Abstract
I’ve said elsewhere that diversity is a true hallmark of American higher education (Strayhorn, 2008, p. 501), but the enormity of this statement can be missed or ignored if one is unfamiliar with the scope of higher education internationally and the complexion of the North American “system” of higher education, which itself is a misnomer since there’s no true system of postsecondary education in this country due to the lack of a federal authority for higher education (e.g., a ministry of education), a national university, and national standards or exams beyond K–12 education. Still, the richness of American higher education is reflected in the diversity of its institutions and students. There are more than 4,300 colleges and universities in this country (composed of approximately 2,000 community colleges, 600 comprehensive universities, and 260 research universities), compared with over 1,000 universities in China and just about 40 in Ireland.
The complexity of the North American system is further illustrated by the diversity among students. Today, approximately 19 million students are enrolled in postsecondary education, including majority women, a significant number of underrepresented minority students, and approximately 30% first-generation students. Other national estimates suggest that the U.S. college student population includes 10% to 20% gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) students (Evans, 2001; Rankin, 2006) and rapidly growing numbers of international students, veterans, and students living with disabilities. Taken together, these data clearly demonstrate the structural diversity that characterizes American higher education.
Structural diversity, which refers to the demographic composition of the student body (Strayhorn, 2010a), is just one way of discussing the pluralism that distinguishes higher education in the United States from that of its global peers. Diversity can also be explored through legal perspectives, policy (and politics) debates, and educational pipeline issues such as access and equity. And, in many ways, that’s exactly what Stulberg and Weinberg offer in their edited volume, titled Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach. They mention at least two explicit purposes in the Introduction: (a) “to capture under one cover a wide range of critical issues that comprise the current discourse on diversity in higher education” (p. 1) and (b) “[to] provide the reader with a broader perspective on diversity, one that goes beyond the more traditional conceptualizations of diversity (p. 4). Before assessing the extent to which they achieve these objectives, I offer a review of the book’s form and content.
The 290-page book consists of 20 substantive chapters organized into four major sections. Section I (“The K–12 Pipeline: Impacts on Educational Equity”) consists of three chapters focusing on ethnic and social class disparities, the K–12 pipeline for Blacks and Latinos, and educational equity and testing in K–12 contexts. To help readers mine the topic of diversity, the editors provide definitions in the Introduction to clarify the meaning and purpose of various terms and key concepts that relate to the book’s focus. In Chapter 1, Meredith Phillips analyzes data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine the relationship between K–12 academic skills and postsecondary student outcomes such as college application, attendance, and completion. She concludes, “Ethnic and social class disparities in academic skills are large when students finish high school. These disparities, even when measured as early as the end of eighth grade, have important consequences for students’ likelihood of applying to, attending, and completing college” (p. 20). And although she argues that test score and grade differences explain the entire Black–White gap in college outcomes, there’s still much debate about this topic and fairly consistent evidence that grades and scores are not objective, static measures of student performance but, rather, functions of factors that lie outside the direct control of students and parents (e.g., teacher preferences, school resources).
Section II (“The Diversity Imperative: Postsecondary Institutional and Legal Ramifications”) turns to diversity debates, with four chapters relating to admissions debates, elite admissions, rationales for diversity, and the role of race in diversity. For instance, Chapter 4 recalls an important but all-too-often forgotten fact that diversity has not always been linked to race. To be sure, the concept of diversity is not new to education, and efforts to ensure (or limit) diversity are all but novel. In the early 20th century, a menagerie of tactics was employed to restrict “geographic diversity” (p. 56), referring to ways to control the number of Jewish students admitted to college. By the 1960s, with the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, many admissions officials adopted race-based affirmative action as a way of increasing the number of racial/ethnic minorities, especially Blacks, on campus. In this chapter, Lisa Stulberg and Anthony Chen deftly demonstrate how the notion of diversity has changed over time to become inextricably linked to high-stakes debates about selectivity and merit—simply put, diversity is now what good schools do!
As another example, in Chapter 6, Mitchell Chang and Maria Ledesma summarize the diversity rationale that is largely attributed to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. In the 1978 Bakke case, Powell opined that race could be used as one of many factors to achieve the benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body. His rationale led to the conclusion that “student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions” (p. 74). Using information from the recent “Michigan cases” (i.e., Grutter and Gratz), the authors point out that the Court upheld Powell’s rationale in 2003. Despite the gravity of Powell’s opinion, Chang and Ledesma interrogate the legal logic behind the diversity rationale and expose the fact that the Court’s decision offers little to no guidance to educators to achieve the benefits of diversity but, rather, seems to rest upon what the authors call “magical thinking,” implying that the benefits of diversity may arise from unplanned, unstructured casual encounters. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we know anything at all from social science, we know that it is necessary to create productive educational environments that offer meaningful opportunities for students to engage one another purposefully if we’re to achieve the benefits that diversity provides. The authors make this point, although it would have been helpful to include a few ideas about how this might be done.
Understanding progress and continuing challenges to diversity in American higher education is the focus of Section III and it’s the longest section in the volume, composed of eight chapters. Chapter topics range from trends in educating minority students to diversifying university faculty, from Asian American students to GLBT students, from gender equity to conservative college students, to name a few. For instance, in Chapter 11, Darryl Smith engages a topic about which she has written extensively: faculty diversity. Here she focuses directly on faculty diversity in terms of race/ethnicity and gender, rather than the full spectrum of demographic factors and social identities that distinguish one faculty member from another. Drawing on research and a few hypothetical anecdotes, Smith identifies prevailing myths, beliefs, and practices that pose as problems to our pursuit of faculty diversity. These include, but are not limited to, prevailing (yet debunked) myths (e.g., the limited availability of minority candidates) and academic elitism (i.e., using institutional prestige as merit). The chapter closes with a helpful set of practices that hold promise for increasing faculty diversity, such as developing strong, involved leadership, implementing carefully constructed job descriptions, and socializing underrepresented minorities and/or women through college.
The final section is rightly titled “Future Implications for Diversity: Practice, Policy, and the Law.” Five chapters were placed in this section addressing historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), women’s colleges, financial aid, and faculty diversity. For example, Sarah Willie-LeBreton (Chapter 16) offers a brief history identifying the contributions of Oberlin College to the education of Blacks prior to the mid-1800s, the pivotal role that the Second Morrill Act of 1890 played in the establishment of Black colleges, and how the 1896 Plessy decision upheld “separate but equal” policies. It was not until the 1954 Brown decision that separate educational facilities were ruled unequal and, thus, illegal, which ushered in a new era of desegregation and racial equality in education. Willie-LeBreton then casts a critical gaze on the ways in which HBCUs are negatively affected by “post-racial” policies and mandates that force HBCUs “to comply with standards of racial equality [i.e., by enrolling White students] in order to receive much-needed government funding” (p. 215), although it is difficult for HBCUs to do so, given their fiscal challenges, racist (and erroneous) reports about their inferiority (Jencks & Reisman, 1967), and their long-standing reputations as “Black colleges,” which make them less attractive options for some White students (Strayhorn, 2010b). Toward the end of the chapter, the author toys with the notions of post-racial and post-racism fantasy as she considers the precarious future of HBCUs. Her point seems to hang midair, and she fails to come down hard on what I know is without question—that the past contributions of HBCUs to society are undeniable and that their future role must be assured.
In closing, I offer several other comments about the book. Generally speaking, the book is an important addition to the growing number of recent texts on diversity in higher education. The book is fairly well organized, easy to follow, and written in a way that makes it accessible to a wide range of audiences. As a diversity scholar, I also appreciate the bank of references to empirical scholarship on the educational benefits of diversity; this feature adds to the currency and usefulness of the volume. In my experience, some book authors purport to focus on diversity in American higher education when, in reality, they limit the scope of their work to racial/ethnic diversity only. Thankfully, Stulberg and Weinberg avoid this misstep by devoting considerable space to other diversity types such as social identities (e.g., GLBT students, faculty, staff), social locations (e.g., social class), legal issues, and institutional types (e.g., HBCUs). Indeed, these additions make the volume “a more comprehensive approach” or treatment of the subject than some previous texts.
The book is likely to be useful to a number of constituent groups. For instance, faculty members who teach undergraduate and graduate courses on diversity might use the text to generate discussion of diversity-related topics, legal issues in education, or the historic mission of HBCUs and women’s colleges. Campus administrators who manage diversity (Dancy, 2010) may find the authors’ explanations of key concepts, reviews of legal precedents, and recommendations for achieving the educational benefits of diversity useful in their work with students. Policy makers may consult the information in particular chapters (e.g., Chapters 4–7) when establishing new or revising existing policies such as the use of race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Although far from exhaustive, the book makes a worthwhile addition to our collective knowledge about Diversity in American Higher Education.