Academia: After Diversity?

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

One of the most frustrating things for me in the procedural world of higher education in the United States in the last decade has been that administrative preparations for the expected overturn of the Supreme Court’s ruling in University of California v. Bakke have not taken place in any remotely transparent or public way except in large public university systems that have been involved in state-level jurisprudence as a result of state-level bans on race-conscious admissions.

Elsewhere, college and university leaders have continued with default rhetoric about the importance of diversity that they were left with by the terms of Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke. Law professor Richard Thompson Ford’s summary of the history of the case and how it forced leaders into higher education into a narrow space of policy and rhetoric in defending their admissions policies is useful understanding how we got to this point. Powell left higher education (and eventually by extension many other civic and business organizations) arguing that diversity was good for their own missions, their own internal cultures or productivity, and was therefore something they could legitimately prefer in making selective decisions about who to admit, hire or promote. Whether those preferences changed the wider society in a positive way became, for the most part, something to avoid.

Ford points out something that most of us who keep an eye on these issues have known for a long time: that the Supreme Court that took shape in the 2010s, especially after Trump’s appointments, was virtually guaranteed to strike down any basis for race-conscious admissions or similar practices in hiring and promotion, including a preference for “diversity”. That time is no longer “at some point in the future”, it’s “in the coming year”. But we haven’t been talking at all about that in the public culture of higher education, whether inside institutions or across them, in large part because legal advisors believe that such conversations might turn into evidence for future lawsuits.

As a result, what’s been going on is that handbooks are being revised, human resources departments are shifting their language, statements about diversity are relentlessly widening and abstracting what the term refers to, and admissions offices in highly selective institutions are becoming more secretive than ever while off-loading the use of tests and other data that might make serve as evidence of some form of internal preference on racial, gender, or other lines that harken back to the sociopolitical objectives of affirmative action pre-Bakke. That’s fundamentally what the conceptual framework of “holistic” admissions has been about, to articulate an idea that a selective institution has absolutely no fixed goals or objectives with external sociological implications, only that it is trying to find a class whose skills, interests, talents, goals and character will most appropriately suit the institution’s mission and culture.

Because all of that preparation is taking place in managerial, technical and resolutely confidential settings, directed as much by legal counsel as it is by presidents or chief academic officers, there’s been no chance to really prepare wider communities for what is likely to be a traumatic shock when the ruling comes or to really convene a conversation about why people are attached to diversity—and who understands that even now as a proxy for the justice-seeking aspirations of the older paradigm of affirmative action. This is Ford’s point as well—in bowing to Bakke, and studiously following advice to avoid any invocation of affirmative action’s social vision, higher education’s leadership stifled a public conversation that remains as urgent as ever.

I’ll add one element to Ford’s critique. One of the possible conversations that got stifled in the process that has only recently found ways to bubble up around the edges might be, “Well, why did we think that affirmative action in the older sense might have changed society for the better and lead to some greater equity?” The answer has always been a bit different whether we were talking higher education in general or talking about highly selective elite privates in particular. If we are talking all of higher education circa 1978, when Bakke was decided, the answer was fairly plain. If underrepresented racial minorities enrolled in large public university systems at numbers matching or exceeding their demographic share in various parts of the United States, that would (at least potentially) change their representation in higher-paying fields of employment that required that educational credential which would in turn erode the correlation between structural poverty and race.

As Ford observes, switching to “diversity” aligned with the way that neoliberalism defined human capital. Your inclusion in a university community—or later, a workplace—meant that your life experience added value to the university or workplace but without any commitment to what that might mean in terms of a wider social transformation, except perhaps that the validation provided by seeing diversity of this kind might further ostracize racial prejudice as a kind of “bad thought”. I don’t mean to make light of that achievement, which I think has been real. When I watch television that has commercials, I occasionally remind myself of how astonishing and great it is to see advertisements for detergent and shampoo and Hamburger Helper that feature men doing the laundry, same-sex couples setting the table, and people of all races. Just as it is important that universities are diverse in the same sense—and thus I do appreciate all those behind-the-scenes changes that I think are consciously intended to try and preserve the ability of private colleges and universities to assemble classes that are “diverse” in the current sense.

That diversity in large public universities may still have been sociologically transformative, though less so perhaps simply because public universities have been so badly undercut by underfunding, as well as in some states by more rigid bans on race-conscious admissions than what Bakke and later federal rulings allow. But when you look at elite selective universities and colleges, there’s always been a second proposition about what affirmative action—or “diversity”—might lead to, and that’s a transformation in the sociological composition of the national elite: the people who make political decisions, who lead civic institutions, who control the public sphere, who are the visible makers of popular culture.

That’s a doubly obscured conversation in higher education. Not only have leaders felt that talking about a deliberate ambition to achieve social transformation has been off-limits since 1978, but just about everybody in higher education has become uncomfortable with the idea of training an elite even while it’s remained more or less true that they still do. The institutions that don’t maintain that as a goal are uncomfortable mostly about talking about what they are doing instead (not the least because it became a commonplace objective among leaders at many universities and colleges to move up the hierarchy and become ‘world-class’, which usually meant ‘start having a share of the work of producing an elite’) and the institutions that really do still maintain a commitment to doing so found it increasingly awkward to speak in that language. Awkward within the institution, because both students and faculty were uncomfortable with so much of what that goal assumed and exalted, and awkward outside of it, because the resentments of people left behind by credentialism generally were dramatically intensified when they thought about people who seemed like elites.

So just as “diversity” replaced “affirmative action”, so too did we push aside a lot of the discourse surrounding elites to favor concepts like “leadership”, “ethical intelligence”, “innovators”, “achievers”, and so on. When you look at elite selectives and what they celebrate about their graduates, though, it’s still plain that what they look to as success stories are people who rise to pre-eminence within fields or institutions that are generally seen as meritocratic—and they celebrate especially where diversity and leadership align in the thought that this is some form of social transformation for the better.

Which it is! But the lack of a public conversation inside the academy about all of this history—and about the bleak legal future hurtling towards us—has kept us from thinking about other ways to transform what we do and how we do it that would not just amount to legal counsel quietly hardening up the defenses. Most signally, we ought to at least talk about the entire idea of selectivity that is the basic weak point of the entire system.

Right now, what both selective elites and large public systems maintain is that they’ve got to have students who are qualified to do the work that the program of instruction requires. That generally means a particular set of academic preparations—that students need to write to a standard, do math to a standard, read to a standard, that is understood as “college-level”. Whether it’s UC Berkeley or Princeton, the admissions process gets described at its most elemental as evaluating whether an applicant has that preparation, and if they don’t, whether they’re plausibly within reach of achieving it with some support from the institution rapidly enough to complete a course of study within four years to the standard defined by the faculty and administration.

Holistic admissions in highly selective institutions adds another layer, since many of the applicants meet the standard of being able to do the work, which is whether the applicant has some life experience, some particular skill or talent, some kind of perspective or outlook, or anything else that might enhance the overall community and the learning experiences of other students, generally by virtue of its individual distinctiveness. That isn’t really talked about in the public life of those institutions either (e.g., Admissions decides what is valued mostly on its own, guided by leadership, perhaps in confidential consultation with other stakeholders).

Whatever the Court decides, though, some of this landscape inevitably remains in our control. Right now the hardening of the institutional defenses is focused on making our decisions about admissions and hiring even more resolutely private, even harder to measure against external data, and even vaguer in how we imagine the value of the particular heterogeneity that individuals bring to our work. I understand why that seems like an effective strategy to counter the Court’s probable rulings—it’s hard to imagine that the Court is going to extensively intervene in the decision-making processes of private institutions. But we could be talking at the other end of things, which is about how we manifest “selectivity” and define it against curricular structures and goals that many faculty take to be immovable and natural objects (despite the historical fact of their mobility and artificialness).

Do students have to write to a particular defined standard or have a prior set of mathematical skills? What if we widened the range of starting points and changed accordingly our expectations for end points, and did so consciously as a way to think about how we might put our resources and skills into a renewed commitment to social transformation? Is the Court going to tell Princeton University what their curricular goals have to be? What their basic academic standards have to be? What gets someone an “A” in a course?

I’m not sure where that conversation should go, and I understand very well why some idea of standards and selectivity remains very important to the entire concept of “higher” education. But I think it’s a conversation we can have. Maybe we should think about social transformation less in terms of changing who gets employed and more in terms of our overly narrow assumptions about what qualifications people must have to do a lot of work and about the perceived necessity to have those qualifications completed by the age of 22. There might be other ways to keep doing what many of us believe in when it comes to playing our part in changing the world that we’re not fully discussing because people who think too specifically about building legal defenses think that any discussion is a source of liability and vulnerability.