Struggling to Diversify

Privilege and Diversity in the Academy
Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault. New York and London: Routledge, 2007

Reviewed by Susan Talburt

Frances Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault’s careful study of institutional, individual, and collective meanings of faculty demographics on three campuses rejects a best-worst dichotomy, creating instead an unsteady narrative of progress. The authors position their text as a challenge to disembodied scholarship on higher education’s corporatization, which they describe as a “negative national literature” that only “fleetingly . . . touches on demographic changes in the faculty.” They ask what conditions have made these demographic changes possible, what factors have impeded them, and what effects the changes have had on institutional policies and practices. Their narrative does not trace a straight line from white male privilege to diversity—it is neither the best nor the worst of times, but a time in which we have something before us.

Through institutional ethnographies of Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Rutgers University–Newark, Maher and Tetreault explore historical, social, political, and economic contexts that have shaped responses to what they call “the challenges of diversity” over the past several decades. The book takes readers into the institutions themselves, focusing on interviews with faculty and administrators. Particularly refreshing, and somewhat unusual in ethnographic studies, is the naming of individuals interviewed—among the familiar figures are Renato Rosaldo, Estelle Freedman, and Claude Steele at Stanford and David Halperin, Abigail Stewart, and Nancy Cantor at Michigan. Noteworthy are the preponderance of advocates for change and the paucity of “big names” from Rutgers–Newark.

The historical backdrop for the reconfiguration of higher educational hierarchies includes the rise of science-based research universities with the Cold War buildup of Big Science, which changed funding priorities of private foundations; the GI Bill’s expansion of higher education for white males; and heightened racial and economic segregation that accompanied the rapid growth of the suburbs in the 1950s. Within these contexts, the authors examine Stanford’s entrepreneurialism and institutional privilege, Michigan’s preemininence in the social sciences, and Rutgers–Newark’s disadvantaged position. The authors thus contrast the physical environments of Palo Alto, Ann Arbor, and Newark while depicting a national hierarchy of universities and stratification within them according to departments and areas and methods of study. Research commercialization, entrepreneurialism, and the quest for national rankings emerge as key factors in creating and perpetuating patterns of structural, demographic, and intellectual privilege. Demographic changes, however, first of students and more slowly of faculty, have encouraged new practices that challenge singular notions of excellence.

In framing their analysis, the authors define excellence as “a code word for commonly agreed-on high standards of academic performance —in other words, rigorous scholarship with universal applicability—and a deservedly high stature for those who meet those standards. Diversity has then meant a spreading out of, a dilution of, and a threat to those standards.” Rather than denoting quality, excellence consolidates privilege, solidifying institutional norms to control who counts as a scholar and what content and methodologies count as scholarship.

Making explicit an arguable narrative of progress, the authors employ feminist phase theory to understand changing dynamics of privilege and diversity on these campuses. The five phases, originally developed to study curricular transformation, include (1) viewing as standard “a white male professoriate” (during the time of few women faculty or faculty of color); (2) “ending race and sex discrimination and becoming ‘just like them,’” or the civil rights–era effort to build a diverse faculty as long as it was, as at Stanford, “the best possible faculty” (the most egregious example of a “just like them” mentality); (3) challenging “university standards, norms, and cultures,” or questioning curricular norms and scholarly standards for tenure decisions; (4) “linking diversity and excellence,” or refusing to understand these terms as opposites and making diversity a part of excellence in policy and practice; and (5) “shifting the focus from excellence and diversity to privilege and diversity,” or challenging individualistic ideologies of success by making structures of privilege an explicit part of institutional discourse.

Several chapters detail the institutions’ struggles to diversify their faculty, revealing an elaborate interplay of external and internal dynamics and offering insights into actors’ understandings of their institutions. The narratives also raise questions about the authors’ assumptions. Phases 3 and 4 receive the most elaboration, with examples at Stanford of challenges to tenure norms and the infamous 1980s curricular debates over the transformation of the undergraduate Western culture requirement to Cultures, Ideas, and Values (CIV), which mandated attention to race, class, and gender. But here the authors’ assumptions, not to mention dominant ideologies, go unchallenged. The book is premised on “positionality,” the idea that membership in a marked category of gender, race, or ethnicity offersan alternative worldview. Yet the discussion fails to note that this essentializing assumption is belied by the reversal of the CIV requirement under Condoleezza Rice, who served as Stanford’s provost during most of Gerhard Casper’s presidency.

Although the authors purport to reject a best-worst dichotomy, Michigan emerges as something of the “best of times,” which the authors attribute mostly to the university’s commitment to interdisciplinarity (in contrast to the entrenched departmental structures and norms at Stanford). Indeed, interdisciplinarity is figured as a hero throughout the book, enabling the development of pluralistic standards of excellence and programs designed to effect change through strategic hiring of clusters of faculty, joint appointments, and recruitment of senior female faculty. Across the campuses, interdisciplinary women’s and ethnic studies are described as locations of both possibility and marginalization. Yet the authors fail to emphasize the revenue-generating potential of particular interdisciplinary formations as a significant factor in their positions in institutional hierarchies.

At Rutgers–Newark, which the authors describe as recently beginning to “catch up” with other institutions, there are efforts to link excellence to the university’s urban mission. The search for resources, however, works against diversification, as significant investments in sciences and a defunding of other departments—including the predominantly African American academic foundations department—privilege “traditional” scholarship and stratify faculty internally.

Despite the authors’ intentions, the book often supports “worst of times” thinking about corporatization’s effects and the dominance of the sciences in universities, particularly regarding Stanford’s adherence to the “Stanford style” of the scientist-hero-entrepreneur and Rutgers–Newark’s stratification of departments and faculty in its quest for resources and prestige. At the book’s end, Maher and Tetreault remain puzzled by warnings that academic capitalism endangers faculty autonomy and scholarly integrity, despite their own portraits of commercialization’s role in perpetuating the hierarchies and privileges the text bemoans. Nonetheless, despite minor disagreements (did I mention that heterosexual privilege functions largely as an add-on?), this book offers compelling ideas worthy of serious consideration.

Susan Talburt is director of the Women’s Studies Institute at Georgia State University.

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