Thanks in part to folks like Roger Clegg and his Orwellian Center for Equal Opportunity, who routinely lodge complaints with the U.S. Justice Department about programs that serve minorities, the issue of minority recruitment has been transformed into talk about "diversity initiatives".
A Chronicle of Higher Education article (you need a subscription to read the full article) discusses the impact of this shift. Colleges and universities across the U.S. are changing the admission criteria for scholarship and summer programs previously designated for minority students. The revised programs are said to address diversity. The result is that fewer minority students are being served.
Just last week, the State University of New York System's Board of Trustees voted unanimously to expand the eligibility criteria for a $6.2-million fellowship program and a $649,000 scholarship program that had been restricted to black, Hispanic, and American Indian students. And officials of the Southern Illinois University system sought faculty input on a plan to change the eligibility criteria for three minority fellowship programs in response to the threat of a lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department.
Many of the programs have shifted their focus from increasing minority access to education to serving the broader and more abstract goal of promoting campus diversity. Many have taken in sizable numbers of white or Asian-American students without expanding in overall size. As a result, they are serving fewer students from the minority groups that they previously had sought to help — a development that dismays some minority advocates, as well as people engaged in efforts to diversify certain professional fields.
Some colleges are even altering their administrative structures, renaming offices that deal with minority issues as diversity or multicultural offices. The Chronicle reports that many of the colleges who've abandoned their commitment to serving minorities (the Chronicle calls it "opening up programs") have resorted to new formulations of the meaning of "underrepresented" groups to include first-generation and/or low-income students. For example,
The University of Delaware's provost, Daniel Rich, says his institution has changed a scholarship program so that, rather than being reserved for members of racial or ethnic minority groups, it is now available to students who are part of the first generation of their family to attend college; who have been through "challenging social, economic, educational, cultural, or other life circumstances"; or who are deemed financially needy based on federal financial-aid criteria. Mr. Rich reports that about 30 percent of the students nominated for scholarships last year were white, and says "the new program is better because it attracts more nominations and supports more students from more diverse backgrounds."
I would have met several of these criteria when I was a student (I am a white woman from a blue-collar family). I like the idea of programs intended to help first-generation or low-income students. But I don't like this zero-sum game - if we're going to "open" our programs and change criteria, then we have to resign ourselves to serving fewer minority students.
Some will argue that the first-generation and low-income criteria will still include the minority students most in need of the programs; minority students with college-educated parents or from wealthier families don't need such help. I wonder about this. I think the very existence of programs that explicitly say they are designed to recruit minority students encourages minority students to apply. In addition, while there is overlap between the categories "minority" and "first-generation" or "low-income', each group has different kinds of needs. We need programs to address those needs, which go beyond financial aid. In some cases, modified programs take this issue into account:
The Tri-Co Summer Institute, a one-week orientation program for incoming freshmen jointly offered by Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges, took in its first cohort of white students last summer. It not only expanded from about 65 students to about 85, but also ended up altering the activities related to its focus: discussing issues related to race, gender, and class...Just as in past years, the program conducted workshops in which students broke off into small, segregated groups that discussed what their particular racial or ethnic identity meant to them, and then reported back to other participants. For the first time, however, there were white students on hand to break off and share their own experiences before joining the broader discussion. "It was really interesting to watch the white group this year. A lot of people had never talked about 'whiteness,' or what that term means to them," says Deluwara Ahmed, a Bryn Mawr sophomore of Bangladeshi descent who took part in the program two summers ago and helped run it this last time around.
Note that this program also expanded in size, lessening the chance that fewer minority students would be served.
Engineering and science definitely need more diversity. They need white women and minority women and men. They need to provide financial assistance to low-income students. But the shift from "minority" to "diversity" takes the pressure off institutions to recruit and retain minority students. If our colleges and universities are going to abandon their programs that support minority students, then they need to step up their efforts in other areas. They need to develop targeted recruiting programs that go into minority communities. They need to get serious about dismantling white privilege. They need to institute change in cultures that implicitly define engineers as white and male. They need to educate the white males on how not to be discriminatory and drive women and minorities away. They need to stop denigrating minority students who gather to support each other as "self-segregating". They need to do all these things in addition to providing targeted minority programs.
Some programs that seek to recruit more women to science and engineering are already under similar assault. It takes a special twist of the brain to assert that programs for women in engineering are discriminatory. As I've always said, we already have a Men in Engineering Program. It's called The College of Engineering. By coincidence, that's also the same as the Whites in Engineering Program!
Roger Clegg and his ilk say they do not seek outcomes such as serving fewer minority students or shutting down programs altogether. They say they are all for diversity! They would be more believable if they were agitating for development of new programs to recruit first-generation or low-income students, rather than attacking existing programs for minorities. Denying the very need for minority-focused programs says, in effect, our institutions are fine just as they are. We've got plenty of diversity already! No need for special programs! Let every program and scholarship be for everyone! Don't be exclusive! Just look at merit, not race! Let our current hordes of minority students compete on equal footing with whites so they won't carry the scourge of affirmative action that obscures their merit!
How disingenuous. When we reach the happy day when racism and sexism are no more, I will be the first in line to argue for making all programs open to competition from everyone. Roger Clegg claims programs for women and minorities are sexist and racist. He wants us to treat everyone "the same". But treating everyone "the same" ignores the incredible culture-wide bias that privileges white and male. Which, of course, is exactly what Roger Clegg wants us to do.
10:03:55 AM 
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