Diversity and Its Contradictions

How support for diversity in higher education can undermine social justice.

By Benjamin Baez

In the 1980s "diversity" became a buzzword in the academy, representing a movement advocating the appreciation and celebration of difference-in culture, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation-and, at the same time, a critique of the dominance of the Western tradition in the undergraduate curriculum.

The scholars who criticized the hegemony of that tradition and argued for curricular change were a diverse group, but they came mainly from disciplines influenced by Afrocentrism, critical theory, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. They included Molefi Kete Asante, James Banks, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Henry Giroux, Peggy McIntosh, Renato Rosaldo, and many others. Their opponents were conservative scholars, politicians, and commentators such as William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D'Souza, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger. The conservatives defended the Western tradition in the undergraduate curriculum, or at least opposed drastic curricular change.

What was at stake in this debate? For many, the content of the undergraduate curriculum had the potential to affect the future of society itself and the role that education would play in that future. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., put it in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, "Ours is a late-twentieth-century world profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And the only way to transcend those divisions-to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities-is through education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture."

Gates saw a future in which cultural differences are respected, and he viewed education as the vehicle to that future. Arthur Schlesinger, on the other hand, was troubled by differences. In The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Schlesinger states that if the "ethnic revolt" led to a denial of a "common culture and a single society . . . the republic would be in serious trouble."

Despite their disagreements, the 1980s proponents and opponents of diversifying the academic curriculum saw education, especially higher education, as an important battleground for the future of American society. For proponents, education had the power to promote social justice and recognition of the increasing diversity of American society. They viewed transformation of the curriculum as a prerequisite for such progress. In other words, only through an education that emphasized diversity could individuals understand the world, recognize inequities, and gain the tools needed to remedy those inequities. For opponents, changing the curriculum to reflect multiple perspectives threatened what they saw as a common culture, an America that compared well with-or surpassed-other countries in its culture, economy, and workforce.

In retrospect, the concerns voiced on both sides of this debate were fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, the opponents of curricular change, in lamenting threats to the American cultural tradition, seemed oblivious to the diversity of that tradition. On the other, proponents of curricular change sought to put forth alternatives to the Western tradition in the undergraduate curriculum. But because they saw the alternatives as just as valid as the Western tradition, their actions amounted to an attempt to replace it altogether. In other words, they advocated for the equality with Western tradition of the texts and values of non-Western cultures, as well as those of women, homosexuals, the physically disabled, and other "others."

Their doing so helped to destabilize the hegemony of the majority or mainstream culture that was perceived as repressing these others. Conservatives probably were correct in equating such moves for curricular change as an effort to end the "American cultural tradition." The proponents of change failed to eradicate the "Western, heterosexual, male" undergraduate curriculum, but they succeeded in making it more open to other perspectives.

Besides the gaps in logic among those arguing for or against diversity in the curriculum, the meaning of the term "diversity" did not remain constant. Diversity implied a dichotomy between whites and others, or between the Western tradition and the traditions of non-European cultures. Yet proponents of curricular change also sought to include the perspectives of such nonracial groups as women and homosexuals. Some critics of curricular change, such as Arthur Schlesinger, highlighted this contradiction between the term diversity and the goals of those pursuing it in higher education.

Perhaps in response to such a critique, proponents of diversity sought other words to capture their intent and goals. They chose terms such as "multiculturalism" and "pluralism," which supplanted "diversity" but signified the same thing: an alternative to, or replacement of, the Western tradition in higher education.

Despite criticism from conservative scholars and others, and contradictions in terminology and goals, proponents of diversity achieved one of their objectives: a greater concern for multiple perspectives in the academy.

Affirmative Action

Recently, the term diversity has resurfaced, but with a different function. In response to 1990s legal and political threats to race-conscious admissions and employment practices, diversity is now being used as a tool to preserve affirmative action. For example, in The Shape of the River, scholars William Bowen and Derek Bok set out to demonstrate the benefits of diversity in higher education as a strategy to defend race-conscious admissions. Many advocates of affirmative action see such an approach as the only hope for saving it.

The basis for this hope is Justice Lewis Powell's opinion in the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell indicated that the University of California's goal to increase diversity in one of its medical schools presented a compelling state interest that justified considering race among other factors in admissions. He stated, "[I]n arguing that its universities must be accorded the right to select those students who will contribute the most to the 'robust exchange of ideas,' [the University of California] invokes a countervailing interest [to the constitutional requirement of race-neutrality]. . . . In this light, [the university] must be viewed as seeking to achieve a goal that is of paramount importance in the fulfillment of its mission."

Powell's opinion has come to signify that race (or ethnicity or gender) may be used as a "plus factor" in admissions, employment, and financial-aid decisions. Hopwood v. Texas struck down affirmative action policies at the University of Texas in 1996, and more recent Supreme Court cases have shed doubt on the legal viability of such policies. Yet legal scholars who defend them believe that Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke is still good law and that it provides the only hope for taking race into account in the treatment of people of color in higher education.

Pending litigation against the University of Michigan, one of the most prestigious institutions in this country, illustrates how proponents of diversity now cast their arguments. The university, a public institution, faces two separate lawsuits over the affirmative action policies of its law school and undergraduate programs. The strategy of the university's lawyers relies on Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke regarding the importance of diversity.

As part of its defense, the university commissioned leading researchers to "verify [diversity's] legitimacy with empirical proof." The Compelling Need for Diversity in Higher Education, a report available on the university's Web site, indicates that Bakke "affirmed that the role of diversity in colleges and universities is both essential and compelling." The report further states that opponents and proponents have wrestled with ideology and theory, but have never had the benefit of a comprehensive theoretical framework that has been tested by reliable empirical data. The University of Michigan has drawn on several of the nation's leading, and most respected, researchers and scholars to develop such a framework and verify its legitimacy with empirical proof.

The report explains that leaders in the fields of history, sociology, education, economics, psychology, and law confirm the "continuing imperative for diversity-including racial and ethnic diversity-in higher education."

The prodiversity arguments of the 1980s apparently succeeded insofar as today's arguments for diversity focus not so much on why diversity is important, but on how it is important. The University of Michigan report does not discuss what diversity is or whether it's worthwhile-it simply states that Bakke already "affirmed that the role of diversity . . . is both essential and compelling." If the prodiversity movement had failed in its efforts to define racial and ethnic diversity and to establish the need for it in higher education, the university could not have just cited Bakke. It is the movement's success that leads the university to focus now on providing data it believes courts would find persuasive.

Reliable Empirical Data

This evidence cannot, however, be merely "anecdotal." In the July-August 1999 issue of Change, John Friedl, professor of law at Wayne State University, argued that for courts to deem diversity of compelling interest, the evidence of its value must be grounded in "research," justified "empirically" and with "quantifiable" data. The University of Michigan report accepts this premise; that is why the university has commissioned respected researchers, such as William Bowen, Derek Bok, and Patricia Gurin, to prove with "reliable empirical data" that diversity is "essential and compelling."

Other scholars have also been conducting research on the benefits of diversity as a way to support affirmative action. Sylvia Hurtado, a leading scholar on diversity in higher education, has written extensively about the educational benefits of diversity. She has found that diversity increases racial understanding and improves student retention. Professional organizations have joined this endeavor as well. The American Council on Education and the AAUP have published the results of a survey of faculty members regarding the educational benefits of diversity; the survey (.pdf) indicates widespread support among professors for diversity in the classroom.

Other studies have found that the benefits of diversity in higher education are many and that they affect all constituents. For students, diversity increases retention, job prospects, racial understanding, satisfaction with college, openness to difference, and critical thinking. For faculty, diversity enriches their teaching, service, and research. For institutions, diversity improves the curricula, campus social interactions, and race relations. And even for businesses, the ultimate beneficiaries of higher education according to many people, diversity promotes creativity and innovation, fosters problem-solving skills, and adds to organizational flexibility.

A statement, On the Importance of Diversity in Education, issued by forty-nine educational organizations and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on February 13, 1998, put the benefits of diversity in a nutshell: it enriches students' educational experiences, promotes personal growth and a healthy society, strengthens communities and the workplace, and enhances America's economic competitiveness.

Some Caution

Most proponents of affirmative action agree that "reliable empirical data" will allow us to measure the value of diversity. But reliable empirical data means quantifiable measures, like graduation rates, learning outcomes, standardized test scores, and so forth. Up to now, such criteria have ensured that the student body at many prestigious institutions remains predominantly white, because members of racial minority groups do not fare well on these measures. In addition, reliance on such data means that only certain types of research will count; for example, surveys, analyses of large databases, perhaps even qualitative studies. What gets left out are critiques questioning the ways the academy admits students or evaluates faculty. By working within the confines of existing academic practices, the recent studies on diversity fail to examine such practices.

Bowen and Bok's The Shape of the River, for example, asks whether racial minorities with lower academic qualifications than whites or Asian Americans succeed in higher education. The answer is often yes. But what these studies don't ask is why we classify, grade, rank, and test students in the first place. Such practices create "winners" and "losers," and members of racial minorities often lose.

By starting and ending with prevailing academic practices (and the assumptions underlying them), the discourse on diversity may simply reinforce the status quo. In the past, these practices have proved detrimental to the goal of diversifying higher education, and there is no reason to believe that they will not continue to be so if we do not think of different ways to evaluate applicants and students. In other words, it is these practices, not solely the educational value of diversity, that must be studied and justified.

Confirmation and Denial

But when proponents of curricular change and affirmative action focus on oppression, such as sexism, racism, or homophobia, they assert that social categories like race are not real. Proponents often claim that majority cultures (usually western European ones) created these categories to justify and ensure the subordination of nonwhites and others.

Yet proponents use these categories as the basis for their claims that diversity has educational value. Gates, for example, discusses the importance of using education to "comprehend the diversity of human cultures" and to permit students to "possess another culture, no matter how 'alien' it may appear to be." But he also states that "[r]ace . . . pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a trope."

Thus proponents of diversity engage in a discourse that denies itself-one that confirms the legitimacy of the knowledge and experiences of diverse cultures, and the importance of human differences, but that denies that the categories underlying that knowledge and those experiences are real. How, then, is this confirmation and denial reconciled?

I believe this contradiction in the discourse on diversity exists because the concept of difference has not been well explored. The theory of diversity presumes that social differences lead to particular of kinds of experiences that promote special kinds of knowledge, perspectives, values, and so on. Advocates of diversity, therefore, seek through higher education to expose and to know, and so to appreciate and celebrate, the experiences of individuals and groups of different cultures, ethnicities, and races. As I have already noted, studies of the educational value of diversity stress the importance of social differences in promoting "racial understanding," "multiple perspectives," and other social benefits.

Theory of Difference

Thus elaborations of ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality that begin and end with difference fall into the trap of naturalizing difference, while failing to analyze how social differences, and the oppression that results from them, occur in the first place.

In academia, recent case law, research studies, and institutional statements make difference the origin of knowledge, experience, and educational benefit. In this context, "reliable empirical data" from studies on the educational value of diversity become evidence for the fact of difference, not a basis for exploring how difference takes place and how it is institutionalized in academic practices.

I believe that a more fertile ground for theorizing diversity, and for challenging the conservative politics of courts and legislatures, lies in dissociating the evidence of difference from any understanding that difference is an inevitable or natural "fact" of life. Educators (and lawyers) need to study the mechanisms of language, knowledge, norms, and science that position us as different and produce our identities and experiences. Those concerned about the threats to affirmative action and diversity in higher education should heed what Jonathan Alger wrote in the January-February 1997 issue of Academe: "The argument for the necessity of diversity is perhaps stronger in higher education than in any other context, but only if diversity is understood as a means to an end." I agree with Alger that diversity is crucial in higher education, and that colleges and universities provide important settings for studying and understanding diversity "in action."

But relying on our prevailing conceptions of diversity will not lead to the educational end to which Alger referred, which is a time when racial differences will no longer be seen through the lens of stereotypes or interpreted in terms of hegemonic interests. Instead, courts and institutions of higher education need to look at the history of ideas about social and cultural differences, the kinds of practices resulting from these ideas, and the context in which the ideas originated. Studies of the educational benefits of diversity cannot serve as the sole basis for a politics of resistance to the predominance of the Western tradition in the academic curriculum or the conservative practices of the current judicial and political systems in the United States. But such studies can help minimize social domination if, instead of taking differences for granted, they actually examine the processes that create differences, the mechanisms that link such processes to economic and political interests, and the ways in which these processes and their effects become entrenched in our social institutions.

I understand that our legal and political discourses influence the way we think about diversity and demand that we talk about differences as if they were inevitable or "natural." So perhaps one needs to support diversity with reliable empirical data to save affirmative action. Still, those concerned about affirmative action should recognize that today's legal and political discourses present diversity in ways that reinforce racial and other differences. Although such a presentation may be necessary in the legal and political arenas, it is counter-productive to social change.

What is to be done? Let me suggest an answer. Although a politics of diversity may have to rely on studies that prove the legitimacy of diversity in higher education in order to satisfy the claims of judges, politicians, and others, such a politics must also question the kinds of practices that create differences in the first place. And it must disentangle these differences from the economic and political interests that maintain social inequalities. The strategy of this politics, then, may have to be contradictory. That is, the main contradiction of diversity in higher education may be that we have to reinforce social differences at the same time that we question them.

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