Chronicle of Higher Education
By PETER SCHMIDT
Orlando, Fla.
Friday, May 30, 2008
The brochures for the 21st annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education boasted of it being "the leading and most comprehensive national forum" on the issues it covers. About 2,000 people registered for the event, being held this week at the Coronado Springs Resort in Disney World's Animal Kingdom.
In a move befitting this wild locale, one of the nation's leading proponents of diversity in higher education turned on her audience in a biting speech delivered on Thursday. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, suggested that colleges let people attend this annual conference—typically held in family-friendly tourist destinations—to reward them for not making waves by pushing for more equity and black and Hispanic representation on campus.
Calling herself "a hard-nosed critic from the inside," Ms. Hu-DeHart said, "Let's face it: Diversity has created jobs for all of us. It is a career. It is an industry."
"We do what we need to keep our jobs," she said. "But as long as we keep doing our job the way we are told to do it, we are covering up for our universities."
"You all are covering up," she said. "You all are complicit in this."
Driven by Business, not Social Justice
The problem, she argued, is that those who attend the conference—and work in college offices dealing with diversity and minority issues—help their institutions create the impression that they are far more concerned with diversity and equity than is actually the case.
To try to prove her point, she asked her audience to comb through the program for the five-day meeting and note the job descriptions of those who would be speaking, and think about those who seemed absent from this event. The group found plenty of listings for chief diversity officers, administrators and staff members from campus offices in charge of student support, outside diversity consultants, and faculty members in the fields of education, psychology, and ethnic studies. But they found little evidence of the presence of college trustees, presidents, provosts, academic deans, or professors in more traditional academic fields, especially mathematics and science.
Many of those missing, she said, are "the heart of the academic side" of colleges, people who have power over research, curriculum, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty members. [To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/3042n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en ] Subscription required.
2 comments:
In a kind of cultural kismet, as Ms. Hu-DeHart was presenting at one Disney resort, I was a block away at another Disney resort also presenting on diversity and cultural filters at the NCAA Development Conference for scholar athletes.
The breakout session workshops were being run by university professionals -- many of the sort being slammed by Ms. Hu-DeHart-- and they were helping scholar athletes, two from every NCAA school, make significant changes in their lives.
This was a top-notch program and perhaps Ms. Hu-DeHart can wangle an invitation from the NCAA to see how to do it right.
Jonathan Kroner, JD, MBA
http://jonathankroner.com/
Does “Diversity” mean hiring minorities in proportion to their demographics – or their degrees?
Let us look at three relevant numbers: minority doctorates in “mathematics and science”.
(1)“Although BHNs(Black; Hispanic; Native American) represent one
quarter of the U.S. population, they have earned less
than 5% of the doctorate degrees in the mathematical
sciences.”(italics in the original)
www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/stats/comm-medina200407.pdf
(2) “For blacks, the greatest representation is 3.5 percent among social science doctorate holders, and the lowest is 1.1 percent among physical science doctorate holders….. even among the 1983-92 cohort, the percentage of black doctorate holders ranges from only 1.4 percent in the physical sciences to 4.6 percent in the social sciences.” www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind96/ch3_sele.htm
(3) Oddly, Asians, many of whom do not speak English at home, have no problem; as the second study shows, from 3.8% of the population, “Asian doctorate holders, both U.S. and foreign-born, are a much larger proportion of the S&E labor force than other minority groups. Asians represent 25.4 percent of U.S.-educated doctorate holders in engineering in the labor force, 15.2 percent in mathematics/computer sciences, 12.4 percent in the physical sciences, 8.7 percent in the life sciences, and 3.9 percent in the social sciences.”
“"You all are covering up," she said. "You all are complicit in this." Wrong: any BHN with a doctorate in science or math will be feted and hired. But why go to education, when industry pays multiples of professors’ salaries, with far more perks?
Calling herself "a hard-nosed critic from the inside," Ms. Hu-DeHart said, "Let's face it: Diversity has created jobs for all of us. It is a career. It is an industry." “Hard-nosed critic” – that would be someone in the “industry” of diversity criticizing those minorities (women, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Middle Europeans….. excepted) who refuse to earn the minimal qualification for an academic job: a doctorate.
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