Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education

Reviewed by Faye J. Crosby

 Robert Ibarra’s book defies easy categorization. Part report of his own study, part survey of the scholarship on diversity in education, part philosophical treatise, part sociological tract, the book is mostly an invitation to rethink the way we conduct the business of higher education, and especially the business of graduate education. Beyond Affirmative Action is an unconventional book, and the better for it.

Ibarra divides Beyond Affirmative Action into three major sections. The first section offers some background information on the author’s qualitative study of Latinos in America and lays the conceptual groundwork for the book. The second section goes into depth about the findings of the study, and the third outlines the implications of Ibarra’s findings, analyzes how the American educational system approaches issues of diversity, and gives some advice about how the issues might better be approached.

In the 1990s Ibarra interviewed seventy-seven Latinos in the academy, thirty-one of whom were graduate students and forty-six of whom were faculty members or administrators. The respondents came from fifty-six different institutions. While the sample included many Mexican Americans, it also included Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others from Latin American countries.

More than half of the Latinos interviewed had encountered problems during or after graduate school. In addition to the customary difficulties faced by all graduate students, the Latinos in Ibarra’s study described profound misunderstandings and feelings of alienation. Some of the instances described to and by Ibarra smack of ethnic prejudice. But, according to the author, the overwhelmingmajority of the problems experienced by his subjects were not simple cases of racism. Rather, Latino graduate students felt a deep disconnection between their own cultural habits of thought and action and the habits of thought and action valued in the academy.

The most telling conflicts—those that showed a cultural gap rather than racism—concerned Latino graduate students and their ethnic minority faculty advisers. “I believe,” writes Ibarra, “that the suspicion that Latino faculty treat Latino students badly is justified.” To illustrate the point, Ibarra quotes at length from a student whom he calls Raul:

Sometimes, even with the faculty member I work with, I am not getting the respect I feel I should get or the support. . . . . [My adviser] . . . is Latina, but much more assimilated culturally than I am in terms of frame of mind, outlook, perception. She grew up in difficult circumstances too. I admire her for the obstacles she’s overcome. But again, in one of our conversations, she said, . . . “I’m not here for those students who don’t give a damn. I’m here for those students who work hard.” . . . [A] lot of times I think [her] assumption is that those students who fail are the ones that didn’t work hard.

The problems, as Ibarra poignantly recounts, do not end when the Ph.D. is conferred. Rather, the entrenched culture of academia renders life difficult for Latinos as they move through the tenure process and assume senior positions. Even when they become administrators, Latinos feel uneasy in the university.

Why? The cause of the discomfort is not out-and-out racism, but something far more difficult to uproot: the culture of academic life. Ibarra argues that the entrenched culture of the academic establishment is a “low-context” culture. Meanwhile, Latinos, other ethnic minorities, and white women, according to Ibarra, operate in a culture of “high context.” A high-context person in a low-context setting is like the proverbial square peg in a round hole.

The fascinating distinction between high- and low-context cultures is one Ibarra adapts from the work of Edward T. and Mildred R. Hall. In a clear and complete chart, Ibarra sets out the contrasts between the two cultures. From the chart we learn, for example, that low-context cultures make little use of nonverbal signals, value direct communication with explicit, elaborate, and literal verbal messages, and depersonalize disagreements, while high-context cultures rely extensively on nonverbal signals, see communication as an art form in which indirect, implicit, and informal verbal messages are valued, and personalize disagreements. In low-context cultures, but not in high-context cultures, societal recognition indicates success.

Latinos, who are high-context people, are undervalued by the low-context academic system. The cultural misfit means that many Latinos drop out of academia or assume poorly paid jobs as adjuncts, often working in the community college system. Other Latinos avoid academia altogether and go into medicine or law, where the costs of survival are just as great, but the rewards of money and prestige are presumably much greater than the rewards of the professoriate. A few Latinos, according to Ibarra, stay at research universities, at great cost to themselves and to their ever-more-estranged communities.

The misfit also brings enormous costs to academia. Because of cultural rigidity, we lose the benefit of much talent. Not only do we forfeit the harvest that could be reaped from the hard work and talent of many Latinos who could make a contribution to our existing system, but we also vastly decrease the possibility of finding creative and good solutions to the problems that beset higher education in the United States today. The solutions, Ibarra suggests, may be possible only if we are willing to trade in some of our antiquated low-context habits and to adopt the more expansive and organic ways of high-context environments.

Faye Crosby is professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of numerous publications on affirmative action and social justice. Her book Affirmative Action Is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action is forthcoming.

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