From the Editor: Diversity on Campus

Ellen Schrecker

Because higher education is today’s main vehicle for social mobility, the academic community has to confront this racial impasse. True, the overt discrimination of an earlier generation has long since disappeared from our institutions. Pluralism is the mantra of the day; just about everybody on campus denounces racism and extols diversity. Demography is destiny here, Christopher Edley, Jr., and Evelyn Hu-DeHart explain. As the proportion of people of color within the American population rises, so too will their proportion within the nation’s student bodies.

But as we wait for the inevitable, we must deal with the present and the continuing underrepresentation of minority groups in the academy. How can we achieve the diversity we claim to want in ways that will be both fair and educationally valid? The most effective method, affirmative action—the deliberate use of ethnic, racial, gender, and other criteria to recruit a diverse student body or faculty—is politically unpopular, and several pending lawsuits threaten to undermine its legal viability. If that occurs, educators will have to adopt race-blind policies that not only ignore reality but also threaten to roll back much of the progress that has been made.

To avert such a predicament, some academics are making the case for affirmative action by supplementing traditional appeals to equity and justice with empirical research. It is no longer enough to say that diversity is good; now we must show what it is good for. Such a strategy is problematic. Not only does it inflate the importance of narrowly quantitative markers like test scores and grade-point averages, but, since one can marshal statistics to support almost any position, it also weakens what may still be the strongest argument for affirmative action: that it’s the right thing to do.

But, as Benjamin Baez explains, because pending litigation has turned the debate about diversity into a matter of social science, we must avail ourselves of its tools. In conjunction with the American Council on Education, the AAUP sponsored a survey to assess the educational benefits of diversity from the faculty perspective. Because of the importance of this research, Academe is publishing excerpts from it as well as other articles about the value of diversifying the academy. Whether it’s by encouraging more classroom interaction or opening up new fields of scholarship, teachers from minority groups can, as Caroline Turner and Jeffrey Milem show, enrich the educational experiences of everybody on campus.

How persuasive this evidence is remains to be seen, for, even within the academic community, as Abigail Thernstrom’s indictment of racial preferences in admissions reminds us, the diversity debate continues to rage. Some scholars like Hu-DeHart believe that few institutions have made more than a pro-forma commitment to diversity. Baez finds the issues even more complicated. Although he supports retaining affirmative action, he questions the desirability of its defenders’ stress on difference, suggesting that such an emphasis may undermine affirmative action’s egalitarian goals.

On a more practical level, a further obstacle to achieving those goals is the failure of so many institutions to diversify their faculties. Despite the common complaint that there aren’t enough minority professors in the pipeline, Daryl Smith explains that traditional hiring practices may be the main obstacle to recruiting them. As Paula Krebs’s report on her department’s success in recruiting African American faculty members shows, once an institution is determined to hire minorities and pursues them energetically, it can do quite well.

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