Backwards on Racial Understanding

Inside Higher Ed
April 10, 2012 - 3:00am
By
Scott Jaschik

One stereotype about college is that the experience encourages students to be more interested in diversity and promoting racial understanding. To some this is a great virtue of higher education; to critics, this suggests academe is too focused on diversity. What if they are all wrong?
A new study being presented at this year's annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association suggests that as undergraduates progress in higher education, they become less interested, on average, in promoting racial understanding. The study finds that this is true across racial groups -- although it finds some characteristics of the college experience that may make students more interested in racial understanding as they proceed from freshman to senior year.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/10/study-suggests-students-grow-less-interested-promoting-racial-understanding#ixzz1rfFew7YK
Inside Higher Ed

Affirm affirmative action

Columbia Spectator
By Jessica Geiger
Published October 26, 2011
As the Supreme Court reconsiders the issue of diversity, Columbia should look to preserve it.

To quote Columbia’s student affairs website, “diversity is one of the things that make Columbia vibrant, dynamic and exciting.” I think most Columbia students would agree with this statement, and I know I certainly do. The experiences I’ve had with people of different ethnicities, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds at Columbia have been some of the most valuable experiences I’ve had during college.
From hearing a Contemporary Civilizations classmate relate his experiences in the South Korean army to Plato’s “Republic,” to listening to my suitemate tell story after story about her experiences in one of Minnesota’s lower-income high schools, I can safely say my experiences inside and outside of the classroom have been enriched, varied, and altered thanks to the extensive diversity of Columbia’s student body.

Full Story: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/10/26/affirm-affirmative-action

College Diversity Nears Its Last Stand

The New York Times
Sunday Review
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: October 15, 2011

Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times.
Washington
ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/college-diversity-nears-its-last-stand.html?_r=1

Pell Grants as Costly and ‘Harmful’ Welfare?

Diverse Issues in Higher Education by Dr. Ibram Rogers, April 6, 2011 As American politicians and educators continue to slice and dice away at higher education resources and programs using the hollow, yet sharp knives of austerity, the future of a diverse academy increasingly looks bleak and dreary. The widely used justification — the need to cut costs and reduce the national deficit — seems so difficult to conceptualize each time I look at military expenditures, each time I hear about another country the United States has bombed. From the standpoint of diversity, the reformers of exclusion have peeled away at the surface of many of the programs, funding lines and initiatives in higher education that the reformers of inclusion instituted over the course of the 20th century, climaxing in the 1960s and 1970s. Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/blogpost/342/pell-grants-as-costly-and-harmful-welfare.html

Taking Diversity to the Next Level

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Reginald Stuart , June 9, 2010

When Colgate University decided a few years ago to recast its diversity efforts, it joined a small, but growing, number of schools across the country in taking a new approach to a decades-old challenge of how best to make their schools more appealing to people from all walks of life and more compelling to employers as a good place to recruit
Colgate, a midsize liberal arts college in northwestern New York state, created a high-ranking diversity post with an ambitious mandate to help expand the school’s approach to diversity. It would embrace recruitment, enrollment and retention of students; development and retention of staff; long-term planning; academic programs; and internal and community relations. It would be quite a leap from historical efforts largely run at department levels by individuals with less authority.

Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/article/13865/taking-diversity-to-the-next-level.html

Frank L. Matthews, co-founder of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, will moderate an American Association of Affirmative Action panel titled, “Maintaining Diversity in a Time of Downsizing," on June 30 in Raleigh, N.C.