Taking Stock Together:
Diversity and Change in New England Colleges and Universities
by Grant M. Ingle
(Click here for a PDF version of this article.)
As we move further into the 21st century, college campuses continue to modify the way they approach diversity issues. Some of these modifications are efforts to refine traditional approaches to diversity while others reflect more fundamental shifts in assumptions about how to make campuses more inclusive learning and working environments. These changes reflect student demographics; alterations in the legal landscape of affirmative admissions; shifts in institutional vision and values; efforts to create competitive advantage outlined in “business cases” highlighting diversity; and reformulated curricula which place increased emphasis on enhanced sophistication about diversity for all students.
Over the past two years I have had the opportunity to meet with staff and faculty from a number of New England campuses to discuss the status of their local diversity efforts. These contacts grew out of my participation for two years in NERCHE’s Multicultural Affairs Think Tank, as well as through consulting relationships with campuses and from coaching senior administrators. What resulted was not a formal study of the campuses but rather my impressions – as an organizational psychologist and practitioner - about how these campuses are defining diversity and what they are doing to address diversity issues.
In my experience, approaches to diversity range widely across campuses, with dramatic differences in the language of diversity, whom “diversity” includes, who is responsible for addressing diversity, and what change models are in use. On one end of the spectrum are nearly all-white campuses with few if any diversity programs and minimal inclusion of diversity issues and topics within their curricula. On the other end are more diverse campuses which have been refining their programmatic and curricular approaches for nearly four decades. Most campuses are somewhere in between, and all have administrators, staff, faculty and students who are concerned about issues of diversity but are often unsure if their campus is utilizing the best strategies.
When looking at campus diversity strategies on individual campuses it is typical to find distinct programmatic approaches to diversity operating simultaneously, though they are located in different parts of the campus organization: affirmative action and equal opportunity approaches based on a compliance model; recruitment and retention activities including cultural and social support; efforts to incorporate diversity into the curriculum; training and development activities aimed at employees, and so on. A few campuses have found ways to integrate these approaches, but more often the staff and faculty responsible for these approaches to campus diversity operate in independent silos, aware of each other’s activities but rarely collaborating. What is particularly striking is how the mix of these disciplinary and professional differences flavors the approach to diversity for particular campuses, especially when one of these perspectives predominates. For example, on some campuses, when the person responsible for diversity initiatives also serves as the AA/EO compliance officer for the campus, it shouldn’t be surprising that diversity tends to be framed as a compliance issue, with an emphasis on demographic numbers rather than climate assessments. On other campuses where a student affairs approach predominates, campus diversity efforts consist largely of recruitment activities combined with cultural and academic support programs aimed at students of color and perhaps other groups as well.
In New England, the regional discussion of diversity issues among campuses seems to mirror the disparate organizational and professional structures within campuses related to diversity issues. AA/EO officers meet in their own regional forums, as do student affairs professionals. Campus climate researchers hold their own regional meetings, as do human resource and training and development groups. Similarly, on the academic side there is an array of regional forums, including those concerned with diversity topics such as race,
gender, and class and others centered on teaching and learning from a faculty development or teaching improvement perspective. While comprehensive campus diversity initiatives need to incorporate all these perspectives, it is rare for these organizational and professional areas to be bridged in a fashion which directly addresses larger issues of planning, strategy and management regarding campus diversity initiatives. When the different organizational and professional areas of activity do intersect, the conversation can be
challenging. For example, I’ve participated in two exchanges between campus climate researchers and representatives of regional campus AA/EO offices in recent years. Both professional groups listened politely to each other, but the gulf in their basic assumptions and terminology was so great that meaningful communication between these two potentially complementary campus groups wasn’t really possible.
This disciplinary and professional compartmentalization clearly works against campuses developing and sharing more integrated perspectives about their approaches to diversity, both internally and externally. One consequence of this compartmentalization is that it’s not uncommon to find two or even three areas of a campus which represent themselves as the center of campus diversity efforts. It is also possible to find campuses within walking distance of one another which are at the same time decades apart in terms of how they look at diversity and the programs and policies to support it. What is especially unfortunate about this situation is that many campuses now launching campus-wide diversity initiatives are doing so without the benefit of learning directly about the experiences of other, similar campuses. As a result, campuses often unwittingly and painfully repeat the mistakes of peer campuses which have already been down a similar path, perhaps a decade or more previously.
If campuses would share more about their experiences with diversity initiatives with their regional peers, they could develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems - in short, a shared practice related to improving how diversity is addressed. What follows are seven areas where thoughtful inter-campus exchange could be of great practical benefit by exposing campuses to new perspectives regarding campus diversity, the pitfalls experienced by their peers, and promising practices which are emerging in the region:
- Sharpening the terminology of campus diversity
- Appreciating the current reframing of the context for diversity initiatives.
- Critical examination of the change models underlying campus diversity initiatives.
- Greater awareness of the subtleties involved in the upward migration of diversity efforts.
- Increased appreciation for the level of planning and time commitment necessary for a diversity initiative
- Growing sophistication about what constitutes a diversity intervention.
- Appreciating the importance of symbolic action by leadership.
Sharpening the terminology of campus diversity. Although rarely acknowledged or discussed, campus definitions of diversity and related terminology are highly “campus-centric.” So when members of different campuses meet about diversity, they often use the same terminology although the meanings may diverge dramatically. On a number of campuses, for instance, it is clear that “diversity” refers only to racial diversity. Other campuses define diversity in a way which parallels the protected classes listed in their non-discrimination statements such as race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, and sexual orientation. A quick search of diversity definitions found on institutional websites, however, reveals that a growing number of campuses have broadly inclusive definitions of diversity similar to those used in more progressive sectors of the corporate world. On these campuses, the list of elements of diversity has grown to include other social and cultural identities such as organizational role (e.g., faculty member, student, custodian, and professional staff member), regional background, language group, work background, socio-economic status or social class, family responsibilities, marital status, military experience, parental status, education, and so on. Some campuses have taken a further step, adding a category of individual diversity, referring to elements of diversity such as cognitive style, personality type, learning style, and teaching style. Related terms such as “multicultural” have a similar range of meanings, from narrowly referring to only people of color to inclusion of all oppressed groups to more literal definitions of “multiple cultures.”
Definitions can also vary considerably within the same campus. Despite a broadly inclusive administrative definition of diversity, external consultants conducting a diversity audit at one large public campus found that while students and staff shared this inclusive definition, the faculty understood diversity as a synonym for race alone. Questions about the source of faculty conceptions about diversity became clearer when the audit revealed that this campus was sending mixed messages about diversity. Its espoused definitions of diversity were much more inclusive than its definitions in-use. Thus, almost all diversity programs within academic affairs were limited to students of color, and academic affairs publications, while referring to expanded definitions of diversity, featured photographs that illustrated racial diversity only.
It is important that diversity definitions (though they may differ across institutions) be applied deliberately and explicitly, and that that they be shared on an individual campus. Definitions of diversity and how they are enacted send important messages to students, faculty and staff about what is meant by diversity, who is included (and not), and what is expected. To illustrate, administrators on one campus continued to use the term “multicultural” in its broadest sense, assuming everyone on campus shared this sense of the word. The student newspaper, however, for years had included a weekly “Multicultural Affairs Page” which was explicitly limited to news about students of color, and this definition became the operative one for undergraduates. Unable to alter undergraduate understanding of the term “multicultural,” this campus ultimately stopped using the term and chose instead to emphasize the triad of community, diversity and social justice. Similarly, administrators on another campus issued directives to include white students in diversity programming which failed because the programming was coordinated by a “multicultural center.” This multicultural center had historically provided social and cultural support to students of color exclusively, and white students on the campus didn’t see the center as offering anything appropriate for them. In time, this campus opened a second “diversity center” to provide diversity programming to all students.
Fortunately, campuses are now becoming more sophisticated about their use of diversity terminology, its implications and how different segments of the campus understand it. A smaller but increasing number is also becoming aware of the important symbolic differences between espoused definitions of diversity and definitions in use, while taking steps to close this gap.
Appreciating the current reframing of the context for diversity initiatives. When campus diversity efforts first got underway in the 1960s and 1970s, nearly all of the focus was upon campus programs serving under-represented groups, and many of these “recruitment and retention” programs continue in the same vein today under the same assumptions. To illustrate, when asked by a corporate CEO in 2005 about what his engineering school was doing about diversity, a dean proudly outlined his school’s minority engineering program which recruited students of color and provided academic support. The CEO listened politely, and then asked the dean about the diversity programs for all students, and majority white students in particular. The dean didn’t have an answer. The CEO explained that his priority was hiring engineering graduates who were not only bright and well-trained but who could also function well in an increasingly diverse work and business environment.
While the recruitment and retention program mode has continued over the years, newer approaches have been evolving as the concept of campus climate has gained more currency. While traditional recruitment and retention programs focus entirely upon underrepresented program recipients and their financial, academic and cultural support, questions have arisen more recently about the academic and workplace environments in which members of under-represented groups are recruited and expected to thrive (see Ibarra, 2001). The result of this line of thinking and research is to place increasing emphasis on “climate” and “culture” created by the behavior of majority populations on campus towards each other and under-represented groups. Examining campus climate as a factor affecting the recruitment and retention of members of under-represented groups has also allowed campuses to move beyond demographic questions of how many thrive or leave toward an exploration of why they thrive or leave. In addition, competent campus climate assessments have also created the opportunity for finer resolution of campus data so that these questions can be explored not only for the entire campus, but also at the level of schools, colleges, administrative divisions and even individual departments. As a result, campuses are able to improve on the broad initiatives of the past by fine-tuning their diversity initiatives to encourage implementation of local initiatives tied to the specific strengths and weaknesses of individual campus departments. Furthermore, timely reassessment provides a needed and invaluable opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of those local initiatives.
Critical examination of the change models underlying campus diversity initiatives. A change model at its simplest provides the overall logic and structure by which a campus moves forward with programs and policies to accomplish its diversity goals. Unfortunately, there are many campuses that have no explicit change model connecting their diversity efforts to desired ends. Lacking a change model, the diversity initiatives of these campuses tend to consist of periodic exercises to generate lists of their existing diversity programs and activities, as if to document and rationalize how much the campus is already doing. The assumption is that these programs and activities are supporting, enhancing or even increasing diversity and understanding of it, but evaluation of the effectiveness of these program and policy efforts is either minimal or non-existent. Programmatic examples include of “recruitment and retention” efforts, required diversity courses within the curriculum, living and learning arrangements such as theme housing and specialized cultural and academic support programs. In the best cases, the number of under-represented students, faculty and staff are periodically re-examined for increases and decreases, but there is no institutional research done to determine the factors contributing to the increase or decrease in their numbers. On these campuses, once programs are created, they become part of the landscape and may continue long after the issues they were designed to address have changed significantly and new issues and needs have surfaced.
At present, there seem to be two general categories of change models operating on New England campuses. In the first category, campuses have phased in program evaluations in order to have a better idea of which diversity programs and activities are accomplishing their purposes and which are not. Though a step in the right direction, this approach typically is not based on valid information about what larger diversity issues and shortcomings need to be addressed by a campus in the first place. Another downside is the tendency for such program evaluation to be limited to the small number of explicit diversity programs, leaving unexamined the possible contributions to campus diversity efforts of the much larger number of academic and administrative departments comprising the campus.
A second and increasingly popular approach to diversity change models features a process of
(1) assessment, (2) formulation and implementation of action plans, and (3) reassessment to ensure that efforts are moving the campus in desired directions. In the best instances, this change process becomes an ongoing cycle of assessment-intervention-reassessment which recurs every two to three years. There are many benefits to an approach in which a campus diversity initiative is predicated on a serious and pragmatic research effort. The initial assessment sets benchmarks against which the campus can measure its progress in the future. Furthermore, these initial assessments often provide important data about diversity issues which challenge long-held campus assumptions about existing diversity programs. Knowing that a reassessment will occur in the near future helps to focus the efforts within a campus diversity initiative and give it more persistence over time. Assessments, if planned thoughtfully, can also utilize tools such as climate surveys already developed by other campuses, saving time and effort and also allowing for comparisons of assessment results with peer campuses. And finally, if done competently, timely reassessment will reveal which action steps are working and which are not, allowing the campus to discontinue unproductive efforts and bolster others.
Greater awareness of the subtleties involved in the upward migration of diversity efforts. On most campuses, responsibility for diversity concerns and programs other than AA/EO compliance generally first took shape in student affairs, reflecting the sense that issues of diversity were primarily student issues. On many campuses, diversity efforts still remain located in the student affairs divisions. Over the past 25 years, however, overall responsibility for campus diversity efforts has been shifting upward in campus organizations. This movement is in part (or in sum) to persons and offices located in either the president’s or provost’s office, reflecting the more realistic assumption that diversity is a campus-wide concern, affecting staff and faculty as well as students.
Campuses have also sought to highlight campus diversity efforts and ensure better coordination by locating them in an office overseen by a senior administrator. In recent years, this upward relocation of campus diversity efforts has been coupled with the appointment of “chief diversity officers” and similarly named positions. Unfortunately, the identification of one person to be responsible for campus diversity efforts often chafes against simultaneous campus efforts to develop a more inclusive definition of diversity. When diversity was only about race and gender, a person of color or, better, a female of color would be the ideal symbolic candidate for such a position. With an expanded definition of diversity, however, it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible to find a candidate who speaks to all the categories of diversity identified by a campus. Similarly, the identification of a single person responsible for campus diversity can also send another unfortunate symbolic message: that no one else needs to attend to diversity now that a chief diversity officer has been appointed to take on this area.
Campuses are now creatively circumventing these conundrums by shifting responsibility for coordinating campus diversity efforts away from a solitary chief diversity officer to a diverse team which this person assembles to plan and coordinate the campus diversity initiative. This approach places less emphasis on the specific social and cultural identity of the chief diversity officer, and instead emphasizes the collective diversity of the team members and their ability to work together. Typically such diversity teams or coordinating groups are composed of individuals chosen because of their skills and expertise, their cultural competency, their familiarity with diversity issues, their leadership capability, their specific social and cultural identity and their role identity on the campus.
Increased appreciation for the level of planning and time commitment necessary for a diversity initiative. While some campuses are still appointing diversity committees and expecting them to produce implementation-ready diversity recommendations within a semester, an increasing number of campuses are building in initial planning phases to determine how their diversity initiative will proceed, and with whom. In some cases, this involves the campus diversity committee first proposing a plan of how their work will proceed prior to launching into it. In assessment-intervention-reassessment change models, the emphasis is upon a planning phase sufficient to work though the details of the larger diversity initiative so that it can move forward as smoothly as possible once it actually starts. Oftentimes the planning phase itself may require one or two (possibly more) academic years to complete. While part of this time is used for actual planning, significant time is also spent developing “buy-in” for all campus constituencies, establishing realistic expectations and setting aside required budgetary, staffing and other resources required to carry out a successful initiative.
Table 1 lays out the timeline for a typical assessment-based diversity initiative.
|
|||||||||||||||
Experience has shown repeatedly that the time interval between the initial assessment and the reassessment should be two but not more than three years. It is usually considered good practice to conduct a diversity assessment in the spring semester so that participants can reflect on their experiences of the previous academic year. Furthermore, methodological rigor argues for a reassessment conducted at the same time of year as the initial one. If thoughtful action plans are implemented within a year of the initial assessment, it will generally take another year for their effects to be felt, suggesting a reassessment scheduled two years after the initial assessment. It is possible to conduct the reassessment three years after the initial assessment, but it may be difficult to keep up the momentum of the diversity initiative over that time span, especially when other, unforeseen, emergent issues, crises or other major events are likely to distract members of the campus from the longer-term work of the diversity initiative.
The need to develop action plans and implement them within a year of the initial assessment clearly requires careful planning to assure that the initiative continues to move forward on a workable timeline. Initial assessment data will need to be quickly but thoughtfully disseminated to the campus. Local teams at the divisional, school and college and even departmental level need to be prepared in advance to examine this data, and then develop and implement appropriate action steps. In addition, there is the question of resources to implement needed action steps, questions which need answers prior to teams doing their work. Will departments be expected to fund their own action steps or will there be full or partial central funding available to support local efforts?
Growing sophistication about what constitutes a diversity intervention. Based on my experiences with campus diversity assessments and the experiences of my colleagues, these assessments, if done well, will invariably reveal dynamics which no one would have predicted because the local assumptions about underlying diversity issues had never been tested previously. One campus which had expected to find high levels of racial harassment of students found high levels of sexual harassment affecting women students of all races. Another campus which suspected that advising for students of color was lacking found that advising for all undergraduates was poor, but made worse for students of color because of culturally insensitive advisors. And a third campus expected to see high levels of dissatisfaction from students of color regarding administrative offices such as the financial aid, registrar’s and the bursar’s offices. The results revealed this dissatisfaction but also demonstrated strong dissatisfaction regarding all three offices from students
generally. Further analysis revealed that students with large financial aid awards (which included students of color and working class white students) had worse experiences largely because they had many more interactions each semester than other students with these user-unfriendly offices. The lesson was that poor administrative services have a proportional effect: the more one uses them, the worse the experience will be. As seen in these examples, the interventions required to improve the experiences of students of color may often involve also improving the experiences for all students. As a consequence, many of the action steps emerging from an assessment-driven diversity initiative will not look like traditional diversity interventions in which programs or activities are aimed only at members of under-represented groups.
Similar dynamics can surface on the employee side of diversity initiatives. In one campus-wide assessment which captured data down to the level of individual departments, one large department’s prior assumptions about why it was unable to attract and retain employees of color were shown to be questionable. The department had always explained the lack of employees of color by claiming that the salaries it offered were insufficient to attract candidates of color who were sought by other competing organizations. While this may have been one factor, assessment results also revealed that 25% of department employees experienced bullying in their immediate workplaces and 30% were afraid to report such incidents because of fears of retaliation. When coupled with other results which indicated poor management and supervisory practices, it was evident that the department was an undesirable place to work for any new employee. As demonstrated by a reassessment two years later, managers of the department were able to improve workplace climate noticeably by clarifying policies about appropriate behavior, encouraging the reporting of incidents and increasing professional development opportunities for managers and supervisors. With an improved workplace climate, recruitment and retention increased for employees of color as well as for all employees.
Appreciating the importance of symbolic action by leadership. Attending any higher education conference which brings together persons responsible for programmatic campus diversity efforts will quickly reveal that most of these individuals are persons of color. As a white male with such responsibilities, I initially felt like an oddity at such conferences, but quickly found myself welcomed warmly. Over the past two decades, I had many direct and revealing conversations with my colleagues of color about the plusses and minuses of this obvious but infrequently discussed practice. On the plus side, having a person of color lead campus diversity efforts was seen as a way to provide credibility to the position and assure that faculty, staff and students of color would have someone whom they would feel more comfortable approaching about difficulties on campus, filing grievances, etc. But my conversations over the years revealed a downside as well. Unfortunately, the appointment of a person of color to lead campus diversity efforts can also send a message to whites on campus that the work of diversity is really more appropriately the work of people of color. Worse yet, but rarely discussed, are other related dynamics. One dynamic involves the appointment of people of color to such positions as a convenient way for an all white administration to claim that it was taking diversity seriously. All too often this person will also be the only person in the leadership group who has only one or two subordinates and a miniscule budget. Another unfortunate but unexamined dynamic involves white administrators acting on the assumption that a person of color would, solely because of her or his minority racial identity, be an appropriate person to address diversity issues for a campus.
The campus practice of appointing diverse teams instead of individuals to lead campus diversity initiatives helps with these symbolic issues in at least two ways. First, a diverse team working together models inclusion in a very direct way. Second, diversity issues specific to a particular population receive the team’s attention and not just the attention of their “representative,” an important way of modeling broadened campus responsibility for addressing the needs of particular social or cultural groups. Another arrangement improves further on the team concept by placing responsibility of leading campus diversity initiatives squarely on the shoulders of the president and other senior administrators. With this approach, a diverse team advises the leadership and conducts the day-to-day activities of the diversity initiative. In this way, campus leadership directly models incorporating diversity concerns along with the other important business of the campus.
Conclusion. Most campuses continue their traditional practice of developing diversity initiatives in relative isolation from the efforts of other campuses. This practice needs to change. The challenges of moving forward with regard to diversity now require campuses to pool their efforts to insure the success of efforts on any one campus. Issues of diversity and how we address them are more than campus issues – they are regional and national issues, requiring regional and national solutions. While higher education associations continue to lobby in Washington for financial aid, affirmative admissions policies and other legislative changes related to diversity, activity at the regional level regarding diversity appears much less organized.
If New England campuses are to improve their effectiveness in making needed change regarding diversity, they need to engage in a new form of collaboration. I believe that diversity initiatives on New England colleges and universities would benefit greatly from an ongoing exchange between campuses that integrates existing disciplinary and professional perspectives and examines the theory and practice of diversity initiatives in two areas: the changes campuses might make in programs, policies and personnel, and how campuses can manage the process of change itself. The purpose of this regional exchange – created by a community of practice – is not to homogenize campus diversity initiatives, but rather to better inform those who plan and implement such initiatives.
While national forums, electronic and otherwise, exist for this purpose, time, energy and travel resources are better spent building an ongoing, regional community of practice among the administrators, staff and faculty charged with moving their campus diversity initiatives forward. Many of the issues related to campus diversity are truly regional, such as the particular racial and ethnic demographics of New England which affect the ability of campuses to be attractive to students, staff and faculty from under-represented groups.
Furthermore, there are many regional opportunities for campuses seeking to recruit a more diverse workforce and student body by collaborating with other campuses and even secondary schools which are producing graduates from under-represented groups.
To be effective, this community of practice needs to cut across the professional and disciplinary lines which currently exist at the regional level and provide a combination of frequent face-to-face meetings, phone and email communications, and site visits. By directly engaging members of campuses who are responsible for planning and implanting diversity initiatives, a community of practice would provide campuses an opportunity to improve their local approach to diversity by sharing experiences with other campuses and learning from the insights of practitioners who have directed campus diversity initiatives. This would allow campuses to refine their local diversity change models based on the latest experiences of their peers, and also learn what policy, program and personnel changes seem the most promising interventions regarding diversity. And given the national need for higher education to become more adept at addressing diversity on many fronts, New England’s campuses might be able to turn their progressive approaches to diversity into a competitive advantage for higher education in the region.
References
Ibarra, Robert. 2001. Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher
Education. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Additional Resources
http://www.diversityweb.org/ - on online compendium of higher education diversity resources and examples of campus diversity initiatives
http://www.multiculturaladvantage.net/diversity/category/recruitment-specialties/education-faculty-and-staff/ - segment of the Diversity Advantage web site dedicated to higher education
http://www.ewenger.com/- homepage of the Community of Practice (CoP) researcher and consultant who coined the term along with Jean Lave
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/ - web site devoted to communities of practice since 1995
We are part of the
Graduate College of Education
at UMass Boston
|
Think Tanks | Projects | Campus-Community Partnerships | Lynton Award | Publications |
|
Regional Resources | National Resources | Contact Us | Directions | Search |
|
SEARCH |
