Last Word - Summer/Fall 2005
Why
We Care About Diversity
The
Class of 2009 at St. Lawrence has within it the highest percentage
of U.S. students of color ever in our history—over 12% of the
class. This summer, at the Chautauqua Institution I led a program
on diversity in higher education. My remarks focused on what
we know from careful research about the educational impacts of diversity,
and I want to share them with you here, for it was the educational
impacts of diversity that caused the U. S. Supreme Court in June
2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger et al. to say: “The Court
endorses Justice Powell’s view [in Bakke] that student body
diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race
in university admissions.”
Grutter was denied admission
to the University of Michigan Law School and sued its president,
Lee Bollinger, and the University. In
the Grutter case, the University’s “narrowly tailored
plan” for use of diversity in admission to its law school was
upheld; its non-“narrowly tailored plan” for use of diversity
in admission to its undergraduate college of arts and sciences was
found unacceptable that same day in the Court’s decision in
Gratz v. Bollinger. The “compelling
state interest” to which Justice Powell referred in Bakke is
our need, in a society still characterized by profound racial separation,
to educate a new generation of Americans with the skills and motivation
finally to bridge that racial divide.
Those of
us in the business of liberal arts education have long held that students
will learn more and be more profoundly affected if our institutions are demanding,
expect a great deal of students, challenge their presuppositions, put them
in situations where they have to hear views that are new to them—in
short, get them with some frequency to say: “Gee, I never thought
of it that way before.” Such learning environments produce more
engagement on the part of students and more motivation to learn, with the
result that they become life-long learners. We have long believed,
as well, that environments that have people who bring different histories,
experiences, and presuppositions to the table are the richest environments
for learning, the ones that produce the most profound long-term effects. We
have believed all of this to be true, but it is only in the last decade or
so that the evidence for those beliefs has come in, fast and furiously.
The
best summary of all of the evidence is generally held to be found in Gurin,
Dey, Hurtado, and Gurin, Harvard Educational Review Fall
2002, an
extension and summary of earlier testimony by Patricia Gurin, chair
of psychology at the University of Michigan, in the Gratz and Grutter
cases. It is research with carefully constructed statistical
controls designed to discover whether diversity has independent and
statistically significant impacts on student learning outcomes.
They begin by distinguishing so-called “structural diversity”—the
mere presence of diversity in a university’s student body—from “informal
interactional diversity,” which refers to the degree to which
students from diverse backgrounds actually interact with each other. Structural
diversity is necessary but not sufficient for there to be educational
impacts from diversity: “the theory that guides our study
is based on students’ actual engagement with diverse peers.”
Then they
review the psychological theories of social development from which they developed
their hypotheses—the theories that have caused us for the last 30 years
to construct our learning environments the way we have. Erik Erikson,
for example, “introduced the concept of identity and argued that late
adolescence and early adulthood are the unique times when a sense of personal
and social identity is formed,” making
the time students are in college critical for identity development. Noting
that college students in America overwhelmingly come from communities that,
with regard to race and ethnicity, are highly segregated, they cite research
that shows that “higher education is especially influential when its
social milieu is different from students’ home and community background
and when it is diverse and complex enough to encourage intellectual experimentation
and recognition of varied future possibilities.” They
also cite Theodore Newcomb’s classic research at Bennington College. “Newcomb’s
study demonstrated that political and social attitudes . . . are quite malleable
in late adolescence and that change occurred particularly in those students
to whom Bennington presented new and different ideas and attitudes.” Then
they cite Piaget, who argued that “discontinuity and discrepancy spur
cognitive growth” and note that “Campus environments and policies
that foster interaction among diverse students are discontinuous from the
home environments of many American students.” They
go on to argue that diverse college and university environments more frequently
foster “active thinking and intellectual engagement”. . . . .
. . “effortful, mindful, and conscious modes of thought.” And
finally, they hypothesize that “Racial and ethnic diversity in the
student body and university efforts to foster opportunities for diverse students
to interact and learn from each other in and out of the classroom offer college
students who have grown up in the racially segregated United States the very
features that these theories suggest will foster active thinking and personal
development.”
So
there is the theoretical rationale and the basic hypothesis. What are
the research results? The bottom line: “In the national study
and the Michigan study, both sets of analyses show that diversity experiences
had robust effects on educational outcomes for all groups of students [that
is, for white students and for
African-American, Latino, and Asian-American students], although to varying
degrees.
And
these effects persist into later life.
Learning outcomes that were
assessed included active thinking, intellectual engagement and motivation,
and academic skills. In addition,
a group of so-called “democracy outcomes” were also assessed,
testing whether when students studied in diverse learning communities
they would also be better prepared, more able, and more willing to
become engaged in democratic community life, including Citizenship
Engagement (a commitment to the importance of influencing the political
structure, influencing social values, helping others in difficulty,
etc.); Compatibility of Difference and Democracy (the question of
whether the existence of difference in one’s social environment
must inevitably lead to conflict and separation, or can be non-divisive,
and result in a perceived commonality in life values with groups
other than one’s own); Perspective-taking (willingness to put
oneself in another’s shoes); and Racial/Cultural Engagement
(learned about other racial/ethnic groups during college, acceptance
of persons from different races).
Three different kinds of diversity experiences
were assessed: Informal Interaction (amount of contact with students from
other racial groups, proportion of six best friends from other racial groups,
positive interaction with diverse peers); Classroom Diversity (exposure in
classes to information/activities devoted to understanding other
racial groups, and enrollment in a course that had an impact on views
on racial/ethnic diversity); Diversity events/dialogs (number of
multicultural events attended and participation in a dialog group).
The results
were that to varying degrees, each form of diversity had statistically significant
and strong effects on both learning and democracy outcomes in both the national
and the University of Michigan studies, and while the effects were strongest
for white students—that is, white students benefit most from the presence
of diversity—the effects were also there for students from
other racial/ethnic groups. Further, it isn’t enough
just to teach about diversity (the impact of classroom diversity). Informal
interaction with persons who are racially and/or ethnically different
and attendance at diversity events and dialogs both had independent,
and in most cases, stronger effects on learning and democracy outcomes. This
finding is critical, for it is what justifies taking special steps
physically to ensure diversity within the student body.
Finally, the
experience of diversity in college continues to affect students’ post-college
lives. The more diversity experienced
in college, the more one’s post-college friends, neighbors
and co-workers are diverse; the more one remains intellectually engaged
and motivated; and the higher is one’s citizenship engagement
and democratic participation—powerful results indeed, and sufficient
to sway the Supreme Court.
The civil
rights movement began as an issue of social justice, and that reason for
pursuing diversity in higher education remains. But now we know how
truly profound the positive educational impacts of diversity are on students. What
began as an issue of social justice can now, as well, be justified on purely
educational grounds—a real win-win—and that is why we care so much
about diversity at St. Lawrence.
Daniel
F. Sullivan
Patricia
Gurin, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin, “Diversity
and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational
Outcomes,” Harvard Educational Review Vol. 72,
No. 3, Fall, 2002, 330-366.
