men, albeit not as rapidly as for women. One puzzling aspect of the reversal of the gender gap in college completion is the slow pace of growth in men’s rates of college completion in the face of rising returns to college

Gender Equity in Higher Education 123

for men. Whether this phenomenon is due to young men’s lack of knowledge about the value of postsecondary education, their lower priorities for obtaining higher education relative to other short-term goals or some other mechanism is not clear.

Institutional factors Beyond the factors that shape individuals’ resources and incentives to attain a college education, institutional-level factors also shape gendered patterns of college access and success. These include sociocultural changes in gender roles and expectations about life course trajectories for women and men. Shifts in the structure of the labor market such as declining discrimination against women and changes in occupational sex-segregation also impact individual incentives to attend college, as do changes in institutions of higher education themselves, such as the growth of community colleges, the rising costs of higher education, and changes in financial aid regulations. Military service may also compete with higher education for young adults, especially young men, and shape gender-specific patterns of participation in higher education.

Gender-role attitudes In the United States, there have been large changes in gender-role attitudes in recent decades, with the clear trend of declining support for traditional gender roles and greater support for gender-egalitarian views (Brooks and Bolzendahl 2004). Research finds support for a causal relationship between gender-role attitudes and subsequent behaviors and attitudes as diverse as childbearing (Kaufman 2000), voting behavior (Brooks 2000), and marital satisfaction (Amato and Booth 1995). Changes in gender-role attitudes are also related to the growing college attendance of young women, but in complex ways and coupled with other factors (DiPrete and Buchmann 2006; Goldin 2006). Young women’s rising expectations for future employment encouraged them to attend and complete college, but the increasing median age of first marriage among college students in recent decades has also played a role (Goldin et al. 2006). Women’s growing rates of college and graduate/professional education, in turn, contributed to the rising median age of first marriage. The access of reliable contraception in the form of the birth control pill positively impacted women’s college attendance and a host of related factors, including their age of first marriage, professional labor force participation, and age of first birth (Goldin 2006; Goldin and Katz 2002).

Labor markets Between the 1970s and 1990s the gender wage gap declined, and women with high levels of human capital (e.g., education and labor force experience) saw

124

Buchmann and DiPrete

the greatest increase in their wages (Morris and Western 1999; Spain and Bianchi 1996). Moreover, the returns to labor force experience increased more for women than for men during this period (Blau and Kahn 1997), owing to rising levels of women’s human capital and the passage and enforcement of antidiscrimination laws (Goldin 2006). Occupational sex segregation also fell between 1970 and 1990, although the rate of decline slowed in the second decade (Morris and Western 1999). As a result, more women entered prestigious and better-paid positions in sectors such as law, business, and the sciences (Goldin 2006). These changes in the labor market are related to women’s rapidly rising rates of college completion from the 1980s onward.

Educational institutions Changes in higher education also may have altered the access or pathways to college in gender-specific ways. The system of higher education expanded rapidly during second half of the twentieth century. During the same period college tuition costs have risen and grant-based financial aid has declined resulting in increasing levels of student loans (Alon 2007). Cursory evidence suggests that women and men receive similar levels of financial support from their families (Jacobs 1999), but it is possible that changes in financial aid or the increasing costs of college are affecting men and women differently. Recent research indicates that women are more responsive than men to programs that decrease college costs (Seftor and Turner 2002), suggesting that policies aimed at making college more affordable will increase the female advantage in college enrollment. This is an important topic for further research.

Military service To what degree does the military compete with higher education for young adults? The U.S. military recruits about 200,000 enlisted personnel each year, almost all of whom are high school graduates. Since 1975 the U.S. military has comprised less than 1 percent of the total population. In 2007, active duty personnel comprised almost 1.4 million people, 85 percent of whom are men (U.S. Department of Defense 2007). The enlisted population is disproportionately young, with more than 50 percent under the age of 25, so it is possible that military service competes with college as a destination, especially for young men. But decisions to enlist in the military and to enroll in college need not be mutually exclusive. For some, military service may make enrolling in college possible, albeit at a later point in life (Kleykamp 2006). Moreover, nearly all of the officers commissioned by the armed forces each year are college graduates and about 40 percent received their commission through participation in a university’s Reserve Officer Training Program (ROTC) (Segal and Segal 2004, p. 8). For this group, military enlistment occurs after completing college.

Gender Equity in Higher Education 125

On the whole, men who serve in the military receive less education than those who do not serve. It is possible that merely delaying college enrollment reduces the likelihood of attending or completing college. It is unclear whether military service reduces the likelihood of attaining a college degree or whether the military differentially selects young people who are less committed to postsecondary education (MacLean and Elder 2007). MacLean’s (2005) findings are consistent with the idea that military service competes with higher education for young men. To the best of our knowledge, no research has examined the relationship between military service and educational attainment for women or whether the effects of military service found in the past remain the same for military personnel today. These are important questions for future research.

Conclusion Gender inequalities in higher education have seen much change, with young women gaining advantages over young men in ways that could not have been anticipated just two decades ago. These changes raise many questions for future research: Why are young men less likely than women to enroll in college immediately after graduating high school? Why have men’s rates of college completion not kept pace with the rising returns to college for men? Do changes in college costs and the availability of financial aid affect men and women differently? In addition to addressing these questions, future research must investigate gender differences in higher education by race, ethnicity, SES, and immigrant status. Such research should attend to vulnerable segments of the population and to males who may be at particular risk for poor performance and low educational attainment. In sum, we have much to learn about the nature, causes, and consequences of the changing gender gaps in higher education and across the educational life course more generally.

Notes 1

2

Sections of this chapter appeared previously in “Gender Inequalities in Education” by Claudia Buchmann, Thomas A. DiPrete and Anne McDaniel and are reprinted with permission from the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 34:319–337, © 2008 by Annual Reviews, www.annualreviews.org. The “status dropout rate” reflects the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in high school and who have not earned a high school diploma or a Certificate of General Educational Development (GED).

References Alon, Sigal. 2007. The Influence of Financial Aid in Leveling Group Differences in Graduating from Elite Institutions. Economics of Education Review 26: 296–311. Amato Paul R. and Alan Booth. 1995. Changes in Gender Role Attitudes and Perceived Marital Quality. American Sociological Review 60: 58–66.

126

Buchmann and DiPrete

Averett, Susan and Mark L. Burton. 1996. College Attendance and the College Wage Premium: Differences by Gender. Economics of Education Review 15: 37–49. Becker, Gary. 1991. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blau, Francine D. and Lawrence M. Kahn. 1997. Swimming Upstream: Trends in the Gender Wage Differential in the 1980s. Journal of Labor Economics 15: 1–42. Blau, Peter M. and Otis D. Duncan. 1967. The American Occupation Structure. New York: John Wiley. Bozick, Robert and Stephanie DeLuca. 2005. Better Late Than Never? Delayed Enrollment in the High School to College Transition. Social Forces 84: 527–50. Brooks, Clem. 2000. Civil Rights Liberalism and the Suppression of a Republican Political Realignment in the United States, 1972 to 1996. American Sociological Review 65: 483–505. Brooks, Clem and Catherine Bolzendahl. 2004. The Transformation of U.S. Gender Role Attitudes: Cohort Replacement, Social-Structural Change and Ideological Learning. Social Science Research 33: 106–33. Buchmann, Claudia and Thomas A. DiPrete. 2006. The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Parental Resources and Academic Achievement. American Sociological Review 71: 515–41. Charles, Kerwin Kofi and Ming-Ching Luoh. 2003. Gender Differences in Completed Schooling. Review of Economics and Statistics 85: 559–77. Cho, D. 2007. The Role of High Hchool Performance in Explaining Women’s Rising College Enrollment. Economics of Education Review 26: 450–62. Cohen, C. and C. Nee. 2000. Educational Attainment and Sex Differentials in AfricanAmerican Communities. American Behavioral Scientist 43: 1159–206. DiPrete, Thomas A. and Claudia Buchmann. 2006. Gender-Specific Trends in the Value of Education and the Emerging Gender Gap in College Completion. Demography 43: 1–24. Freeman, Catherine E. 2004. Trends in the Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Goldin, Claudia. 2006. The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family. The American Economic Review 96: 1–21. Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence F. Katz. 2002. The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions. Journal of Political Economy 11: 730–70. Goldin, Claudia, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko. 2006. The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap. Journal of Economic Perspectives 20: 133–56. Horn, Laura J. and M.D. Premo. 1995. Profile of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Education Institutions: 1992–93, With an Essay on Undergraduates at Risk (NCES 96-237). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Government Printing Office. Jacob, Brian A. 2002. Where the Boys Aren’t: Non-cognitive Skills, Returns to School and the Gender Gap in Higher Education. Economics of Education Review 21: 589–98. Jacobs, Jerry A. 1995. Gender and Academic Specialties: Trends among College Degree Recipients in the 1980s. Sociology of Education 68: 81–98. Jacobs, Jerry A. 1996. Gender Inequality and Higher Education. Annual Review of Sociology 22: 153–85. Jacobs, Jerry A. 1999. Gender and the Stratification of Colleges. Journal of Higher Education 70: 161–87.

Gender Equity in Higher Education 127

Jencks, Christopher. 1972. Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic. Kaufman, G. 2000. Do Gender Role Attitudes Matter? Journal of Family Issues 21: 128– 34. King, Jacqueline E. 2010. Gender Equity in Higher Education: 2010. Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Kleykamp, Meredith A. 2006. College, Jobs, or the Military? Enlistment during a Time of War. Social Science Quarterly 87(2):272–90. Leibowitz, Arlene. 1977. Parental Inputs and Children’s Achievement. Journal of Human Resources 12: 242–51. MacLean, Alair. 2005. Lessons from the Cold War: Military Service and College Education. Sociology of Education 78: 250–66. MacLean, Alair and Glen H. Elder. 2007. Military Service in the Life Course. Annual Review of Sociology 33: 175–96. McDaniel, Anne. 2010. Cross-National Gender Gaps in Educational Expectations: The Influence of National-Level Gender Ideology and Educational Systems. Comparative Education Review 54: 27–50. McDaniel, Anne, Thomas A. DiPrete, Claudia Buchmann, and Uri Shwed. Forthcoming. The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons. Demography. Morris, Martina and Bruce Western. 1999. Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Annual Review of Sociology 25: 623–57. National Science Foundation 2009. Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. Division of Science Resources Statistics. Arlington, VA, Publication number 09-305. Seftor, Neil S. and Sarah E. Turner. 2002. Back to School: Federal Student Aid Policy and Adult College Enrollment. Journal of Human Resources 37(2): 336–52. Segal, David R. and Mady Wechsler Segal. 2004. America’s military population. Population Bulletin 59(4): 1–40. Snyder, Thomas D. and Sally A. Dillow. 2007. Digest of Education Statistics 2009. National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Snyder, Thomas D. and Sally A. Dillow. 2010. Digest of Education Statistics 2009. National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Spain, D. and Suzanne M. Bianchi. 1996. Balancing Act: Motherhood, Marriage and Employment Among American Women. NY: Russell Sage. Turner, Sarah E. and William G. Bowen. 1999. Choice of Major: The Changing (Unchanging) Gender Gap. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52: 289–313. U.S. Department of Defense. 2007. Population Representation in the Military Services, Fiscal Year 2006. Washington, DC: USGPO. Xie, Yu and Kimberlee A. Shauman. 2003. Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10 LGBT STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND STAFF Past, present, and future directions Debbie Bazarsky and Ronni Sanlo

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) movement in higher education is a recent phenomenon, from the establishment of the first LGBT office in 1971 to over 180 such offices today. In this chapter, we review the history of LGBT issues and people on U.S. college and university campuses as part of the broader LGBT history, identifying longstanding and newly emerging needs and concerns in higher education. A key question: How might campuses create welcoming and inclusive environments for this population? The initials LGBT describe the broad population of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. However, the words bisexual and transgender did not become common use in higher education until the mid-1990s. Bisexual and transgender people have been on college campuses but were, and likely remain, highly invisible.

History of LGBT issues in the United States and higher education The history of LGBT people is still being uncovered as LGBT scholarship becomes more accepted. LGBT people have likely been on college campuses since the founding of Nanjing University in China in AD 258, though the word homosexual was not created until 1869 (Miller 1995). Despite considerable gaps in the historical record, there are identifiable events—in literature, politics, and social movements—that paved the way for addressing today’s LGBT students, faculty, and staff in higher education. Although we do not provide a comprehensive LGBT history in this chapter, we note that gay/lesbian publications are among the precursors to visible presence of LGBT people in the academy. The first known gay-related novel, Joseph and

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 129

His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania, by Taylor, was published in 1879, followed in 1928 by Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Better Angel, by Brown, published in 1933, was the first gay-related novel in which the hero survives. Organizational newsletters were other sources of writing about gay/lesbian concerns, and contributed to the development of LGBT communities. The Society for Human Rights, the first gay rights organization in the U.S., was founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924, but was disbanded almost immediately when Gerber was arrested for creating “immoral” materials.” (Loughery 1998). Later efforts were more successful. In 1947, Lisa Ben published Vice Versa, the first national lesbian newsletter. The Mattachine Society, the first major gay male organization, was founded in Los Angeles in 1950, and in 1954 was given permission by the U.S. Postal Service, via the U.S. Supreme Court, to send its newsletter, One, through the mail (Bullough 2002; Miller 1995). The lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, with its national newsletter, was founded in 1955 (Miller 1995). The modern LGBT civil rights movement is thought to have been initiated with the Stonewall riots in New York on June 29, 1969 (Duberman et al. 1990). The movement made headway throughout the 1970s with the founding of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the Gay Rights National Lobby (forerunner of the Human Rights Campaign), and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). Sadly, movement work was significantly affected in the 1980s when gay and bisexual male leaders and thousands of others died from AIDS. Throughout this history, efforts to promote gays/lesbians in society collided with longstanding institutionalized homophobia. On the political front, a 1950 U.S. Senate report declared that homosexuality was contrary to American morality, which led to mass firing of government workers suspected of being gay (Eisenbach 2006). To make matters worse, in 1951 the American Psychiatric Association added homosexuality to its list of mental disorders. Within this broader framework of oppression, the fate of gays/lesbians in academia was marked by both setbacks and advances. In 1956, the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee initiated an eight-year witch hunt of lesbians and gay men in Florida’s colleges and universities (Sanlo1999), followed by a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right to refuse employment on the grounds of homosexuality. However, simultaneously, East Lansing and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and San Francisco, California passed gay rights ordinances. Miami followed suit, but in 1977, in opposition to this more liberal trend, singer Anita Bryant was successful in leading a highly publicized public fight, considered to be one of the most notorious challenges to gay civil rights, for the repeal of Miami’s gay rights ordinance (Sanlo 1999, 2005). On the heels of Bryant’s success, in 1978, John Briggs introduced Proposition 6 which would ban gays, lesbians, and their allies from working in California’s public schools. Thanks to the work of Harvey Milk, Proposition 6 was rejected by California voters.

130

Bazarsky and Sanlo

The LGBT community has not been silent in its responses to legal challenges. In June of 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Bowers v. Hardwick, the Georgia law that forbade oral or anal sex, ruling that the constitutional right to privacy does not extend to homosexuals (Miller 1995). The ruling prompted an LGBT march on Washington, on October 11, 1987, attended by nearly one million people. One year later the first National Coming Out Day—now celebrated annually on U.S. college campuses—was inaugurated. On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court struck down Bowers v. Hardwick in the landmark case Lawrence et al v. Texas, ruling that the country’s sodomy laws were unconstitutional (Human Rights Watch 2003). Despite legal and cultural progress, as of this writing, the words sexual orientation and gender identity/expression do not appear in federal nondiscrimination laws, and proposed legislation addressing this issue has languished in Congress since 1974. As a result, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is legal in much of the U.S. (Sanlo et al. 2002). In 29 states, it remains legal to fire people from their jobs, take away their children, and remove them from rented or leased housing or hotels for no other reason than their sexual orientation or gender identity. The current political dialogue, weighted on the side of opposing same sex marriage and the military’s anti-gay Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policies, certainly does not inspire safety, inclusion, nor protection for LGBT people. Given this legally and institutionally sanctioned discrimination, many faculty and staff opt out from being public about their sexual orientations or gender identities.

LGBT organizations and centers on campus LGBT concerns have become more visible not only in academia but also in wider legal and cultural domains. Signs of an LGBT presence on campus were student organizations. The first—the Oscar Wilde Study Circle at Texas Christian University—was formed in 1937 by Morris Kight. While similar organizations may have existed, no documentation appears again until 1968 when the Student Homophile League at Columbia University became the first institutionally recognized gay student group in the U.S. The first conference, the National Gay Liberation Front Student Conference, was held in San Francisco in August of 1970 (Miller 1995). Given the power of student movements, in alliance with civil rights and identity-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it is not surprising that student groups led the way for the establishment of LGBT centers and other institutional spaces dedicated to their needs. In 1971, in response to both the Gay Liberation Front and the Black Action Movement, the University of Michigan established the first offices that provided services to specific populations, including lesbian and gay students. The Human Sexuality Office had a quarter-time function within the counseling center, staffed by gay activist Jim Toy (Sanlo et al. 2002). That same year, Jack Baker, an openly gay law student at the University

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 131

of Minnesota, was elected student body president (Miller 1995). In 1973, as the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, UCLA hosted the first national lesbian conference (Retter 1995). LGBT issues began to gain recognition in college and university classrooms, research agendas, and publications in the 1970s, when lesbian and gay studies became a recognized field of scholarship. The first undergraduate lesbian–gay course was taught at the University of California Berkeley in 1970 (McNaron 1997). With an initial emphasis on lesbian and gay history, LGBT studies has expanded to include a broader range of disciplines, genders and sexualities, and approaches, including the concept of queer, which was included in literature departments to challenge social constructs of sexual and gender identity. City College of San Francisco (CCSF) developed the first Queer Studies Department in 1972, and in 1989, Jonathan D. Katz, director of that department, became the first tenured professor of LGBT studies. Organizations and services addressing LGBT student needs continued to expand on U.S. campuses. By the end of the 1980s, the University of Michigan Lesbian and Gay Male Programs Office was a full-time operation. Other campuses followed suit and by the early 1990s, the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) officially recognized LGBT professionals on college campuses (Sanlo et al. 2002). NGLTF initiated its Campus Project to examine campus climate for LGBT students, faculty, and staff (Sanlo et al. 2002) and hired Curt Shepard in 1993 to “foster the growth of campus organizations that are healthy, effective, and equipped to participate meaningfully in improving the quality of life for LGBT people in academe” (Shepard et al. 1995, i–ii). With assistance from NGLTF, NASPA, and ACPA, campuses opened LGBT office doors. During that time, three books were published that helped create a sense of a movement and a new profession: Beyond Tolerance (Evans and Wall 1992), The NGLTF Campus Organization Manual (Shepard et al. 1993), and Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender College Students: A Handbook for Faculty and Administrators (Sanlo 1998). While LGBT center directors met between 1994 and 1996, a more formal meeting occurred in 1997 in Chicago. With support from NASPA, ACPA, and NGLTF, the Consortium of Higher Education Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Professionals (Consortium) was founded with Ronni Sanlo as chair. In 1999 the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) invited Consortium chair Sanlo to join the CAS board and create LGBTspecific standards and guidelines. (CAS develops standards and guidelines for the 40-some functional areas of Student Affairs.) The resulting CAS LGBT Standards and Guidelines provides a guide for developing campus LGBT offices or centers and is a tool for assessing LGBT work on campuses. With the growth of LGBT campus centers, along with the tragic 1998 death of 21-year old gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, there was

132

Bazarsky and Sanlo

an expansion of LGBT activity on college campuses. As Shepard’s murder was widely understood as an act of anti-gay violence, so campuses became more cognizant of providing programs and services for LGBT students.

Campus life today There are over 180 LGBT offices on college campuses today and the Consortium has over 400 members who support LGBT students. This does not include the many campuses where LGBT services are integrated into multicultural centers and other student affairs offices. In addition to the expansion of LGBT offices on campus, more staff and faculty are out, along with senior administrators and trustees who are now willing to address LGBT concerns. The number of LGBT student organizations has increased, along with the number of out and active students. Today, many universities may have LGBT organizations for students of color, questioning and out athletes, transgender and genderqueer students, bisexual and sexually fluid students, those with shared political interests, and those interested in social activities. There are also LGBT sororities and fraternities, LGBT organizations based on academic majors or professional schools, and LGBT organizations for staff, faculty, and alumni. While this expansion of support and resources is dramatically changing the college experience for LGBT students, staff, and faculty, the number of such host campuses remains small. Because LGBT policies are not externally dictated but each a product of the climate and disposition of a particular institution, there is no consistency in LGBT-related policies on college campuses. Accordingly, the kind and level of support may vary widely. LGBT policies and issues in public four-year institutions in California, for example, may be quite different from similar public four-year institutions in, say, Kentucky. Policies may vary between institutions within states themselves or even between public and private institutions in the same city under the same set of laws. Some campuses may offer LGBT services, but because they are situated in larger communities or states that are not supportive, students may still feel isolated and alienated.

Key issues on campus today Just as campus resources for LGBT students, staff, and faculty developed in relation to a longer history of struggle, the very success of these struggles has wrought its own changes. Simply put, today’s college students have grown up in a dramatically different environment than that experienced by those before them. Students entering college today have always known LGBT characters on television and in film as well as “out” actors, musicians, elected officials, and athletes. Many have out LGBT friends and family members. Some may have been active in gay/straight alliances in their high schools. Throughout their lives, they have witnessed political debates about gays in the military, same-sex

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 133

marriage, and any number of LGBT-related laws and policies. Many LGBT students and their straight peers have grown up in a shared world and are coming to college with a greater level of support for LGBT people and issues than previous generations. Seidman (2004) argues that LGBT people are now in a process of normalization and routinization about their identity. There is a shift away from the closet to a place of self-disclosure, acceptance, and integration of one’s identity in social life. Although the closet still exists, the dominance it once held has dissipated. Consequently, there is an increase in the number of new college students who have been out since childhood or early adolescence and do not experience the closet in the same way it was previously constructed. As the LGBT community grows and more labels and identities are added to the nomenclature, there are also increasingly varied ways to identify one’s sexual orientation and gender identity than ever before. So too, students are rejecting previous conceptualizations of what it means to be LGBT and are reinterpreting identity to fit their needs and changing ideas of self (Savin-Williams 2005). In fact, many youth today are resisting labels altogether. Savin-Williams (2005) notes that youth are “rejecting traditional conceptualizations of identity categories and re-interpreting their lives in innovative ways. For philosophical and practical reasons, they believe that the old categories, labels, and identities don’t seem to fit anymore” (p. 194). In practice, this means that there straight-identified students in same-sex relationships and gay- and lesbian-identified students who partner with people of all genders. Others may not claim a label because they are closeted or on the “down-low.” Some are experimenting and trying to better understand their own identity, and some simply do not wish to identify as LGBT. This rejection of labeling is not unusual among today’s students (Cook and Pawlowski 1991). There is an openness to orientation, behavior, and identity without necessity for them to be the same. Concurrently there are more students than ever who are out and identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender as well as genderqueer, heteroflexible, homoflexible, fluid, and queer. For many older LGBT people, the term queer was an insult that remains painful. But many youth have reclaimed the word as a positive subversive identity, a political orientation, and a term that they find to be inclusive of all their identities. One of the challenges for campus LGBT centers, given this different landscape, is the descriptive name of the office. Some use LGBT, others LGBTQ, still others use LGBTQQI. The use of such initials tend to be more exclusive than inclusive, insofar as the approach omits students who do not identify with any of the labels but who would benefit from the services provided by such centers. Therefore, some LGBT centers have changed their names to cast a wider net, to names like Center for Sexual and Gender Equity, Rainbow Center, or Pride Center. Whatever the solution to this naming problem, it is clear that the new language, even as it changes over time and with new generations, must be rec-

134

Bazarsky and Sanlo

ognized. Naming (and its absence) signifies ways of being which is important to address to further education, outreach, and resources.

Coming out: Revisited It is true that students are coming out at younger ages and living in a world with many role models and endless ways to be LGBT. However, there is still a large subset of students who struggle to come out and accept their identity. As in past decades, many students wait until they go away to college and/or leave their families before they come out. Similarly, others wait until they graduate and start their professional lives. There is also the dynamic of students being out at home but closeted at school, and others who are out on campus but not at home. Yet others were out before they came to college and intentionally retreated back into the closet while on campus (Seidman 2004). Although there are many closeted students and employees, there are likely more closeted people in particular affiliations on campus (i.e., some athletics, social fraternities/sororities, ROTC), from particular communities (i.e., international students, students of color, non-traditional-aged undergraduates), and in particular fields. Research is sorely needed to examine these dynamics, but even in the absence of such data, it remains evident that homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia are prevalent and affect students, staff, and faculty alike. Discrimination exists within the LGBT community. First, because of biphobia, some students are closeted bisexuals, and choose instead to identify as gay or lesbian in order to be included. In particular, some male students find that being out as bisexual impacts their ability to date and be accepted. Second, many transgender students, staff, and faculty do not want to be known as transgender. This topic will be addressed later. However, being out about one’s gender identity is somewhat different from being out about one’s sexual identity and often requires training to help co-workers and peers understand, learn how to be supportive, and honor one’s wishes not to be out about gender identity. There is still work to be done—even at the most accepting campuses—to support closeted students. Programmatic priority should be given to addressing the topics of coming out and both subtle and overt homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia on and off campus. For many schools, this happens through yearlong programming about coming out, celebrating National Coming Out Day (October 11th), organizing lectures and panels that speak to topics on being out as well as internalized and horizontal discrimination within the community. In addition, many campuses offer support and discussion groups to help students explore their identity in a safe and confidential space with peers and professional staff. When developing coming out services, there should also be specific events for those in various sub-communities on campus (e.g., students of color, students of faith, those in the sciences and engineering, athletes, bisexual students, transgender and genderqueer students, international students, those in Greek-letter organizations).

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 135

Gender identity: Transgender and genderqueer students, staff, and faculty As with LGBT people, there have always been transgender people at colleges and universities. Transgender people have always existed—both within and outside of academia—throughout human history, with many cultures respecting and privileging those who were cross gendered (Lev 2004). Today there is less understanding and acceptance for those who do not fall within strict gender norms. There is palpable transphobia, lack of legal protections, and fear of discrimination experienced by transgender people. However, like their gay and bisexual peers, some transgender students are coming out prior to entering college. There is an increasing number of students who identify as genderqueer, an identity that works outside of or beyond the female/male binary, thereby challenging traditional notions of gender (Nestle et al. 2002). There is much work to be done to help students, staff, and faculty understand how to best support genderqueer and transgender people on campus and is currently an area of growth and advocacy on campuses today. Beemyn (2003, 2005) has excellent articles that describe how to improve campus for transgender students. Several key areas are briefly described below. One primary area is the need for inclusive facilities, including housing, bathrooms, and locker rooms. For instance, how inclusive is the process for applying for housing, and how safe are transgender students’ living communities? Are there private showers and bathrooms? Are gyms, athletic facilities, and other gendered changing places (e.g., theater dressing rooms) private and lockable? Campuses should offer a gender-neutral housing option and non-gendered bathrooms in main areas and highly frequented buildings and have a commitment to include non-gendered bathrooms in all new construction. In addition, campuses should provide a map for students to locate such facilities. Campus services are other areas of concern, from health care to the forms used to process student information. Regarding healthcare, professionals both on campus (e.g., doctors, therapists, nurses) and off campus (e.g., EMT, emergency room staff) should be knowledgeable about serving transgender clients. Health care plans are increasingly moving towards offering students and employees coverage for hormones and gender-reassignment surgery. In addition, there should be a referral list of health care providers in the greater community who have experience working with transgender clients. University forms and databases, including admissions forms, must be changed to capture all aspects of gender as well as inclusive transgender options. There should also be a simple streamlined process to change one’s name and/or gender on forms, transcripts, student identification, and email/electronic classroom information systems. Finally, campus units such as human resources, study abroad, visa services, and alumni affairs must be prepared to offer appropriate services and resources for transgender people. Additionally, administrators and those who direct

136

Bazarsky and Sanlo

diversity/multicultural affairs must include gender identity in their work and services, and ensure that gender is discussed inclusively in university communications and publications.

Intersectional identity support and services Sexual orientation and gender identity are only two factors that define LGBT people. Race, ethnicity, nationality, class, ability, economic status, and spirituality are other key identities for LGBT people. However, LGBT students often feel they must choose or prioritize identities. This is exacerbated by the many forms of bias (i.e., racism, sexism, classism, ableism, xenophobia, religious hegemony) in LGBT communities and the homophobia and gender bias that exists in other identity-based communities on campus. To address these issues, campuses intentionally provide programming, resources, support, and advocacy regarding the intersection of identity. Offices whose missions focus on any of these identities have a responsibility to ensure that LGBT students are not invisible or alienated. Many colleges and universities already provide support and services around intersectional identity. This includes programming and support groups for students. It is important for institutions to integrate intersectional work into all services and to ensure that there are role models who do the same, including staff, faculty, and alumni who represent different intersectionalities and who connect with students. Within the larger rubric of intersectionality, it is important to examine the inclusion of LGBT people in discussions of multiculturalism and diversity. Are there ways to challenge bias, exclusivity, and hierarchy of oppression in all campus environments? There is much that colleges and universities may do to prevent the reinforcement of bifurcated identities so that students, faculty, and staff may be on campus with all identities embraced.

Technology The Internet has revolutionized students’ experiences for self-discovery, resourcegathering, making friends, and dating. Wakeford (2000) notes the importance of cyberqueer spaces in the construction of identity. “The importance of a new space is viewed not as an end in itself, but rather as a contextual feature for the creation of new versions of the self” ( p. 411). In this vein, youth express themselves in complex ways and use the Internet as a stage to rehearse coming out and being LGBT (Addison and Comstock 1998). In fact, a 1997 study of LGBT youth, which was replicated in 2000, indicated that more than half of the students came out online before coming out in “real life” (Kryzan and Walsh 1998). The Internet clearly provides space for LGBT students to meet others like themselves and offers validation, discourse, and connection around their identities. In addition, virtual spaces provide a social connection while allowing students to

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 137

maintain anonymity and remain in the closet if they so choose (Alexander and Cagle 2004; Russell 2002). University staff and faculty are making use of the Internet’s popularity to connect with students through various online media (Eberhardt 2007; Gross 2007). Professionals use innovative techniques to outreach to LGBT students to help them with identity development, community connections, and resource information. As more students connect virtually rather than in person, campuses need to adapt services and support through these online technologies. Students access social networking sites, blogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards, cruising sites, multiplayer role-playing games, and virtual worlds. Each is a possible connection point. Professionals have had great success in reaching out to students on bulletin boards and blogs, organizing chat rooms through their offices as well as visiting chat rooms where LGBT students congregate. Virtual networking sites are fast becoming an established part of campus life world-wide. Many LGBT offices have established Facebook and Twitter accounts, and sites such as LinkedIn and Friendster to reach alumni, staff, and faculty. Eberhardt (2007), in his article Facing up to Facebook, acknowledged the increasing growth of this technology and discussed ways in which campus administrators may utilize Facebook to outreach to students, ease transition, offer support and validation, provide mentorship and role modeling, and create opportunities for student involvement and identity development. Other resources are virtual worlds, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), which provide spaces where students meet others, explore identities, and try on different personas. By 2007, there were over a hundred institutions of higher education building virtual campuses on Second Life (Joly 2007), which provides opportunities for professors to teach lessons online, gives students the opportunity to engage with subjects such as foreign languages and visual arts in interactive ways, and offers universities unique methods to outreach to distant learners. Princeton University, for example, developed a virtual LGBT Center in Second Life where the real office held virtual office hours and provided outreach to support students online. In 2008, NCSoft’s City of Heroes/Villains hosted a Rainbow Prom with over 200 participants showing up in prom regalia. Pride Global Channel has chat boards for LGBT gaymers. Educators and consumer markets are beginning to explore the multitude of ways to outreach and teach through Second Life and other virtual worlds. There are many excellent online technology sources for outreach and education. Other options include: instant messaging, blogs, streaming video, online radio and podcasts, digital journals and zines, and wikis. In addition, as cell phones and personal digital assistants advance, there are opportunities to connect with students through texting, phone applications, and educational programs through iTunesU and more (Bazarsky 2010). Technology is advancing rapidly and new communication techniques are being created. As universities explore virtual education and networking sites advance, there will be many

138

Bazarsky and Sanlo

additional ways to offer support and education. In the future, universities will have to keep pace with the changing technology and reinvent new and creative ways to engage students.

Future considerations Regardless and inclusive of sexual and gender identity, all students, faculty, and staff deserve to feel they belong. A central current issue is what some have called the “great facilities debate” that pits multi/cross-cultural centers that include LGBT services against free-standing LGBT centers. Those who favor multicultural centers believe that everyone benefits from collaborative programming and interaction, and that LGBT students with multiple racial/ethnic identities feel more comfortable in multi/cross-cultural centers. Those who favor free-standing centers believe LGBT students will be further marginalized within multi/crosscultural centers. Some also argue that Caucasian LGBT students may not go to multi/cross-cultural center for needed services if the LGBT office is located there. Additionally, some feel that they are automatically “outed” to the many straight students in the center by merely walking into the space. However, there is currently no research to address these concerns. Given campus budgets in this current economic climate, institutions are likely to do whatever it takes to save money. Therefore, the more likely scenario in the near future is that LGBT work will take place within the context of multicultural or cross-cultural centers. Research is needed to determine efficacy and outcomes of this scenario. Financial considerations will also likely affect desperately needed academic research on LGBT issues. LGBT studies programs are growing, and there is more support than ever from faculty for doctoral student research on LGBT issues. However, budget cuts have created tremendous challenges for academic departments. External funding for LGBT research lags far behind other academic areas, so funding for research on LGBT students and issues remains a priority.

The state of research on LGBT campus services and lives Considering that research on the various sub-populations of college students is extensive, one might expect there to be extensive research on the LGBT student population as well. Unfortunately, this is not the case (Sanlo 2004). To date there have been no studies that assess the efficacy of LGBT centers (or multicultural and women’s centers), no research to explore the ways in which campuses support LGBT students academically, socially, or psychologically, and no studies to explore the factors that serve to improve LGBT student retention and academic success. In general, and from a comparative framework, there have been no studies to determine how sexual orientation affects scholarship, leadership, health, or persistence to graduation.

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 139

The absence of such research suggests that universities must do a better job of bringing sharper focus to the needs of LGBT students and how those needs may be met more effectively through campus programming and other support services. Many Consortium LGBT center directors identify campus climate reports such as those generated by Dr. Sue Rankin of The Pennsylvania State University, as critical tools for understanding the broad current and emerging needs of campus populations including LGBT people, women, people of color, people with disabilities, and students who are veterans, first generation, parents, and those from the foster care system. A broad-based campus climate study should be initiated through presidents’ or chancellors’ offices, with action taken as results are analyzed.

Conclusion This chapter offered an overview of history, campus life, identity, issues, and research needs of LGBT people in higher education. While LGBT people have always been on college campuses, little is known about their lives. It is imperative that the critical issues of safety and services prevail, and that research is encouraged, supported, and conducted by a variety of campus academic centers for a full understanding of this large but still mostly invisible population. With research, we may gather an understanding of how sexual orientation and gender identity affects students’ scholarship, leadership, and health. It may open the doors to learning how homophobia affects this generation of students, and how they persist to graduation with or without available and utilized services. Regardless of one’s identity(ies), every person deserves a safe campus at which to learn, to teach, and to work.

References Addison, J. and M. Comstock. 1998. Virtually Out: The Emergence of a Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Youth Cyberculture. In J. Austin and M. N. Willard (Eds.), Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press. Pp. 367–78. Alexander, J. and V. M. Cagle. 2004. In Their Own Words: LGBT Youth Writing the World Wide Web. GLAAD Center for the Study of Media and Society. Retrieved from http:// www.digitalalliance.org/documents/csms/queer_youth.pdf. Bazarsky, D. 2010. Getting Connected: Online Outreach and Education with Queer Youth in College. Unpublished manuscript. Widener University. Beemyn, B. 2003. Serving the Needs of Transgender College Students. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Educations 1(1): 33–50. Beemyn, B. G. 2005. Making Campuses More Inclusive of Transgender Students. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Educations 3(1): 77–87. Bullough, V. L. 2002. Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. New York: Routledge. CAS. Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.cas.edu/index.html.

140

Bazarsky and Sanlo

City College of San Francisco (CCFF). n.d. Department History. Retrieved from http:// www.ccsf.edu/Department/Gay_Lesbian_Bisexual_Studies/department_history.html. Cook, A. T. and W. Pawlowski. 1991. Issue Paper: Youth and Homosexuality, P–FLAG, P.O. Box 27605, Washington, DC, 20038. Duberman, M., M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey (Eds.). 1990. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: Penguin. Eberhardt, D. M. 2007. Facing up to Facebook. About Campus 12(4): 18–26. Eisenbach, D. 2006. Gay Power: An American Revolution. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers. Evans, N. J. and V. A. Wall (Eds.) 1992. Beyond Tolerance: Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals on Campus. Alexandria, VA: ACPA Media. Gross, L. 2007. Gideon Who Will be 25 in the Year 2012: Growing up Gay Today. International Journal of Communication 1, 121–38. Human Rights Watch. 2003. Lawrence v. Texas. Constitutional Right to Privacy of Gays and Lesbians in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2003/ 07/01/lawrence-v-texas. Joly, K. 2007. A Second Life for Higher Education? University Business. Retrieved from http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=797. Kryzan, C. and J. Walsh. 1998. The !OutProud!/Oasis Internet Survey of Queer and Questioning youth. !OutProud!, The National Coalition for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth and Oasis Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.outproud.org/survey/pdf/qys1997_report_pub.pdf Lev, A. I. 2004. Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with GenderVariant People and their Families. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Clinical Practice Press. Loughery, John 1998. The Other Side of Silence—Men’s Lives and Gay Identities: A TwentiethCentury History. New York: Henry Holt and Company. McNaron, T. A. 1997. Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Miller, N. 1995. Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Random House. Nestle, J., C. Howell, and R. A. Wilchins. 2002. Genderqueer: Voices from beyond the Sexual Binary. Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications. Retter, Y. 1995. Lesbian (Feminist) Los Angeles, 1970–1990: An Exploratory Ethnohistory. Retrieved from http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/ queerfrontiers/queer/papers/ retter.html. Russell, S. T. 2002. Queer in America: Citizenship for Sexual Minority Youth. Applied Developmental Science 6(4): 258–63. Sanlo, R. (Ed.). 1998. Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender College Students: A Handbook for Faculty and Administrators. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sanlo, R. 1999. Unheard Voices: The Effects of Silence on Lesbian and Gay Teachers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sanlo, R. 2004. Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Students: Risk, Resiliency, and Retention. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice 6(1) (October): 97–110. Sanlo, R. 2005. The Johns Committee: How it Influenced LGBT Issues in Florida’s Higher Education. In James T. Sears (Ed.) Youth, Rducation, and Sexualities: An International Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

LGBT Students, Faculty, and Staff 141

Sanlo, R., S. Rankin, and R. Schonberg. 2002. Our Place on Campus. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Savin-Williams, R. C. 2005. The New Gay Teenager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seidman, S. 2004. Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life. New York: Routledge. Shepard, C., F. Yeskel, and C. Outcalt. 1995. Comprehensive Manual for Campus Organizing. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Wakeford, N. 2000. Cyberqueer. In Bell and Kennedy (Eds.), The Cybercultures Reader. New York: Routledge.

11 IDENTIFYING TALENT, INTERRUPTING THE USUAL Diversifying the faculty1 Daryl G. Smith

Among the arenas on college campuses where efforts at increasing diversity have been made, achieving faculty diversity requires urgent attention. Change has certainly occurred, but it has not been sufficient to provide the institutional capacity required for an increasingly pluralistic student body and society. The concept of faculty diversity is complex, and can be defined in a variety of ways that impact policy and practice. A full discussion of this concept as it addresses both inclusion and differentiation, in addition to intersecting identities, is provided elsewhere (Smith 2009; see also Cook and Córdova 2006). Rather than addressing the full spectrum of faculty diversity, this chapter focuses on its salient aspects of race/ethnicity and gender, and addresses central problems as well as possible solutions for increasing faculty diversity in U.S. higher education.

The state of faculty diversity While there has been progress in increasing the number of historically underrepresented minorities (URM) and Asian American faculty on college campuses in the U.S., the growth has been quite slow. In the period from 1993 to 2007, for example, URM faculty went from 7 percent to 9 percent of the full time faculty nationally. Asian American faculty went from 5 percent to 8 percent while international faculty grew from 2 to 4 percent. Overall, and within each ethnic category, the percentage of women faculty has also grown faster than for men.2 Significantly, international faculty has been the fastest growing group of faculty during this period. Thus while the rhetoric on many campuses has favored diversity especially with respect to URM faculty, the behavior suggests that globalization has driven hiring. Moreover, on many campuses the numbers for

Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual 143

international faculty are not separated from domestic ethnic groups, often inflating numbers for faculty of color. The fast pace of hiring, overall, and its potential effects on faculty diversity, is perhaps one of the most significant and startling findings of the research in the last decade. On many campuses, not only has the overall size of the core tenure and tenure track faculty grown, but, on average, one-third to one-half of the faculty have been replaced. Although the generational change projected by Bowen and Schuster in 1986 has taken longer than expected, there does now appear to be significant replacement hiring because of retirements and new hiring because of actual increases in the size of tenure and tenure-track faculties.3 If one-third of a faculty is replaced during a five-year period, in ten more years the next generation of faculty will have been hired. This clearly provides great opportunities—as well as potentially dire consequences—for faculty diversity. The current slowdown in hiring because of economic conditions may actually provide opportunities to revisit the hiring priorities before the process accelerates once again. Finally, retention is emerging as a key issue in making progress in faculty diversity. A large volume of both quantitative and qualitative research over the last several decades documents the challenges that result in the departure (and lack of promotion, which can lead to departure) of male and female URM faculty, faculty of color, white women faculty, and gay and lesbian faculty. Some of the more common reasons identified include: alienation, cultural taxation, marginalization, discrimination, microaggressions, and lack of mentoring. Furthermore, even with the considerable strides that White women have made, the recent studies of women in science at elite universities documents the continuing sexism, tokenism, and marginalization on campuses and in fields where White women—not to mention women of color—have not achieved anything close to a critical mass and where institutional practices place women at a disadvantage (Aguirre 2000; Chesler et al. 2005; Cooper and Stevens 2002; Delgado-Romero et al. 2007; Garcia 2000; Johnsrud and Rosser 2002; Lawler 1999; Moody 2004; Smith 2009; Smith et al. 2002; Thomas and Hollenshead 2002; Thompson and Louque 2005; Tierney 1997; Tierney and Bensimon 1996; Trower and Chait 2002; Turner 2002b; Turner and Myers 2000; Valian 2005; Weinberg 2008). Recent research has documented that turnover is a significant issue on many campuses and that the turnover for URM faculty can be as much as 100 percent—where every new hire is simply taking the place of someone who has left (Clayton-Pedersen et al. 2007; Moreno et al. 2006; Smith 2009). In that research, using an index called the Turnover Quotient (TQ), we found that, on average, three of every five new URM hires had replaced URM faculty who had left. On some campuses, there was high turnover for women of all ethnic groups as well. Thus, it is important for individual campuses to identify their own specific patterns and establish measures to address them. It is particularly important to avoid a common practice of explaining high turnover levels by reverting to now largely debunked myths. The continued force of these myths—the limited availability of

144

Smith

URM candidates, bidding wars, recruitment elsewhere, the lure of industry and the professions (especially for STEM faculty), and the failure to meet standards of scholarship and publication (quantity or quality)—accounts at least in part for the slow pace of change (Smith et al 1996).

Interrupting the usual: Identifying and keeping talent The challenges in hiring and retaining a truly diverse faculty are multifaceted and vary considerably across different campuses and even within campuses. But the cycle of failure in this arena can be interrupted if campuses engage their institutional resources and capacities for identifying and recruiting talent. A number of promising practices are emerging, that can improve hiring and retention of diverse faculty on college campuses.

Debunking the myths As mentioned above, the myths of faculty hiring and retention are significant impediments to change. Indeed, the prevailing myths become self-fulfilling prophecies in which lack of success in diversifying faculty is assumed to be the logical outcome. Debunking these myths and developing proactive processes for both hiring and retention are critical to ensuring success.

Diversity as essential not optional Institutions can link diversity in hiring and retention to the institution’s mission and planning. The key is to make the hiring and retention of a diverse faculty a matter of scholarly and educational excellence that is actively pursued as a fundamental aspect of the institutional mission. Such changes have already taken place in relation to other aspects of higher education. For example, as technology became central to every sector of college campuses, technological proficiency, and scholarship on or related to technology emerged as important in many searches (Smith 2009). This occurred in part because campuses recognized that these new developments were and would become even more central. In contrast, this connection between diversity and essential hiring needs is often not made. Without a mandate from the institution at the highest levels that makes this connection a matter of policy and practice, no thoroughgoing change will take place. The rhetoric will be present; the words will be written. But in the end, there will be more reasons for failure than evidence of success. Because faculty hiring is so central to departmental autonomy, departments are important sites of attention for improving faculty diversity and making the connection to excellence. Department heads and senior faculty develop recruitment plans and decide what constitutes “quality,” including how scholarly “productivity” is measured, how publications and research are credited, and

Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual 145

the areas of scholarship to be emphasized (Busenberg and Smith 1997; García 2000; Ibarra 2000; Steinpreis et al. 1999; Turner 2002a; Turner and Myers 2000; Valian 2005). It is a given in academia that hiring is based on excellence. But what counts as excellence? What counts as an important area of research? What kinds of topics, methods, and approaches are most valuable? What kinds of teaching experiences are needed to contribute to student success? The answers to these questions will not only impact who is hired, but will also speak to the climate of a department, and affect the success of the person, including how seriously the faculty member’s work is taken and whether it is appreciated. As such, the question of how the criteria for excellence are established and maintained heavily impacts both hiring and retention. An unexamined concept of excellence—exemplified in the idea that “we would be happy to hire a woman or minority but we simply hire the best”— assumes that there is a unidimensional ranking system based on a single criterion. But it is clear that search committees look for a number of competencies: expertise in an area, teaching experience, publications, grant awards, collegiality, and so on. Juggling these needs is common in the search process and finding the right mix is often a contested process. Given the need for building institutional capacity for diversity on most campuses, including diversity of experiences and competencies should be critically engaged as part of the search process. In addition, excellence is often identified by the use of surrogates that reflect academic elitism. For example, a record of affiliation with prestigious institutions may be used as a surrogate for merit. Consider the following example: A department in a comprehensive teaching institution with an interest in the lack of diversity among STEM graduates undertakes a faculty search. The search committee highly ranks someone from an elite research university who has had two postdoc positions but no significant teaching experience or success in working with diverse groups of students going into science. In what way is this candidate more “excellent” than a candidate with a PhD from a less prestigious university, who has held no postdoc positions, but has an extensive record of teaching experience and success with diverse groups of students? The use of institutional prestige as a surrogate for merit in the first stages of the search might easily disadvantage those whose route to a faculty position might be different, as it frequently is with historically underrepresented faculty. One way to plan searches in the context of larger strategic goals of the department or institution is to connect them to program reviews, strategic planning, or accreditation processes. These mechanisms provide opportunities for a department to see a connection between diversity and its own excellence, future, and place in the university. If this connection is not established, hiring will reproduce the past and inhibit possibilities for change. If it is established, job descriptions and position requirements will reflect changes in the field and institutional needs.

146

Smith

Rationale: Essential rather than optional diversity The existing research shows that greater clarity about the rationale for diversifying the faculty is needed if we are to make progress. Whether faculty search committees see diversity as essential rather than simply optional is fundamental. This is especially true in the science, technology, engineering, and medical (STEM) fields where the obvious rationale linking diversity to excellence—that diversity broadens the content of scholarship in a department—does not always apply (Chubin and Malcolm 2006). One rationale, frequently used on many campuses and addressed in much of the literature on campus diversity, is the need for a faculty that is as racially and ethnically diverse as the student body. While this rationale is compelling, it needs development to work effectively, and is not sufficient by itself in any case. The following seven reasons for diversifying the faculty provide a more sustained and compelling rationale by, again, linking diversity to a broader understanding of excellence: 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Diversity in the faculty represents institutional commitment to equity in both hiring and retention; Diverse faculty serve as role models of possibility for all including students, staff, and faculty. Even more, the absence of diversity sends strong signals about the lack of possibilities and the degree to which talent from diverse groups is appreciated; URM faculty and White female faculty play a definitive role in bringing diversity themes to scholarship, increasing diversity in the curriculum, introducing more and different patterns of pedagogy, and increasing the engagement of students in the campus community (e.g. Antonio 2002; Astin 2002; Hune 2003; Milem et al. 2005); Diversity increases the attractiveness of the institution for persons from diverse backgrounds (as well as others who value diversity) as a place to work and to develop (Hune 2003; Smith et al. 2006; Thompson and Louque 2005; Turner 2002b; Yoder 2002); Diversity around the table—within and across departments, as well as in the institution as a whole—strengthens the “demography of decision-making,” increasing trust in the process and the perspectives introduced (e.g. Kramer et al. 2006; Smith 2009); Diversity has implications for the leadership pipeline: Since most academic administrators come from faculty ranks, a relatively homogenous faculty clearly limits the future development of diversity in leadership; Diversity increases an institution’s capacity for making connections and developing vital relationships with diverse communities outside the campus. Both for personal and intellectual reasons, research documents that many White women and faculty of color are more likely to cross institutional borders to make such connections.

Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual 147

Leadership The important role of senior leadership is commonly invoked in the research and practice literature on this topic. While some suggest that leaders should be willing to turn back a final candidate if the group is not diverse, this strategy should be used cautiously. The process by which search committees have come to agreement about the final group involves a lot of compromise, effort, and frustration. (This also shows how untrue it is that there is one dimension of excellence and that one candidate simply rises to the top. There is a lot of negotiation that has gone on.) A far stronger approach requires that institutional leaders including department chairs, deans, and provosts, involve themselves in every aspect of the hiring process: assessing the attractiveness of departments for hiring diverse faculty; discussing important hiring criteria as revealed in recent program reviews; assessing the climate of the unit for diversity; reviewing the job description; creating a competent search committee; selecting a chair; ensuring that the broader pool is diverse; monitoring that outreach that has taken place; supporting efforts to ensure that relevant people have been encouraged to apply; and working to have the department see the institutional and program imperative.

Job descriptions The job description emerges as the defining step in a search process that will be open to diversity. Its development can be quite controversial because so much is at stake. Moreover, good descriptions require some articulation of what skills and competencies are needed. Building in the competence to engage diversity and teaching successfully to a diverse group of students, no matter what the subject, can be critically important. Job descriptions should not just be pulled from an old file but rather should be linked to strategic plans, program reviews, and institutional priorities. Even in science searches, adding an explicit criterion in the job description for experience and success in working with diverse groups of students has significant potential to broaden the qualities being considered. (Weinberg addresses this more fully in chapter 19.) Job descriptions are also significant in what they signal to candidates about the degree to which diversity really matters in the conduct and mission of the campus and are likely to influence the applicant pool.

Proactive searches No matter how good the job description might be, it will not by itself guarantee the recruitment of a diverse candidate pool. The process of identifying and finding faculty does not happen simply through the announcement of a search. The classic search is a passive one. Being on a search committee is often a major responsibility in an already overloaded schedule. If a “strong” pool is achieved

148

Smith

simply by placing ads, then the lack of diversity may simply emerge as a regret or as confirmation that there is no diversity in the field. Having advertised in the major ethnic journals that announce positions, the department or campus feels it has done its job of advertising and opening up the pool. Creating diversity in a pool requires serious and proactive efforts.

Special hires The use of special hires can be a powerful mechanism for identifying excellence through diversity (Smith et al. 2004). Special hires, also referred to as exceptional hires, search waivers, special hire intervention, shortened search process (truncated process), or out-of-cycle hiring, involve searches that target special needs of the department in terms of expertise and competencies. This approach has been a common tool for targeting certain kinds of applicants for faculty positions (including the recruitment of Nobel prize winners). Special hiring will remain significant with regard to diversity as long as regular searches result in hiring faculty of color [and women] only in expected fields. Significantly, such strategies yield hiring across all racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that it would not violate current restrictions in the use of affirmative action and legal challenges (Alger 2000; Smith et al. 2004). Special hires are most often initiated and supported by departments, often with added incentives to budgets or positions, creating greater likelihood that the candidate will come into a welcoming environment, something critical to retention.

The problem of “one” and cluster hires At the department level, search processes are usually only looking for one excellent person. The reality is that because searches often occur one at a time, each hire is significant. This single search embodies all the needs that the department wishes to address. As such, the hiring of “one” often impedes hiring diverse faculty. In such circumstances, moving in new directions, or hiring people who bring new perspectives, may be seen as “less comfortable,” or may require having to give up something people have held dear. Being a token member of a group, being the only “one,” also has profound implications for satisfaction and retention (Moody 2004). The challenge is that the development of a critical mass is not easily accomplished at the most local of sites—the department—and is often not engaged fully even if it exists at the institutional level. Clearly, the solution to this problem involves investing institutional resources, something that is less likely in times of financial leanness or crisis. Still, hiring a group of even three creates more opportunity for diversity and for different kinds of expertise, skills, and talent. On some campuses, efforts to build new interdisciplinary programs have resulted in a cluster of hires that can serve as a model for approaching searches that could be used to increase diversity as well.

Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual 149

Legal issues The current political and legal environment may put campuses on the defensive about legal matters related to prioritizing diversity. The most effective response with regard to the hiring and retention of faculty, as in all other areas where diversity is an issue, is to articulate hiring criteria in terms of the contribution to be made by new hires to the pool of expertise, talent, and skills on campus, and fulfillment of institutional and departmental requirements (Alger 2000). Hiring, including special hires, that focuses on levels of expertise and skills for diversity and are open to all applicants, tends to increase the diversity of applicant pools without violating legal standards.

Evaluation and monitoring of successful departmental and campus practices Without manageable and consistent processes to monitor progress over time, campuses will have no way to measure change, and will have to address competing narratives as to whether progress is being made or not, with respect to diversity overall and to specific groups. Looking at faculty diversity overall, tracking new hires, calculating turnover, gathering honest information about the reasons faculty stay and leave, and identifying locations on campus where success has been achieved can provide manageable and important information. Tracking the success of faculty moving into the rank of full professor is also emerging as important. Using the resulting data, institutions can assess “if,” “why,” and, “how” strategies for increasing faculty diversity have worked, paying attention to whom the strategies have worked for or have not, and making changes accordingly.

Graduate students Higher education is not only hiring the next generation of faculty; it is also producing the pipeline for the next generation of faculty (Beutel and Nelson 2005; Golde and Walker 2006). Doctoral education and the development of future faculty are closely tied to faculty concerns and need to be part of the strategy for diverse faculty especially with the robust hiring underway. National data suggest that despite more diverse undergraduate enrollments in doctoral granting institutions, and increasing diversity at the graduate level, diversity in graduate enrollment is not moving fast enough (e.g. Woodrow Wilson Foundation 2005). It is likely that the decentralization of graduate admissions is a factor in this gap. The location of graduate admissions in departments, as with hiring, leaves talent identification to units that may not yet see a role for diversity. Many of the same strategies used in faculty hiring for monitoring progress, looking for talent actively, using the many research and professional development

150

Smith

programs for undergraduates, and making sure the indicators of excellence are inclusive can be undertaken in graduate admissions.

Conclusion Interrupting the usual and challenging myths with regard to diversity in faculty hiring and retention at both the departmental and institutional level will be very important if colleges and universities are to develop the knowledge, capacity, expertise, and success in the very diverse and globalized society the U.S. has become. Institutions of higher education are now hiring the next generation of scholars. Their choice of candidates and the experience of those candidates in every aspect of the campus will also send a powerful message to students about potential opportunities in faculty careers available to them. Higher education really does produce its own labor pool. It sets the standards for excellence and decides who is hired. While invoking reasons for the lack of progress may seem sufficient in some domains, the consequences of the failure to make progress will have repercussions for years to come. Above all, this failure will diminish the excellence of U.S. higher education across the board. Hence there is both urgency and opportunity in making a push to achieve a fully diverse faculty on every campus.

Notes 1 2 3

Some of the material from this chapter is adapted from Daryl G. Smith’s Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work, published in 2009 from Johns Hopkins University Press. Sources: NCES 1996, Table 226; NCES 2010, Table 250. Though as Schuster and Finkelstein (2006) note, there has been even greater growth in “off-line” faculty.

References Aguirre, A. 2000. Women and Minority Faculty in the Academic Workplace: Recruitment, Retention, and Academic Culture. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report 27(6). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Alger, J. R. 2000. How to Recruit and Promote Minority Faculty: Start by Playing Fair. Black Issues in Higher Education 17(20): 160–63. Antonio, A. L. 2002. Faculty of Color Reconsidered. Journal of Higher Education 73(5): 582–602. Astin, A. W. 2002. Creating a Bridge to the Future: Preparing New Faculty to Face Changing Expectations in a Shifting Context. The Review of Higher Education 26(2): 119–44. Beutel, A. M. and D. J. Nelson. 2005. Gender and Race-ethnicity of Faculty in Top Science and Engineering Research Departments. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 11: 389–403.

Identifying Talent, Interrupting the Usual 151

Bowen, H. R. and J. H. Schuster. 1986. American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled. Fair Lawn, NJ: Oxford University Press. Busenberg, B. E. and D. G. Smith. 1997. Affirmative Action and Beyond: The Woman’s Perspective. In M. García (Ed.), Affirmative Action’s Testament of Hope: Strategies for a New Era in Higher Education. Albany: State University of New York. Pp. 149–80. Chesler, M., A. Lewis, and J. Crowfoot. 2005. Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Chubin, D. E. and S. M. Malcolm. 2006. The New Backlash on Campus. College and University Journal, 81(4): 67–70. Clayton-Pedersen, A. R., S. Parker, D. G. Smith, J. F. Moreno, and D. H. Teraguchi. 2007. Making a Real Difference with Diversity: A Guide to Institutional Change. Washington, DC: AAC&U. Cook, B. J. and D. L. Córdova. 2006. Minorities in Higher Education: Twenty Second Annual Status Report. Washington, DC: American Council on Education Cooper, J. E. and D. D. Stevens (Eds.). 2002. Tenure in the Sacred Grove: Issues and Strategies for Women and Minority Faculty. Albany: SUNY Press. Delgado-Romero, E. A., A. N. Manlove, J. D. Manlove, and C. A. Hernandez. 2007. Controversial Issues in the Recruitment and Retention of Latino/a Faculty. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 6(1): 34–51. García, M. (Ed.). 2000. Succeeding in an Academic Career: A Guide for Faculty of Color. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Golde, C. and G. E. Walker (Eds.). 2006. Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hune, S. 2003. Through “Our Eyes”: Asian Pacific Islander American Women’s History. In S. Hune and G. M. Nomura (Eds.), Asian Pacific Islander American Women. New York: NYU Press. Pp. 1–12. Ibarra, R. A. 2000. Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Johnsrud, L. K. and V. Rosser. 2002. Faculty Members’ Morale and their Intention to Leave: A Multicultural Explanation. Journal of Higher Education 73(4): 518–42. Kramer, V., A. Konrad, and S. Erkut. 2006. Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why Three or More Women Enhance Governance (Report No. 781 283–2510). Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Women. Lawler, A. 1999. Scientific Community: Tenured Women Battle to Make It Less Lonely at the Top. Science 286 (5443): 1272–78. Milem, J. F., M. J. Chang, and A. L. Antonio. 2005. Making Diversity Work on Campus: A Research Based Perspective. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities. Moody, J. 2004. Faculty Diversity: Problems and Solutions. New York: Routledge Falmer. Moreno, J., D. G. Smith, A. R. Clayton-Pedersen, S. Parker, and D. H. Teraguchi. 2006. The Revolving Door for Underrepresented Minority Faculty in Higher Education. San Francisco: The James Irvine Foundation. www.irvine,org/assets/pdf/pubs/education/ insight_Revolving _Door.pdf. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 1996–2010. Data retrieved from http:// www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest. Schuster, J. H. and M. J. Finkelstein. 2006. The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

152

Smith

Smith, D. G. 2009. Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, D. G., L. E. Wolf, B. Busenberg, and Associates. 1996. Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking the Myths. Washington, DC: AAC&U. Smith, D. G., C. S. Turner, N. Osei-Kofi, S. Richards. 2004. Interrupting the Usual: Success Strategies for Hiring Diverse Faculties. Journal of Higher Education 75(2), 133–60. Smith, W. A., P. G. Altbach, and K. Lomotey. (Eds.). 2002. The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education: Continuing Challenges for the Twenty-first Century (Revised Edition). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Smith, W. A., T. J. Yosso, and D. G. Solorzano 2006. Challenging Racial Battle Fatigue on Historically White Campuses: A Critical Race Examination of Race-related Stress. In C. A. Stanley (Ed.), Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities. Bolton, MA: Anker. Pp. 299–328. Steinpreis, R. E., K. A. Anders, and D. Ritzke. 1999. The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study. Sex Roles, 41(7/8): 509–28. Thomas, G. D. and C. Hollenshead. 2002. Resisting from the Margins: The Coping Strategies of Black Women and Other Women of Color Faculty Members at a Research University. Journal of Negro Education 70(3): 166–75. Thompson, G. L. and A. C. Louque. 2005. Exposing the “Culture of Arrogance” in the Academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Tierney, W. G. 1997) Academic Outlaws: Queer theory and Cultural Studies in the Academy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tierney, W. G. and E. M. Bensimon. 1996. Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Trower, C. A. and R. P. Chait. 2002. Faculty Diversity: Too Little for Too Long. Harvard Magazine (March–April): Pp. 33ff. Turner, C. S. V. 2002a. Diversifying the Faculty: A Guidebook for Search Committees. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities. Turner, C. S. V. 2002b. Women of Color in Academe: Living with Multiple Marginality. Journal of Higher Education 73(1): 74–93. Turner, C. S. V. and S. M. Myers. 2000. Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Valian, V. 2005. Beyond Gender Schemas: Improving the Advancement of Women in Academia. Hypatia 20(3): 198–213. Weinberg, S. L. 2008. Monitoring Faculty Diversity, Journal of Higher Education 79(4): 365–87. Woodrow Wilson Foundation. 2005. Diversity and the PhD. Princeton, NJ: Author. Yoder, J. D. 2002. Context Matters: Understanding Tokenism Processes and their Impact on Women’s Work. Psychology of Women Quarterly 26: 1–8.

12 ASIAN AMERICANS AND DIVERSITY TALK The limits of the numbers game1 Dana Takagi

But then graduation day came! We went to college, while you went nowhere. And then you began to think to yourself, “Gee. How can I still give them grief? Oh, I know, I’ll just become a cop.” Yeah? Well, congratulations! Your dream has come true! Now, why don’t you just take this quiet little Asian guy with the American name that treats you so well and give him some more tickets or better just take him to jail. (Kumar, talking back to Officer Palumbo, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle)

This chapter explores an important but not widely recognized transformation in diversity rhetoric and Asian American students. Diversity, a watchword for difference especially racial difference, is crucial for education policies including admissions, curriculum, and retention. Scholars agree that diversity rhetoric is part of the political and socio-cultural logic of liberalism and neo-liberalism,2 both of which reflect distinctive philosophical and political economic views on the value of markets, individual liberty and freedom, and rule of law but differ over the purposes of social policy. Liberalism is most closely aligned with a set of economic and political policies inaugurated during and since the New Deal and neo-liberalism emphasizes—deregulation, privatization, and the declining role of government intervention—policies implemented since the 1980s. In the U.S. affirmative action emerged as policy intended to address racial inequality as liberal reform. However, neo-liberal reform rejects preferences for underrepresented minorities. This chapter addresses a change in diversity talk, namely that while the language of diversity continues to be important in educational policy, there are subtle but noteworthy shifts with respect to Asian Americans.

154

Takagi

I take up two features of discourse about diversity specific to U.S. higher education at the end of the twentieth century and into the present one. First, diversity talk has changed from a discourse enabling explicit discussion about difference about race to one that refers to race implicitly but in general not explicitly. If blackness is central to diversity talk, Asian American-ness is more akin to an absent presence. Though largely beyond the scope of this chapter, the broad changes in diversity talk occurred largely without commentary in higher education and without consideration of its consequences. Second, I examine how parity and representation—the numbers game—anchors diversity talk and yet is at best a flawed mechanism for achieving genuine diversity and balance. I address the absent presence of Asian Americans in the next two sections of the chapter. In the final section of the chapter, I turn to the numbers game in light of the absent presence of Asian Americans. What is diversity talk? It is discourse about difference—multiculturalism, claims of minority/majority rights and post-racial histories, and the role of race in liberalism, immigration and, more generally, the limits of state and juridical interventions in socio-cultural processes and historical change. I emphasize the importance of rhetorical claims as reflections of ingrained, dynamic and shared understandings about difference. Said differently, as West and Fenstermaker (1995) and many others have noted, diversity talk is a socially constructed and dynamic process that is sensitive to the context of shared meanings. Why is diversity talk important? First, discussing how we discuss is imperative since diversity is a key for communicating about race. Second, diversity talk sets limits for what is sayable and what is not sayable. Consider, for example, the importance of blackness in diversity talk. Skin color marks multiculturalism and the visual representations of diversity work only if blackness is present and recognizable.

Diversity talk in the 1980s and early 1990s In higher education, diversity talk is a relatively new historical development, emerging in the 1980s. The rise of diversity talk occurred alongside broad efforts by universities to reorient the curriculum in order to better match changing demographic realities of a an increasingly multicultural U.S. Among the more visible changes in higher education were changes in freshman core, disciplinary foci, college view-books, and undergraduate enrollments. University admission officers, who have not often been the public face of an institution, wrestled, for the most part out of public view, with balancing merit and achievement in the new diversity and diversity talk. No consideration of diversity talk is complete without the controversy about Asian American student admissions to the top colleges. The specific racial dynamics of Asian admissions were different from Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, in that while plaintiff Allan Bakke focused on his displacement as a

Asian Americans and Diversity Talk 155

result of preferences for underrepresented minorities, Asian Americans argued their displacement came as a result of preferences for whites. Were top-tier schools like Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley turning away superstar and competitive Asian American applicants because of racial discrimination shown as a preference for whites? Were Asian American students, popularly demeaned as nerdy but not well-rounded, threatening to displace white applicants? Their complaints claimed that Asian Americans were disadvantaged and underrepresented relative to their qualifications. Asian American complaints of discrimination were different from other claims by underrepresented minorities, in that Asian Americans were among the most competitive and qualified applicants for undergraduate admission. Critics of top schools pointed out that Asian Americans with comparable or better qualifications than whites were not as likely to be admitted as whites. And as Asian American applicant pools grew exponentially, why were enrollments either flat or increasing at such a modest rate? University officials invoked racial diversity to defend against complaints by Asian Americans of discrimination. In the context of claims about diversity in the 1980s, Asian Americans complained that they were counted as contributing toward diversity once admitted but not counted as contributing to diversity in admissions. Were Asian American students competing for admission slots against whites, or other minorities? In higher education, discourse about diversity became a rhetorical means to step to the side of difficult and thorny issues that often arose with discrimination complaints, including those against Asian Americans. In the Asian Admissions controversy of the 1980s and early 1990s, discrimination claims by Asian American students and faculty were part of a shifting discourse (Takagi 1992, 1998). In response to claims of discrimination by Asian Americans, university administrators defended admission policies as necessary for diversity. Critics of affirmative action responded that university commitment to diversity highlighted the unequal and untenable policy of racial preferences that target underrepresented minorities for admission. As the controversy gained momentum and press coverage increased about discrimination against Asian Americans, inexplicably Asian American enrollments at some universities rose, prompting critics to use the rise in enrollments as circumstantial evidence of past discrimination. In 2009, undergraduate Asian American enrollments were reported to be 17 percent at Harvard and 45.3 percent at UC Berkeley, representing hefty increases from the 1986 figures of 12.8 percent and 25.8 percent respectively.3 In general, the national trend between 1980 and 2007, according to the National Institute of Educational Statistics, has been toward declining white enrollments and increasing minority (including Asian American) student enrollments. In the early 1980s, Asian Americans complaints of ceilings on admission at top colleges and universities were backed up by jaw-dropping reports of their academic prowess. But within two short decades, Asian American achievement has become remarkably unremarkable. At many colleges and universities, Asian American students constitute the largest portion of non-white enrollment and

156

Takagi

their academic achievements, including high GPAs and test scores, once hailed as remarkable are now often seen as unremarkable. And being an unremarkable minority group has consequences in diversity talk, as illustrated in the next section by a recent failed rally of claims of discrimination by Asian Americans.

Diversity talk today: The pitfalls of parity and representation Historically, social and political conflict about university admissions has been racial or ethnic. University officials, though they embrace ideals like diversity, face hard choices in policy. Where race and merit are concerned, admissions turn quickly into an unwieldy pile of facts, statistics, and claims about moral and ethical values. Beginning in the mid-1990s, conservatives battled liberals for the high ground to define diversity and equality of opportunity. Their bid bet on insisting that true diversity could not use race as a factor in university admissions—a bid that seemed justified by the claim of discrimination against Asian Americans in university admissions. In response to conservative and neo-conservative posturing, in 1995 the Regents of the University of California repealed the use of race preferences in UC admissions. In 1996, Proposition 209, known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, made it illegal to use race as a factor in admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. In a first test of its legality, the proposition was ruled unconstitutional, but, on appeal, the ninth Circuit Court ruled Proposition 209 constitutional. Most important is that regardless of the constitutional status of the initiative, populist will for California Proposition 2094 remains high and successful passage of similar initiatives in other states have followed suit evidences widespread popular feeling against affirmative action. Claiming reverse discrimination by whites rode the wake of public perceptions about race and reverse discrimination, challenging affirmative action programs at, among other places, the University of Texas (in Hopwood v. Texas) and the University of Michigan (in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger). Through the 1990s, as legal interpretations of diversity in admissions policies piled up, diversity talk changed. Diversity talk became entrenched in the legal and popular rhetoric focused on minorities (read black or Latino) and whites, or underrepresented minorities and whites. Liberal university officials in an effort to defend admission policies clung to their vision of diversity and desire for a racial balance. In this configuration of the “problem,” Asian American claims of discrimination evaporated. As “minority” has come to mean underrepresented (based on parity) minority, Asian Americans have no figurative stance because they are neither white nor underrepresented on the same terms as African Americans or Latinos, as broad groups. Recent changes in admission policy for the University of California ten-campus system illustrate how Asian Americans are now positioned differently than others to make claims of discrimination and representation. Claims about achievement,

Asian Americans and Diversity Talk 157

merit, and representation which were compelling in the 1980s and early 1990s, cannot seem to find their mark. It is, as if in this current era of diversity talk, at least as far as Asian Americans are concerned, the politics of parity and representation are exhausted. While both parity and representation issues still anchor how other minorities are treated, this is not true for Asian Americans. In February 2009, the University of California announced the most sweeping changes in 50 years in admissions policies effective in 2012. Public reaction to the announced changes was, in general, with the exception of Asian Americans, indifferent. Two significant departures from previous policy include (a) enlarging the pool of eligible applicants but reducing the overall size of the freshman class, and (b) granting admissions officers more discretionary power in selection. Students who were not eligible for admission in the past will now be considered eligible; however the overall percentage of high school seniors in California to be offered admission will decrease. In short, in spite of widening the pool of eligible applicants, overall, there will be a reduction in admission slots.5 “The bottom line,” said UC President Mark Yudof, “is that it will be more diverse and more fair” (Yollin 2009, emphasis mine).6 President Yudof’s choice of words “diverse” and “fair” is noteworthy, signaling, on the one hand, that a fair admissions process is commensurate with diversity and, on the other, the enduring importance of diversity. Some observers have been concerned that the new admissions policy would increase black, Latino, and white admissions at the expense of Asian American admits. One blogger estimate, using UC data, projected increases in admissions for all groups except Asian Americans.7 The University of California treads a line between a mandate from California voters to be race-neutral in admissions, employment, and promotion and federally mandated requirements to comply with affirmative action policy. The language of diversity is key for compliance with both state and federal mandates. To some, the change in admissions policy meant that UC could deploy a raceneutral, merit-based admissions policy without sacrificing qualified and competitive minority candidates. There was little resistance or critique of the proposed changes, except from Asian Americans who cried foul.8 Shortly after the UC Regents approved the new policy, leading Asian Americans immediately criticized the plan. Professor Ling-chi Wang, a retired Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, called the policy “affirmative action for whites.” Professor Wang, a veteran critic of UC admissions policies since the 1980s, viewed the new admissions policy as a cover for admitting more whites and fewer Asian Americans. Wang knows all too well the intricacies of admissions practices, as he, among others, led the charge against the UC system in the controversy over Asian American admissions in the 1980s. That controversy over Asian American admissions resulted in repeated shuttling back and forth between Asian American community representatives and university officials and brought federal investigations of both UCLA and Berkeley for possible violations of the equal opportunity provision of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Whereas

158

Takagi

Wang’s criticisms of UC admissions policy drew national attention in the early 1980s, his criticisms in 2009 have yet to rally more than glancing press coverage. Wang’s objections to the new policy were covered in California newspapers like the San Jose Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle and national news outlets like CBS and MSNBC. They also stimulated a lively conversation on many blog sites about Asian Americans, colleges, and admissions. Thus far, however, the charge that the change in policy represents affirmative action for whites has generated little public reaction. Except for a few blog posts and rejoinders “I don’t think this is discrimination” and “Of course it is,” and other less civilized commentary that appeared when the new policy was announced in April 2009, UC Admissions is off the front pages.9 What is the status of Asian Americans in relation to diversity talk? Professor Wang’s claim that the new UC system wide admissions policy constitutes affirmative action for whites offers a first clue. That his claim has not summoned activist response—from either those who agree or disagree with him—may indicate that the very conditions for Asian American claims of disadvantage in higher education have shifted since the 1980s. However, any thoughtful answer to this question must reckon with Asian American student achievement. Asian Americans students are among the most competitive applicants for admission to highly selective colleges and universities. Can academically competitive students be considered as contributing to diversity or subject to preferences in affirmative action? The answer to this question is unequivocally yes. However, that complaints by Asian Americans toward UC admissions policy in 2009 fail to gain public traction reflects public perception that Asian American students are either not victims of discrimination or possibly that Asian American students may be considered overrepresented in higher education. The applicant pools of whites and Asian Americans, at least at UC, are approximately the same size, and so too are the admit rates (University of California, office of the president, website: http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/fall2009adm.html). Since the 1980s and 1990s, the data suggest that Asian American student achievement on objective measures, such as grades and test scores, has surpassed whites. Table 12.1 charts the change in critical reading, math, and writing sections of the SAT over time and illustrates two key facts: that Asian Americans have the highest mean composite score, and that Asian Americans stand out as having the greatest improvement in mean scores over a ten-year period, ending in 2008. My use of SAT scores is admittedly not without concern. There are important criticisms of these tests—what they actually measure and what they actually predict. While standardized tests are not insignificant, there is some question as to their comparative advantage in predicting college GPA and other measures of success in college. Nonetheless, the tests, in general, continue to play a significant role in admissions criteria. To the extent that the vast majority of public and private four-year universities use College Board tests in their admissions delib-

Asian Americans and Diversity Talk 159 TABLE 12.1 Mean National SAT Scores by Race, in 2008 and Over a Ten-Year Period Ending in 2008

Group

2008 Mean SAT: Critical reading

Ten-year Mean Change in SAT: Critical reading

2008 Mean SAT: Math

Ten-year Mean Change in SAT: Math

2008 Mean SAT: Writing

Ten-year Mean Change in SAT: Writing

White Asian American Black Mexican American

528 513

2 15

537 581

9 19

518 516

0 3

430 454

4 1

426 463

0 3

424 447

1 3

Adapted from http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-08-Page-8-Table-7.pdf

erations, I set aside the validity issues to focus on key comparative question. If Asian American students compete principally with white students for university admission, at what point is there balance? At what point is one of these groups overrepresented or underrepresented? Is there a conscious or unconscious upper limit to the percentage of any one racial/ethnic group in the formation of an entering freshman class? There is no discourse that identifies white students as overrepresented, but does there exist a perception that Asian American students are overrepresented in higher education? According to one blog, apaforprogress, the predicted impact of UC’s new admission policy is a rise in white admissions and a decline in Asian. The decline in Asian American admissions when the new policy takes effect in Fall 2012 seems to reinforce the notion that Asian American students, while perhaps the most competitive applicants, are also the most expendable in admissions.10 Even more complicated is the question of how “diversity” on campus is measured. Generally, now, diversity is understood as a measure of parity and representation. At the moment, at least with respect to parity and representation, Asian Americans as a pan-ethnic group have met or exceeded parity and representation at many campuses.11 What other measures might we imagine that would evaluate diversity and balance without resorting to representation or body count? But this is complicated by the fact that at some places, including the University of California, the category of “Asian American” includes under-represented Filipinos and Pacific Islanders, along with students of Asian American heritage (East Indians) who are not considered underrepresented.12

Beyond parity and representation in diversity talk My contention is Asian American achievement has become increasingly asynchronous with diversity talk. Since the 1980s, diversity talk has for many reasons

160

Takagi

become more exclusive in defining the “problem” or “challenge” of diversity by privileging under-representation as its raison d’être. Under-representation or parity with population figures, a priori, leaves out Asian American students, unless they are considered by subgroups (e.g., Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, East Indians). Because the percentage of Asian American college enrollments outstrips the percentage of Asian Americans in the U.S., one might argue that parity has been achieved hence, they are not an underrepresented minority. By this same logic, however, one may argue that Native and indigenous students, who make up not quite 1 percent of undergraduate enrollment, are close enough to population parity that they too should no longer be considered as an underrepresented minority. This argument is not being made nor do I think it should be made; yet it illustrates my point that with respect to some groups, parity establishes the floor effect and with respect to Asian Americans, parity acts as a ceiling. Because parity and representation are measures that, when implemented in the absence of other systematic forms of evaluation, may lend themselves to targets and tokens, they should be considered as only one among several strategies for balance and diversity. Strict adherence to parity and representation in diversity talk reinforces the notion that diversity should be more focused on underrepresented groups. If Asian Americans are not explicitly excluded from conceptions of diversity in the U.S., they are implicitly absented from discourses about diversity. Parity and representation provide a limited rhetoric and already there is wide popular recognition of its limitations. What would it mean to reform or reconsider the politics of representation (and under-representation)? Without a doubt, reconsideration should take into account how the historical emergence of diversity talk has sidelined Asian American achievement. The point is not that achievement ought to replace representation, but rather, that diversity talk conceives only of minorities as less competitive academically, and hence, Asian Americans become an absent presence. What would it mean to move beyond parity and representation to recognize not only the importance of parity and representation but also the limitations of these constructs? Diversity talk currently recognizes the importance but not the limitations of these constructs. To demonstrate what I mean by the limits of parity and representation with respect to Asian American achievement, I end this essay by returning to a quote that opens the essay. The quote opening this chapter is from the 2004 sleeper stoner comedy Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Unlike other stoner films (e.g., The Big Lebowski), the protagonists in Harold and Kumar are a South Asian American, Kumar Patel, and his Chinese American roommate, Harold Lee. At the opening of the film, Kumar Patel is going through the motions of medical school interviews to please his father, and his roommate, Harold Lee, is a drone investment banker who is the brunt of co-worker jokes. They are at best on the loser end of the stereotypical model minorities. By the end of the movie, both “find” themselves in an authentic recognition and representation beyond the stereotype. Kumar, rather

Asian Americans and Diversity Talk 161

than doing his fathers’ bidding, is genuinely enthusiastic about medical school and Harold stands up to his co-workers. The fact of their Asian American identity and stereotypes about Asian Americans is present in the film but in an unexpected way. The narrative about the stereotype is never heavy-handed and is skillfully and humorously smuggled into the dialogue. Harold and Kumar do and do not fit the stereotype. The quote that opens this chapter is Kumar talking back to Officer Palumbo. Kumar says, “you were probably the big asshole in high school, right?” and Officer Palumbo responds, “that’s right.” Kumar’s return diatribe is a smart-ass recapitulation of the stereotype of the good, studious Asian American student, now slightly twisted, in service of humiliating Officer Palumbo’s muscular and stupid bravado. This above, obviously limited example, illustrates that in other representations of public life, the portrayal of Asian Americans and achievement is more complex than in current-day diversity talk. There is representation (for example, of the professional path of the model minority) but there is also recognition that that representation is flawed. I call attention to the film in a gesture toward situating Asian American achievement beyond the logic of numerical representation. Kumar’s is not a teaching moment to convince Mr. Palumbo about the model minority surpassing whites. It is his moment of his creative recognition—and beyond representation. I note “beyond” representation because of its humor about recognition. Kumar pokes fun at the stereotype of the bookish Asian American at the same time he invokes it. The lighthearted embrace and rejection of stereotypes about Asian Americans in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle reflects what one author, John Jackson Jr. (2008), calls a need for an understanding of racial realities in terms that allow for schizophrenia of experience. My point is not that Asian Americans students are clear-cut victims of discriminatory practices. Nor am I suggesting that measures of achievement by objective criteria are reliable. Nor am I suggesting that Asian American students ought to be admitted to institutions of higher education before underrepresented minorities. Rather, I am suggesting that Asian American claims of discrimination unveil the limits of a diversity discourse anchored in the numbers game. If new admissions policies at UC are anticipated to negatively impact only Asian Americans, the most competitive applicants to the University of California, then something has gone wrong with merit-based admissions. Most important, a critique of the numbers game is neither anti-black, anti-Latino, nor a ploy to avoid or sidestep issues of racial inequality. If Asian Americans are above parity, and blacks are below parity, we must ask questions of balance and racial equity. Therefore all groups—blacks, Native or Indigenous people, Asians, Latinos and whites— should be part of our notions of balance and diversity. But if diversity explicitly or implicitly excludes Asian American students we will need to think outside this box. To the extent that admissions is a fair and competitive process, it will be of ever-increasing importance that we recognize the limits of diversity talk driven by parity and representation to evaluate achievement, creativity, and promise. A

162

Takagi

first step in the right direction is to ensure that Asian Americans are present but not absent in diversity talk.

Notes 1 Thank you to Professors Lisa Stulberg and Sharon Weinberg for their comments and suggestions. 2 Diversity talk in its current incarnation emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s at the intersection of political philosophy (Kymlicka 1995; Schlesinger 1998; Tully 1995), corporate diversity management (Thomas 2005) and higher education (Herrnstein and Murray 1996; Karabel 2005; Takagi 1992, 1998), and with the rapidly changing racial and ethnic demographics of American higher education. 3 Enrollment figures are not as significant as admission rates. Admission rates by race and ethnicity, however, are usually not made available by many universities. Enrollment rates, though problematic, offer an incomplete illustration that universities are both admitting more Asians and increasing undergraduate racial diversity. 4 In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, which amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, gender, or ethnicity in admissions, hiring, and promotion policies. 5 Changes in policy include the following: 1. Admission to UC will be more selective. 2. AP SAT subject tests are no longer required. 3. Students must complete all UC high school prerequisite coursework by the end of their junior year (previously this applied only to those who were eligible as the top 4 percent of their high school class). 4. The percentage of students admitted based on their rank in high school is increased from 4 percent to 9 percent. 6 Chea 2009 Terence; Gordon 2009. 7 Table 12.2 estimates an increase in blacks, Latinos and whites, but a decrease in Asian Americans. This table which was adapted from a study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission was included by the Office of the President of the UC in a report to the Committee on Educational Policy at the February 2009 Regents Meeting. In an effort to explain the impact of proposed admissions changes on different ethnic/racial groups, the report to CEP provided the below table. This table is a simulation of the impact in 2012 based on the 2007–2008 freshman class. 8 The changes for 2012, while far reaching, build on earlier shifts in admissions at UC. For example, in 1999, UC eligibility was extended to the top 4 percent of students in California high schools. The percentage plan, the prototype of which was pioneered at the University of Texas in the wake of the 1996 Hopwood decision, widened the criteria of university eligibility. 9 Except for two short blasts of news coverage, in February 2009 when the proposed changes were announced, and in April 2009 when Asian American critics voiced opposition to the policy, there has not been sustained news coverage. However, blogosphere commentary in April 2009 reveals resentment about Asian American claims. 10 Please see Table 12.2. 11 According to the U.S. Census, Asian persons comprise 4.5 percent and African Americans comprise 12.8 percent of the national population in 2008. At UC in 2009, Asian persons were 34.9 percent of admissions and African Americans were 4 percent of admits. A report in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2006, reports that “blacks have a long way to go to achieve educational parity with whites. Overall, 30.6 percent of the white population over the age of 25 holds a four-year college degree compared to 17.6 percent of adult blacks.” (http://www.jbhe.com/latest/index110906.html)

Asian Americans and Diversity Talk 163 TABLE 12.2 Projected Increases in Admissions after Policy Changes at University of

California Characteristics

Mean High School GPA (weighted, capped) Average SAT Reasoning Score: Critical Reading + Math + Writing Ethnic Group (% of Total) African American Chicano/Latino Native American Asian American White Other/Unknown Percent Disadvantaged Schools (State rank on Academic Performance Index-API of 1, 2, or 3)

2007–2008 Admits 3.75 581

4% 19% 1% 36% 34% 6% 14%

Projection of 2007–2008 Admits LOW 3.7 571

4% 19%